Join WMMT and Roadside Theater for a FREE evening with WHITNEY COLLINS, of Ricky & Other Love Stories (2024, Sarabande) and Big Bad (2021, Sarabande), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize, a Bronze Medal INDIES, and a Gold Medal IPPY. Whitney will be doing a workshop, book reading, Q&A, and signing.
Where:
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Groundswell, 229 E. Main Street, Whitesburg, KY 41858 (the old post office; note there is a more accessible entrance, with fewer stairs, around the back of the building)
When:
- From 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm, Whitney will lead a workshop on writing beginnings. While free, this portion of the evening requires registration.
- At 7:15, Whitney will read from Ricky & Other Love Stories.
This event is put on in partnership with Cowan Community Center, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Read Spotted Newt.
“Big Beginnings: A Workshop”
Having worked as a submissions reader for three literary magazines (The Sun, The Louisville Review, The Carolina Quarterly), and having relentlessly submitted my own writing for more than 20 years, I have come to firmly believe that the single most important aspect of a good story (or essay or novel) is its BEGINNING.
This is partly because life is short and people are busy, but it’s mostly because we humans are hungry (starving, really!) for engagement. We want emotion, passion, urgency, and excitement. We’d like to at least see the dessert menu before we eat the meal. We need the stakes to be high from the get-go.
With that knowledge, this workshop dives into “big beginnings.” We will read aloud and discuss several examples of gripping openers and then unpack why they are successful. At the end, we will have fun creating some wild opening sentences of our own, followed by sharing them. Writers will come away with the understanding that these “big beginnings” can not only help them get published and get read, they can also help them, as writers, to sustain momentum. It’s way more likely you’re going to finish a piece that starts with a bang than one that takes forever to get to the good stuff.
While the second half of the evening is open to everyone, the first half--a special writing workshop led by Whitney beginning at 6:00 PM--will have limited space and is capped at 20 people. Please register using the form below to reserve your spot!
Refreshments will be available.
This workshop is being held in conjunction with a book talk and signing later in the evening with Whitney. Information on that event can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/share/Ws5RZNjnNVNmSJ4H/
More About the Author
Whitney is the author of Ricky & Other Love Stories (Sarabande 2024) and Big Bad (Sarabande 2021), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize, a Bronze Medal INDIES, and a Gold Medal IPPY.
Whitney received a Distinguished Story from The Best American Short Stories 2022, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, a 2020 Pushcart Special Mention, and won the 2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize and the 2021 ProForma Contest.
Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI, The Idaho Review, Gulf Coast, The Pinch, Grist, The Best Small Fictions 2022, Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror, and Fractured Literary Anthology 3, among others.
Previously, Whitney was a contributing editor for The Weeklings, a book reviewer for Barnes & Noble, a reader for The Big Jewel, The Louisville Review, and Carolina Quarterly, and an editorial assistant for The Sun Magazine. Her nonfiction has appeared on various sites, including: Salon, Huffington Post, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She earned her MFA from The Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing.
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