Be Well Be Here happily collaborates with the Concord Festival of Authors 2021 to present

Writing Historical Fiction: To Muck and Fudge

Led online by celebrated author Allison Amend

Writing historical fiction requires specificity of time and place, often gathered from authorial research. But how does an author set aside scholarly inquiry to focus on fiction-- character, conflict, voice, etc.? In other words, how do we get out of the books to get into our book? This workshop offers techniques for re-creating historical moments to suit contemporary narratives, and offers suggestions for avoiding historical fiction traps. Explore new ways to turn your story of time and place into a compelling and memorable work of fiction with celebrated author Allison Amend. Learn more about Allison’s fascination with historical fiction and her mindful writing process in her essay, Celebrating Those Whom History Has Forgotten. Discover her wise and witty approach to creating memorable narratives in this entertaining interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Learn more at www.concordfestivalofauthors.org/writing-workshop-historical-fiction

$22 for the session. Register to receive your Zoom link.

Be Well Be Here offers scholarship and subsidies so ALL can be included regardless of ability to pay - simply fill out the BWBH Scholarship Form.

Allison Amend, a Chicago native, graduated from Stanford University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is the author of the IPPY award-winning short story collection Things That Pass for Love and the novels A Nearly Perfect Copy and Stations West, which was a finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her most recent book, Enchanted Islands, was on the longlist for the International Dublin Award. Allison teaches creative writing at Lehman College, CUNY, in New York City, where she has visited every museum, all 115 of them.

Be Well Be Here happily collaborates with the Concord Festival of Authors 2021 to present:

Your First 100 Words:

Grounding Readers in Your Fiction

Led online by acclaimed short story author Pamela Painter

Most readers will engage with a story if they feel grounded in some aspect of that story’s world. Whether physically grounded in setting, emotionally grounded in character, or logistically grounded in the human situation, it’s crucial to establish for readers early on a world they recognize, and to convey what matters in that world. In this advanced craft seminar, we’ll discuss techniques for grounding your stories, analyze published examples, and provide exercises to help you put it in practice.

Learn more at www.concordfestivalofauthors.org/writing-workshop-short-stories

$22 for the session. Register to receive your Zoom link.

Be Well Be Here offers scholarship and subsidies so ALL can be included regardless of ability to pay - simply fill out the BWBH Scholarship Form.

Pamela Painter is the author of four story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, which won the Great Lakes College Award Award for First Fiction, The Long and Short of It, Wouldn’t You Like to Know and Ways to Spend the Night.   She is also the co-author with Anne Bernays of the widely-used textbook, now in its third college edition, What If?  Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers.  

She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s  John Cheever Award for Fiction.  Painter’s stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on stage by Stage Turner, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, in Los Angeles and London by Cedering Fox’s Word Theatre Company.  She appeared with writer, Anthong Doerr, at Word Theatre’s Voices in association with NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where her two stories were read by actors Connor Paolo and Michael Zegan.  

Beginning in the late 80s, Painter was perhaps the first writer to teach a workshop entirely devoted to the short short story at Emerson College in Boston. Many of her students have published stories, won flash fiction awards and become publishers themselves of flash fiction—two examples are Rose Metal Press and Quick Fiction.  Painter wrote the Afterword for Rose Metal Press’s Brevity and Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories made up of the work of Emerson students whose stories had been published and/or won awards in the real world of flash.