Everyone in the world has a story to tell, but not everyone knows how to tell that story. Laura Oliver ’75 has dedicated much of her career to helping other writers better learn how to tell their stories, and on October 21 at 4:30 pm, the Rose O’Neill Literary House welcomes Oliver back to her alma mater to lead “Find Your Subject & Voice: A Workshop for Writers of Fiction & Memoir.”
“Writing is a duet of giving and receiving, and the writing spirit is a generous one,” Oliver says in her book The Story Within: New Insights and Inspiration for Writers (Penguin Books/Random House, 2011). “Plumbers spend time and energy learning to fix your pipes. You respect their skill and are grateful for their choice of livelihood when your pipes leak. But writers? Writers want to give you something enormous and impractical, something bigger than any page can contain. Given the means, writers want to give something that will amuse, entertain, last forever, and fix your pipes. We can’t help it. It’s our nature.”
With lessons and insight pulled from over a decade’s worth of teaching hopeful writers, The Story Within was named one of The Writer magazine’s “Ten Terrific Writing Books of 2011,” and named “One of the Best Books Published on Writing” by Poets and Writers magazine.
Oliver has a BA in English from Washington College and a MFA in creative writing and literature from Bennington College. She has taught creative writing at the University of Maryland and teaches workshops at the The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and at St. John’s College in Annapolis.
Her Washington College workshop “Find Your Subject & Voice: A Workshop for Writers of Fiction & Memoir” will explore finding one’s “most authentic authorial voice” by using writing exercises, published examples, and instruction to learn how to better refine a story and eliminate unnecessary material without compromising the author’s voice. The workshop will be “perfect for new writers wishing to experiment and for more advanced writers seeking fresh inspiration to energize new and existing work.”
“Find Your Subject & Voice” is free and open to the public. For more information on the workshop, visit the event page at https://ow.ly/O8PG304b2dJ. For more information on Laura Oliver or The Story Within visit https://www.thestorywithin.net/.
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