Listening to Etgar Keret on This American Life recently tell Half-Baked Stories About My Dead Mom reminded me just how much can be conveyed in such a short space. He’s a master of short form. His voice is made for storytelling. I highly recommend a listen.
And if you yourself are interested in working on your own short writing, there is one spot left in my upcoming online class via Writing Workshops starting on January 23. Details at the link. Short Form: Writing Flash Fiction and Creative Nonfiction.
Hey Writers! My next session of Short Form writing is starting up on October 17 with Writing Workshops. Fiction. Nonfiction. Short. Up to 1000 words give or take. We’ll read a lot. Write a lot. Discuss. Experiment. Play. It’s all online and asynchronous. We do have weekly deadlines, but you can do the writing and responding to the texts and each other’s work at any time during the week that works for you. I absolutely love this class. I ALWAYS get so much out of the writers who join.
I am preparing for backcountry in the Chugach wilderness this summer, so I’m taking the summer off from leading workshops. I do have select room for some one-on-one work with writers. Otherwise you can find me carrying an enormous backpack around and sleeping with the lights shining in my face to get ready for those Alaskan summer days of 19 hours of sunlight.
Come write short in the next session of my Writing Flash Fiction & Creative Nonfiction class at Writing Workshops. The course is fully online and user friendly. There are a ton of prompts, lots of helpful deadlines, generative themes to each lesson, and readings from some masters of the form. I absolutely LOVE this course. The writing that comes out of it is always interesting. Always.
This ONLINE flash writing workshop is built for writers at any point in their journey (beginner through advanced) who want to focus on creating a batch of short pieces in either fiction or creative nonfiction – or both! There is an amazing abundance of short writing being published in print and online. This course is designed to take part in this conversation.
Not only will we read, discuss, write, and revise short works, but we will also consider possibilities for publishing this writing. Each participant will have the opportunity to workshop twice. This critique will be grounded on the principles of honesty, generosity, consideration, and respect. Participants will find their own writing and revising get sharper as they hone their skills at responding constructively to others’ work.
You can find more information and sign up to take part at the link. Join us!
It’s a dark time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, so to brighten your reading life I’ll let you know about a conversation I had with Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer about their five volume series of books Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. The always-amazing online journal Full Stop published it in two parts this month.
We talk about the environmental movement, animism, lichen as skin, and lots of other delicious topics. I spent all summer with the books they co-edited. I talk a bit about the immersive experience it was in our conversation. I highly recommend their project!
In other news, I’m leading an online workshop on writing short form for Writing Workshops starting January 10. I think there are 3 spots left as of this writing. More info here.
Otherwise, I’m doing my usual reading and writing and walking and balking. More soon on all of that in another piece of writing I’ve been working on. News as soon as I’ve got it. Until then, get yourself a bonfire for the longest night of the year. I hope I do!
A quick update that THIS SATURDAY October 9th I’m doing an actual in-person live reading with actual other people in public. It’s an outdoor patio situ, so cozy up with a fleece and get some warm cider from inside.
It has been super wet in my corner of the world. We got blasted with 2-3 inches of rain in an hour last week after weeks of generally rainy weather. This is nothing compared with what some parts of Europe are experiencing, and the drought and wildfires out west are even worse. Climate change is here. Or as I heard someone describe it recently, climate weirding. It is and is going to be a very bumpy ride that many will not survive. Well, none of us will survive indefinitely. How to live now?
My latest Dispatch from a Distance, Turning Toward the Sun, is up at Best American Poetry. In it I walk my way through some of these thoughts – and emotions. Please have a read. It’s not as much of a bummer as it might sound. In the meantime, the sun has come out today. Here, have a gander at a photo I was lucky to capture of a female ruby throated hummingbird buzzing the bee balm out front of my home.
I’m working on another Dispatch from a Distance for Best American Poetry on animal tracking which, as usual for these ditties, is covering more ground than the subject alone. I’m thinking about how I learn as much as I am about what I learn. That all may be revised out of the post – that writing itself a learning process – but it’s engaging me at the moment. Which leads me to mention how interested I am in writing and thinking and walking and learning as intertwined activities and also that I am leading two writing workshops this Spring. One is for my new venture, The Writers Sanctuary. That Spring session has just one spot left and happens mainly by word of mouth. Reach out to me if you’d like to know more. The other workshop is through Writing Workshops Dallas and just opened up for registration.
Friends, Join me online for this 8 week online writing course. I ran this last fall and it did wonders for all of us in the workshop to have such a generative space in the middle of the chaos. Gonna do it again:
This ONLINE flash writing workshop is built for writers at any point in their journey (beginner through advanced) who want to focus on creating a batch of short pieces in either fiction or creative nonfiction – or both! There is an amazing abundance of short writing being published in print and online. This course is designed to take part in this conversation.
Not only will we read, discuss, write, and revise short works, but we will also consider possibilities for publishing this writing. Each participant will have the opportunity to workshop twice. This critique will be grounded on the principles of honesty, generosity, consideration, and respect. Participants will find their own writing and revising get sharper as they hone their skills at responding constructively to others’ work.
You can find more information and sign up at the link.
Cara Benson 