Read to Write - Master Craft Fiction Workshop - Petaluma

Read to Write - Master Craft Fiction Workshop - Petaluma

(For the Sebastopol Master Craft Fiction Workshop Click Here)

Both Sebastopol and Petaluma Read to Write workshops are now full. You may email marketing@copperfieldsbooks.com to get on a wait list or to hear about future workshops.

A nine-part course for writers who read, readers who write, and book lovers who want to read like a writer.

The "Read to Write" workshop utilizes a specialized reading selection list for the 9-part course format. Participants will study masterful writing, incubate the lessons, and use their expanded knowledge to read more closely and write more skillfully. Presenter Christine Walker has written three novels and holds an MFA in Writing & Literature from Bennington College.

Workshop Format: Nine two-hour sessions.

Petaluma: First Wednesday of the Month, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Each course is limited to 15 participants. The fee is $180.

About the Presenter

Christine Walker conceived this course as a way for writers and readers to build literary community while supporting their local, independent bookstore. Her lively workshops reveal and stimulate creative process, offer useful tools and techniques, and animate intentions. If writers and trusted readers form enduring relationships during the course— all the better!

She is the author and artist of A Painter’s Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life (Warner Books) and the co-author and illustrator of Wooleycat’s Musical Theater (Tortuga Press). She holds an MFA in Writing & Literature in Fiction from Bennington College, an MA in Interdisciplinary Creative Arts from San Francisco State University, and a BFA from the University of Kansas. She lives in Sebastopol.

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Course Description

Writing is a solitary act with a communal spirit among writers and readers. To become accomplished, writers benefit by studying authors who’ve honed the craft techniques and nuances of fine fiction. In this course, participants will examine masterful writing, incubate the lessons, and use expanded knowledge to read more closely and write more skillfully.

In Christine’s two-year MFA program, the promise was fulfilled: “Read one hundred books. Write one.” In this nine-month course, a shorter book list will step participants through crucial concerns of long-form writing.

Writers wanting to move their projects to the next level—whether to draft, revise, cohere, or polish—will be shown tools and methods to do so. The course will help bring fullness to works in progress—novels, story collections, narrative nonfiction, memoir. Fellow writers and book lovers will inspire and encourage one another.

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Course Structure

What makes fine fiction? How or why did that author do that? We’ll delve in with authors who enrich our writing and reading journeys. Participants are asked to focus on a book from each month’s list and be prepared to share discoveries. Christine will demonstrate visual, hands-on techniques and tools that she uses when writing and will suggest optional hands-on homework activities for participants wanting to further enhance their writing craft or literature appreciation.

Each session will combine book and craft discussion with voluntary reading aloud of passages from annotations and writing projects and voluntary sharing of homework activities. The course structure prompts participants to write outside of class, as suits their project goals and craft concerns, but class time will not be devoted to free writes or personal writing. The workshop is not designed as a critique group, but participants may request thoughtful comments and questions on the passages that they read aloud.

The nine sessions will cover craft concerns based on reading selections.

Note: For first session, please prepare by reading any of the March selections from the book list below. Also, please bring first and last paragraphs from favorite books for investigation. If you’d like to share first sentences from your own writing or initial sentences (story seeds) that inspired a project, even if they’ve been discarded or altered in revision, please bring those.

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Suggested Book List

Focus on one book or portions of a book each month. As the workshops progress, participants may suggest books for the list that illuminate topics scheduled for discussion. With an annotative approach, rather than a book report approach, we will explore and contrast specific craft concerns within several books. Our individual literary investigations will cross-pollinate for hybrid thinking among the group. The nine sessions will cover these reading selections: