We are aware that many of you may be reluctant to register for Summer Workshops due to travel and/or vacation plans in June and July. (Workshops do not meet in August.)  At the same time, we want to encourage you to continue to pursue your writing goals during the summer. Don't let the writing muscle get flabby!

 

Last chance to register!  

Historical fiction can be one of the most exciting -- and challenging -- genres in which to write. Whether you're writing a novel that takes place in Elizabethan England or America's Wild West, or a short story about Paris during the Roaring 20's, you must create a completely convincing world of another time and place. In addition, you must populate that world with realistic characters with whom your readers can fully identify.

In this series, led by author, teacher, and playwright Steven Otfinoski, participants will learn a variety of techniques for producing works of historical fiction that will appeal to a wide audience.

Steven Otfinoski holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University and has taught creative writing at the Summer Institute for the Gifted at Yale University and Stratford Continuing Ed. His short stories have appeared in various publications and his novel Throne of The Third Heaven won an honorable mention in the first Fairfield Book Prize competition in 2011. He is currently working on a historical novel about the explorer Meriwether Lewis. 

"How so?

"Michelangelo's, da Vinci's, Tintoretto's billion sketches, the quantitative, prepared them for the qualitative, single sketches further down the line, single portraits, single landscapes of incredible control and beauty.

"A great surgeon dissects and re-dissects a thousand, ten thousand bodies, tissues, organs, preparing thus by quantity the time when quality will count-with a living creature under his knife.

"An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards.

"Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come."

~Ray Bradbury