How does a writer create an "I" whose voice compels us to listen?

What makes one voice funny, another intense, wistful, bitter, or barking mad?

This workshop will explore the embodied concept of voice in short fiction, theatrical monologue, poetry, and memoir.

We’ll begin with a listening exercise, reading short prose excerpts and monologues aloud as well as examining the rhythms and idiosyncracies of voices that different authors create. What specific choices bring their words to life? What makes us feel that we know this character and want to find out what will happen?

Next, we’ll move through a series of guided exercises geared to finding a story and creating a first-person voice that releases it, alive and kicking, onto the page. We’ll complete the circle by hearing these written words read aloud,

sending you home fired up

                                        to keep telling your story.

Writers of all experience levels are welcome. Bring a story or monologue whose opening sentences grab and excite you (can be something you’ve read or something you’ve written), your favorite notebook and pencil or pen.

 

Nina Shengold won the Writers Guild Award for Labor of Love, starring Marcia Gay Harden. Her novel Clearcut (Anchor Books, 2005) was a Book Sense Notable selection, and she has edited eleven theatre anthologies for Vintage Books and Viking Penguin, most recently Laugh Lines: Short Comic Plays.  

She is books editor of Chronogram magazine and artistic director of the theatre company Actors & Writers.

 

On Friday, September 26, the evening before the workshop, join Nina as she mixes her monologues with world-renowned Steve Gorn's bansuri flute and Wendy Kagan's fantastic layered photographs of Buddha heads & more

at the second WEN Barn Harvest Salon. Open to the public.

 

WEN Barn & Gardens

A secret getaway in the Rondout Valley of New York's Hudson Valley

where the arts, the heart, and earth converge.

 

 

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