Deirdra McAfee

"Now What?" The Practical Writer: This one-day course will help you answer those perplexing questions about writing, revising, and persisting. We’ll talk about making and improving work, and about where yours goes from here. We’ll talk about reading—how to read your own work to an audience, and what you read as a writer. And we’ll talk about submitting—how-to, where-to—and about surviving and thriving on rejection. Bring paper and pencils, work, anxieties, misgivings, and questions. We will use them all.
March 10, 2012, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Beginnings & Endings: This six-week evening course will offer examples and strategies to get us into and out of stories, novels, and essays.
Fiction and nonfiction don’t arrive in order. Most writers get pieces—a middle here, a chunk of exposition or description there, openings that don’t open, and endings that don’t end. This class will help you knit together the fragments and find out how your story wants to tell itself. We will learn how to jack up stories' language and tension to make them begin irresistibly. We will discover how the first page foretells the story and suggests shapely and suitable conclusions.
February 2–March 29 (no class March 15), 7–10 p.m.