Most fiction is an authorial monologue. But as a game of make-believe, it often features conversations. How do we deal with dialogue when it's inside the monologue of fiction (technically, philosophically, creatively)? In this workshop, we’ll look at a range of literary examples, talk them over and try some out.

Oisín Curran grew up in Surry, Maine. His first novel, Mopus, was published in 2008 and he was named a “Writer to Watch” by CBC: Canada Writes. His second novel, Blood Fable was picked by the Globe & Mail as one of the most anticipated novels for the fall of 2017 and won the 2018 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Curran lives in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with his wife and two children.

Oisin is reading with his wife, writer Sarah Faber, on Saturday, October 20, at 7pm as part of Word. Blue Hill Literary Festival.

Location: Blue Hill Harbor School (see address and map in sidebar.) Registration is required with a workshop fee of $25. If you have questions about this workshop, you can email word.bluehill@gmail.com or call Blue Hill Books at (207) 374-5632.

To bring: writing materials

“Transformations” is a workshop devoted to helping writers or would-be writers transform their autobiographical material into fiction.  Beginning writers are often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of memory and experience they possess and need to find ways to identify and focus on the truly resonant details of their lives.  In this workshop, participants will engage in a series of writing experiments that help to uncover significant memories and experiences—the ones that might form the basis of stories and novels.

Participants will learn as well about the importance of using precise details and images to create vivid prose.  We will do several writing experiments that encourage the writer to use precise sensory detail and images, rather than abstraction, in telling a story.

Alice Lichtenstein received a MFA from Boston University where she was named the Boston University Fellow in Creative Writing.  She has received a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction and the Barbara Deming Award in Fiction.  She has twice been a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony.  Alice is the author of three novels: The Genius of the World (Zoland Books, 2000); Lost, (Scribner, 2010); and the forthcoming, The Crime of Being (Upper Hand Press, 2019).  Lost was a long-list Finalist for the Dublin IMPAC International Award in Fiction. 

Lichtenstein has published stories in several literary journals.  Most recently her work has appeared in: Narrative Magazine (Fall 2018); Post Road, Short Story, and Digital Americana.

Lichtenstein has been an instructor of creative writing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY for twelve years.  She has also taught fiction-writing at Boston University, Wheaton College, Lesley College, and the Harvard University Summer School.

The location is George Stevens Academy, library (see side bar for address and map). Registration is required with a workshop fee of $35. If you have questions about this workshop you can email word.bluehill@gmail.com or call Blue Hill Books at 207/374-5632.

Materials: pencil (or pen) and paper—and an eagerness to get started on that long put aside novel or story!

This workshop will examine lyric, lyrics, and lyrical modes—chord-based, melody-based, and forms of “free” lyric. Using terms from music—rhythm, tone, rhyme, and stress—we will discuss how lyrics create consciousness, what makes them successfully communicate. Participants will compose original songs and discuss existing songs from around the world Prior musical knowledge and  experience is greatly encouraged, but not necessary. Open-mindedness and risk-taking is mandatory.

HENRY FINCH was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and grew up in Henrico. He holds a BA in English from Appalachian State University and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His writing appears in The Green Mountains Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Seattle Review, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, and many other publications. He is an editor at Crevice, a journal of international literature based in Romania. He has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa, Schoodic Arts For All, Waynflete, Riley School, and throughout coastal Maine with grants from the Maine Community Foundation and Brooksville Education Foundation. What is a Poem?, a collaborative book written by Brooksville Elementary School students and letterpress-printed by Hither & Yon Press in Harborside, is in circulation at the Blue Hill Public Library.  Henry is an accomplished musician and songwriter playing by himself and with groups in Maine and Vermont.

Location: George Stevens Academy, Esther Wood Room (see address and map in sidebar.) Registration required with workshop fee of $35. If you have questions about this workshop, you can email word.bluehill@gmail.com or call Blue Hill Books at (207) 374-5632.

This creative writing workshop will help to unearth stories that need telling and encourage participants to recognize the flow of sources, always available, from our lives, dreams, memory and the world at hand. We will focus on generating new work—whether from childhood memoir, prose meditating on an historical moment, poem elicited through an image, or exploration of the voice of a character from history. Writing exercises will stimulate the development of a range of content, accompanied by select reading samples to take with you which will provide inspiration and lessons in craft to draw on. Everyone will have an opportunity to share work in an atmosphere of mutual respect and offer feedback that helps move the work forward. We will encourage exploration and seek the best form to carry the content forward. Discussion will move from the writing of the participants, but topics could include point of view, voice, imagery and tone, character development, dialogue and description.

BEATRIX GATES (www.beatrixgates.org) has published four poetry books, including Dos and In the Open, a Lambda Poetry finalist. She shared a Witter Bynner Translation Award with Electa Arenal for Jesús Aguado's The Poems of Vikram Babu (HOST). A recent hybrid piece, “For Orlando: Make Beautiful in Maine” appeared in MAP magazine, www.mapmagazine.co.uk, based in Glasgow, Scotland, and the lyric essay, “Inside the Seismograph,” in Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing (GenPop Books, 2018). She’s been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and Ucross Foundation and her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Brooksville zine Afterthought and a translation of a love poem in Arabic appears on the Iraqi literature site: http://www.alnaked aliraqi.net/article/27446.php. A longtime member of Goddard’s MFA faculty, she has taught writing at Colby, NYU, CCNY and Maine Maritime Academy. She lives in Brooksville and serves on Board of The Cannery at South Penobscot.

Location: Fairwinds Florist, second floor (see address and map in sidebar.) Registration is required with a workshop fee of $35. If you have questions about this workshop, you can email word.bluehill@gmail.com or phone Blue Hill Books, (207) 374-5632.

To bring: writing materials

PLEASE NOTE: THIS WORKSHOP HAS BEEN CANCELED
If you are registered for this class we will be contacting you shortly.

Structure in poetry can be thought of as the house where the language lives.  Poetic forms can be useful when building a home for your thoughts, ideas and images. In this workshop we’ll take a look at five poetry forms, and discuss what makes them interesting. Forms included will be epistolary, triolet, sonnet, villanelle and an elegy.

Participants will be asked to choose a form and begin building a new poem.  Substantial time will be given for writing.

MIHKU PAUL, a Maliseet, is an enrolled member of the Kingsclear First Nation in New Brunswick though she grew up in Maine, near Penobscot homeland, and lives now in Portland. Paul is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program. She created and produced a one-woman show for the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor titled Look Twice: The Waponaki in Image and Verse. The exhibit included 12 panels with poems that were paired with archival images of Waponaki people and culture, as well as her own graphic art. Her chapbook, 20th Century PowWow Playland (2012), continues to sell. Paul has taught creative writing at UNE and for an organization called Gedakina, which is dedicated to supporting a thriving and healthy indigenous culture in New England.  She has also worked as a teaching artist in Portland schools and as a storyteller for younger students.

To bring: writing materials

Location: Fairwinds Florist, upstairs (see address and map in sidebar.) Registration is required with a workshop fee of $35. If you have questions about this workshop you can email word.bluehill@gmail.com or call Blue Hill Books, (207) 347-5632.

"This reading and conversation is about the nature of biography and will focus on a perennial question: how does a writer make another person credible through the medium of language? I wrote the biographies gathered in Legends of the Slow Explosion over a number of years but my approach was steady: to try to get at the essence of a life. This meant trying to find ways into the notions and feelings that drove the person. In writing about others, about well-known people I never met, I faced the possibilities of empathy, particularly in dealing with behaviors and attitudes that were problematic. My talk and reading will focus on the paths that empathy can take and how a writer can push that dimension of his or her writing." 

This class will be interactive but will not involve in-class writing or critique of student work. The workshop will take place in the GSA library.  This class is best suited to teens/adults of all skill levels.

BARON WORMSER is the author/co-author of sixteen books and a poetry chapbook. His recent books include Tom o’ Vietnam, a novel set in 1982 about a Vietnam War veteran who is obsessed with King Lear, and Legends of the Slow Explosion: Eleven Modern Lives, biographical pieces about eleven crucial figures from the second half of the twentieth century. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. He has taught many dozens of workshops across the United States and continues to offer generative workshops in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction along with workshops focusing on the works of a particular poet. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and lives with his wife Janet in Montpelier, Vermont.

Location: George Stevens Academy library (see address and map in sidebar.) Registration is required with a workshop fee of $25. If you have questions about this workshop you can email word.bluehill@gmail.com or call Blue Hill Books 207/374-5632.