This workshop is for writers and aspiring writers who have a powerful story to tell but don’t know how to begin. Whether you're writing fiction, nonfiction, or just starting out, we will explore ways to create moving scenes, write captivating characters, and most importantly, put words to the blank page. The workshop will arm participants with tools to combat roadblocks, write with conviction, and leave with the creative momentum to keep going. The first hour of the workshop will focus on three short works by authors Tobias Wolff, Sandra Cisneros, and Meredith Hall (readings will be sent out to registered attendees). These readings will help writers identify and challenge their creative aesthetics while unlocking a fundamental craft element of powerful writing: what a scene is and what it contains. A lively discussion will accompany the readings. For the second hour, writers will be given two prompts followed by two 20-minute writing sessions. Writing prompts will focus on a singular image and/or scene. The goal will be to follow the heat of the moment and not let anything get in the way of the words. At the end, anyone who would like to share their work is welcome. Space is limited. ...

In this class on a Hemingway classic, we’ll consider the tension between Nick Adams’s tenuous psychological state and the physical details of fishing and camping that make this story so vivid. As with so many of Hemingway’s characters, there is more going on under the surface than might be apparent on a first read. We’ll explore how the blackened body of a grasshopper can, for a discerning reader, conjure the horrors of war, and how the difference between a clean river and a muddy swamp can convey as much about the psyche as they do about the watershed. As many times as you read this story, you always see something new in it, and so this class will be a collaborative effort of deep reading in which we’ll help one another find what Hemingway has hidden. Attendees should have read both parts of “Big Two-Hearted River” before the class, but familiarity with the entire collection in which the story appears – "In Our Time" – will be helpful in our discussion of how this final story involves material that readers of the original collection would have encountered before. This class will meet at the Library's Wood River Museum of History ...