Adult Creative Writing Classes

FICTION SHOP with DAVID FULMER

Meets 6-8pm Mondays, July 21-September 8 (class meets Tuesday, September 2 due to Labor Day holiday) in the Movie Museum

You've heard of wood shop; here's "Fiction Shop," covering the nuts and bolts—the many practical elements—of fiction and non-fiction writing. Students bring skill and raw material and instructor David Fulmer helps them shape and polish. "It is a craft, after all," Fulmer says. This workshop will steer any writer to the next level of storytelling through written word. Components include setting, dialogue, characters, plotting, and editing. Short exercises push the learning curve. The session also includes a discussion of the business of fiction and effective strategies with agents and publishers.

LAUREATE WEEKEND WORKSHOP with DAVID BOTTOMS: “WRITING POETRY: LANGUAGE AS ART”

2-day workshop is Sat & Sun, July 12 & 13, 2-4pm on the third floor of the House.

Are you an experienced poet who wants to hone your art? Are you a beginner who wants to shine some light on the mysteries of the poem and the creative process? Are you a poet who falls somewhere in between? This two-day workshop is designed to offer something for everyone. We will examine various aspects of poetry, such as what makes a poem, how language becomes art, and the role of audience. We will also discuss nuts and bolts issues, such as form and free verse, the poetic line, clarity versus ambiguity, symbolism, appropriate and inappropriate metaphor or simile, diction, dialogue, and sound devices. In our discussions about how poems work, the class will examine poems by a variety of celebrated American poets.

About the Instructors:

David Fulmer is the author of five critically-acclaimed, award-winning novels. Chasing the Devil's Tail was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Barry Award, and a Falcon Award, and won a 2002 Shamus Award. Jass was nominated for the "Best of 2005" lists by Library Journal and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and received the 2006 Georgia Author of the Year Award for Fiction. These books and his two most recent, Rampart Street and The Dying Crapshooter's Blues, received excellent reviews from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Times Picayune, The Boston Globe, an Publishers Weekly. Rampart Street was voted "One of the Best Novels You’ve Never Read" by New York Magazine and won the Benjamin Franklin award for best fiction audio of 2007. His fifth novel, The Dying Crapshooter's Blues, set in Atlanta, ws published in 2007, and The Blue Door was published in January.

David Bottoms’ first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was selected by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in over four dozen anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of six other books of poetry, most recently Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems and Waltzing through the Endtime, as well as two novels. Among his many other awards are the Levinson and the Frederick Bock prizes from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Dr. Bottoms has been Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana, Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer at Mercer University, and currently holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University, where he also edits Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art. He is Poet Laureate of Georgia.

To register for classes, please print and complete the registration form,
include payment, and mail to

Margaret Mitchell House
Attn: Adult Summer Writing Classes
990 Peachtree St. NE
Atlanta, GA 30309

The registration form is in Adobe PDF format.
You can download the Adobe Reader if you don't already have it installed.

For more information, please contact Melanie Eisenhart:
call 404-814-2063; 404-249-9388 (fax); or melanie.eisenhart@gwtw.org.