Raleigh Review‘s Southern Recitations workshop and reading series is almost half over! The final workshop for this fall is with Zelda Lockhart November 8-9, 2014. I’m really looking forward to this one as it is a generative workshop, i.e., a lot of writing time. How ’bout you? Need some good, productive, creative-writing time? Sounds like this one will be good for poetry, fiction or memoir! (I’m going for poetry myself.) Incidentally, I recently read Zelda’s novel Fifth Born and found it very compelling.

Mining the Mirror: Turning Emotional Landmines into Good Literature

November 8-9, 2014 | 10am-4pm Sat & 10am-2pm Sun | 410 N. Boylan Ave., Raleigh | $250, Early bird price $187 through October 25, 2014 | Lunch included both days

Zelda Lockhart

Writers of all kinds use their personal experience as a starting point for their work, but they often neglect, avoid, or simply don’t realize the deep, rich potential that is there. The Mirror Exercise is designed to help writers use the complex layers of their relationships to bring depth to literary plot. This and others of Lockhart’s writing exercises within The Soul of the Full-Length Manuscript reveal the ways in which our personal plots parallel and are the artistic building blocks for literary plot.

Participants will create a whole short piece of fiction, memoir or small collection of poems within this two-day workshop. Whether you are experienced or novice, this workshop will offer you a way to instill emotional depth into your writing. Register now.

Zelda Lockhart is Director of LaVenson Press Studios, and author of novels Fifth Born, Cold Running Creek and Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle. She was awarded a Barnes & Noble Discovery Award and was a finalist for a Hurston Wright Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Lockhart served as the 2010 Piedmont Laureate for Literature.