Lions in Winter Craft Talks

Craft Talks

Poetry: CM Burroughs 
Logic of the Eye 

How does a poet keep her reader stable when a poem’s narrative is nonlinear or difficult to discern? In these moments, the image can be a powerful tool. Burroughs  will demonstrate how you might lead a reader from your first line to your last using imagery as primary energy, and how to read poems that are grounded strongly in the logic of the eye.

Creative Nonfiction: Rachael Hanel
Time is of the Essence—Chronology in Memoir

In memoir the author must make decisions about chronology, whether the action takes place in a narrow time frame or spreads out over many years. An effective memoir doesn’t simply start at Point A and go straight through to end at Point Z. Instead, the story shifts back and forth from past to present, sometimes chapter by chapter but at other times it’s even as nuanced as paragraph by paragraph. This talk will examine how memoirists deal with the notion of time.

Fiction: Vu Tran 
What Movies Can Teach Us As Writers 

For better or for worse, movies affect the way we read and write fiction.  Many writers approach their work with a cinematographer’s eye and a screenwriter’s heart, but even for those who rarely watch movies and have no desire to write or see their work adapted for the screen, the language of cinema has already spent over a century seeping into the ways we tell stories on the page.  How has it degraded the art of fiction, and how has it enhanced and expanded the art?  What cinematic impulses do we knowingly and unknowingly bring to our work, and how might we learn from and take advantage of those impulses, the bad as well as the good?  In this talk, we’ll consider all these questions, including the most important one of all: what can literature do that cinema cannot?