WV Summer Fiction Workshop

Jason T. Lewis, director/teacher

Workshop begins: 6/07/06 Register now!

Welcome. This page is dedicated to providing information on the West Virginia Summer Fiction Workshop (to be held 06/07/06-07/26/06 in Morgantown) in this, its inaugural year. My vision for the course is to get together a group of fiction writers, young and old, from all levels of experience and creating a community where we can all learn from each other, work on our writing and enjoy the WV summer in the company of other writers.

We will cover the art and craft of writing fiction beginning at the word and sentence level, including, pacing, how to write effective dialog, plotting and effective placement of exposition, all the way up the ladder to broader thematic issues that thread through all of our work. Each member of the workshop will bring in their own work to be read and critiqued by peers at least two times. We will also read the work of other authors and discuss that work from the standpoint of craft and execution.

The workshop will run run for 8 weeks (June 7-July 26), meeting on Wednesday evenings in Morgantown (site to be determined). The cost for the course is $100.

Space is limited and filling up fast! Contact me now to reserve your slot

Who am I?
I am a native West Virginian and Teaching/Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and will complete my Master of Fine Arts in 2007. I have studied with James Alan McPherson (Pulitzer Prize winner for the collection Elbow Room), Chris Offutt (Guggenheim Fellow, author of the short story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods, two memoirs, and a novel, The Good Brother), Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones), and many others.

The Iowa Writer's Workshop has a proud and extensive lineage in American letters, producing great writers for the last 70+ years including Flannery O'Connor, John Irving, Raymond Carver, West Virginians Jayne Anne Phillips and Pinkney Benedict, and many others. I am proud to be a part of that lineage and excited that I can bring some of what I have learned there back to my home state. I am looking forward to working with other West Virginia writers and hope that I can help continue the tradition of telling the stories that we have to tell in the Mountain State.

I am currently writing a novel set in West Virginia as well as a collection of short stories. If all goes well they'll bother be done within the next year. Fingers crossed.