Be Well Be Here Presents:

Let’s Begin a Story…or Five

Led ONLINE by acclaimed author and master fiction teacher

Pamela Painter

SOLD OUT! Beginning a story, putting the first words onto a page or the computer screen, is often the most difficult task for any writer. So, the focus of this online workshop will be to get you started on several stories, and then to show you how to follow the language, how to provide telling details for your narrative, and also how to unravel and explore an unstable situation in order to move a story forward toward a satisfying end. We’ll discuss techniques for finding the right character to tell your story, and exploring the ways in which your character will determine their own fate or not. I’ll share some of my favorite quotes from writers, and also suggest sites to explore for further guidance and inspiration.

Register to receive your Zoom link. The $55 fee includes a copy of Pam Painter’s latest short story collection, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories.

Please try our monthly mindful writing workshop series, Write Now!

Be Well Be Here offers scholarships and subsidized fees to share mindful writing practices with ALL.

About Fabrications: New and Selected Stories

Pamela Painter's short stories have been praised by Margot Livesey for their "wicked intelligence and ruthless humor." In Fabrications, which brings together 7 new and 24 selected stories, characters struggle to avoid the chaos in their lives, but--driven by addictions and appetites--often bring on disaster. Nobody is ordinary in Painter's stories. A burglar can't believe what he is asked to do by the woman whose jewelry he is stealing. Hitchhikers, hell-bent on murder, are thwarted by the miracle of story-telling. A wife can make rooms--and her husband--disappear, but saves the family dog. A young woman insists on the romance of being married in an Elvis Presley chapel, but for the wrong reasons. Fabrications is a testament to Painter's lyric skill and psychological insight across her career. - Goodreads

Pamela Painter is the author of five story collections: her latest, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories; 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.