Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: The Lives of Others: a Fiction Writing Workshop, July 17-21

Event Details

 

Salvatore Scibona, Instructor 

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 17th to July 21st, 2017.

The deadline to apply to the summer seminars has passed. 

 

In his novel Underworld, Don DeLillo writes of “[t]he shock of other people’s lives.  The truth of another life, the blow, the impact . . . The power of an ordinary life.  It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.”  This from the point of view of a fictional character he had nonetheless invented.  It is a commonplace that fiction writers mostly refashion the nonfictional material of their own experience.  Yet the freedom to pursue lives not our own, to invent by describing in careful language, draws us powerfully to go with the imagination where we have no way to go with our feet.  Where does the material for such inventions come from?  Often from the merest printed scrap.  A footnote, obituary, photograph, letter—the charismatic trivia a writer uncovers, often while researching something quite different.  The detail that snags in the mind, from which a world grows.  

In this class we will use the library’s peerless resources about the lives of the powerful and the unknown as the source material for new stories we will draft and workshop.  Readings will include fiction and some essays by DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Colson Whitehead, Marilynne Robinson, and others, as well as selections from the Icelandic Sagas. 

 

Salvatore Scibona’s first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award from The New York Public Library. Scibona has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he serves on the Writing Committee. In 2010, he was included in The New Yorker’s "20 Under 40" list of young writers to watch. For his short fiction, published in A Public SpaceHarper’s, and The New Yorker, he has won a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Award. During his year at the Cullman Center he will be writing a novel about a family of American servicemen, veterans of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.