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Sandra Beasley Your Voice: Work It, Raise It, Change It Multi-Genre May 8 to May 12, 2017 Number of Participants: 12 Price: $500 Format: 1 Week Asynchronous Workshop

We often regard the author’s voice as having an inherent, unchangeable quality. Many writers have invoked the analogy comparing one’s voice to a fingerprint. But one person’s “fingerprint” is another person’s rut, and no author should feel trapped in his or her voice.

In this one-week intensive course we will identify the voice you have, and explore ways to flex, amplify, and shift that voice on the page. This class is applicable to all genres, from fiction to nonfiction to poetry. Using six tenets of craft—point of view, tense-aspect-mood, image, sound, structure, and diction—we will pursue radical revision of existing drafts, and generate new ones. We will study inspiring models of writers with distinctive voices, meaning those who test the bounds of form and expectation.

Following the class, each participant will receive an email with line edits on either 2-3 poems or up to 1,000 words of their choosing, a general critique of their approach to the work, and suggestions for moving forward.

Biography

Sandra Beasley is the author of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, and A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays. She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Made to Explode, which won the Housatonic Book Award, and she edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Honors include the Munster Literature Centre’s John Montague Fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and six DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships.