Writing with Style Workshop with Matthew Salesses

Writespace presents Writing with Style Workshop with Matthew Salesses.

What is a "prose stylist" and how do you become one? What makes Michael Ondaatje or George Saunders or Barry Hannah a stylist? Using examples from fiction and nonfiction, we will work out how (and when and why) to add music to your sentences.

Students should bring with them the first page of a new story or essay. We will address issues of style in part through micro-editing–that is, how to: use common words in new ways, cut out unnecessary words and phrases, add precision and specificity, employ unique syntax.

We'll also borrow poetic techniques, paying attention to rhythm and cadence and meter, and to the persona, or attitude, of the narrator. We will do a few in-class exercises and share some feedback on those pieces. You will leave with a cheat sheet of handy techniques that you can try in your own work.

Please bring with you the first two pages of a piece you'd like to edit.

Matthew Salesses has written for The New York Times, NPR, Salon, PBS/CAAM, The Rumpus, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and often for The Good Men Project, where he is a Contributing Writer and Fiction Editor.

He is the author of a novel, I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying, a novella, The Last Repatriate, and two chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics and We Will Take What We Can Get.

Forthcoming in 2014 are two ebooks, Different Racisms and All-American Bear Terrorizes Canada, both from Thought Catalog Books. His latest project is a serialized novel, Marked, to be illustrated and published in Gazillion Voices.

He has received awards and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, PANK, HTMLGIANT, the University of New Orleans, IMPAC, and Emerson College, where he did his MFA and was Editor-in-Chief of Redivider. He has taught at Inprint and at the University of Houston, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing and Literature.