2011 COURSES AND INSTRUCTORS
SORRY, SECTION CANCELLED
MAKING UP THE PAST
(AND GETTING IT PUBLISHED)
with Ed Southern
“The past isn’t dead . . .” but it is “another country: they do things differently there.”
If you are writing historical fiction – or fiction that just happens to be set in the past – juggling those two truths can be the trickiest part of telling your story.
How do you make the past as alive and real as the present day? How do you explain historic events, societies, attitudes, landscapes, without turning your story into a history lecture?
How faithful should fiction writers be to the historical record? How should your characters talk? What should your characters know?
We’ll look at all the pitfalls writers face when they set their stories beyond living memory. Using examples of other writers’ works, as well as in-class exercises, we will examine questions of explanation and exposition, dialogue, narrative voice, and more.
Please send me no more than 10 double-spaced pages of your work in time for me to have it by September 1.
I will return your work, along with line edits and comments, on the first day of the workshop. Please send your work to: Ed Southern, c/o NCWN, P.O. Box 21591, Winston-Salem, NC, 27120 |
Ed Southern is a North Carolina native and a graduate of Wake Forest University. His first two books were part of John F. Blair, Publisher’s Real Voices, Real History™ series: The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony, 1605-1614, published in 2004, was a collection of contemporary accounts of the first permanent English colony in America; Voices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas, released in 2009, told the story of the tide-turning Southern Campaign through the words of those who lived and fought their way through that tumult. He is also editor of the anthology Sports in the Carolinas: From Death Valley to Tobacco Road, which combines personal essays and informative articles to examine why sports mean so much to so many in the Carolinas.
His first work of fiction, Parlous Angels, came out in the fall of 2009. Lee Smith said of Parlous Angels: “(c)arefully written, with the best dialogue I've read in years, these terrific and utterly original stories are made to last - like a stone pathway or a brick wall.”
Southern has been executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network since January 2008, after more than eight years with John F. Blair, Publisher. He lives in Winston-Salem, where he is at work on a novel and a nonfiction manuscript, both set during the American Revolution.
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