Description
This is a six-week writing seminar focused on crafting a short story or personal essay based on an actual event. The course consists of six 90-minute sessions, once a week for six weeks. Attendees will have the freedom to choose, within the framework of the course, what genre, short story or personal essay to write, remembering that everything you write about in this course will be based on fact.
CREATIVE NONFICTION In short, creative nonfiction (CNF) is a form of storytelling that employs the creative writing techniques of literature, such as poetry and fiction, to retell a true story. Creative nonfiction writers don’t just share pithy anecdotes, they use craft and technique to situate the reader into their own personal lives. Elements typically found in fictional writing, such as character development, setting, and narrative arcs, dialogue, are employed to create a story or essay.
THE PERSONAL ESSAY is perhaps the oldest form of nonfiction prose, and yet it remains one of the most commonly misunderstood. Some people persist in the belief that the essay needs to be antiquated and moldy, while others claim the essay must follow a menu of one hundred creativity-destroying rules.
These misperceptions are unfortunate, because the personal essay is a wonderfully flexible and creative form, as fresh and inventive as the writer wishes it to be. In addition, the essay remains an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human urge so many of us feel—to not just live year to year but to capture a bit of that life, to produce an enduing record of our better thoughts.
That is, after all why so many people—young and old, homemaker and trial lawyer, working and retired—share the dream of being writers, of having others delight and marvel at what has been written.
We want to speak. And we want to be heard.
Ron Farina is a writer/author/teacher with fiction and nonfiction publishing success, also highly regarded musical teaching artist with successful private studio. Former successful national headhunter, business owner. His publications include:
Essays
Keeping Promises, Connecticut Magazine (2019)
Helping Hands, Connecticut Magazine (2020)
Worn Torn, Connecticut Magazine (2021)
Nonfiction
Who Will Have My Back, Stories of Caregivers to Disabled American Veterans, Lagrange Books (release date, Memorial Day 2020).
Out of the Shadows, Voices of American Women Soldiers (release date, July 1, 2022)
Fiction
At the Altar of The Past, a novel of adult literary fiction, RoseDog-books/Dorrance Publishers (September 2022)
