Advanced Creative Writing Workshops

Taylor Brorby will conduct two advanced, three-hour creative nonfiction workshops at North Dakota State University, which will be open to the greater Fargo community. Students will workshop each other’s pieces, receiving details for improvement, striving to bring each piece to a publishable level. 

Taylor Brorby is the author of Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. Taylor has received grants and fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Books Critic Circle, the MacDowell Colony, and Mesa Refuge. His work has been published in The Huffington Post, North American Review, Orion, among others. Taylor travels around the country to speak about the Bakken oil boom, climate change, and hydraulic fracking. He teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and is contributing editor at North American Review. He's at work on three separate memoirs that deal with western North Dakota, growing up gay on the Northern Great Plains, and being a Type 1 Diabetic.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

Download copies of all workshop pieces from link provided.
Print-off and mark-up (write comments) your workshop peers' pieces. Bring a copy of each piece (including your own) to workshop. At the end of each person's workshop, we'll hand back their marked-up pieces to them so they may further develop them.
Be ready to speak about each piece in the workshop in detail (what you enjoyed, what you were curious about, what you would like to see more of).
Participants should write about how they felt while reading the piece (not whether they liked it or not or thought it good or bad) on the piece itself--think of this as a "love note" to the writer.
Workshop will follow this model during our discussion: Describe (what is this piece about), Praise (what's working well), Question (what were you confused about, like to see more of).
What Taylor Brorby will foster and offer:
--A safe environment for each participant so she/he/they feel comfortable throughout the entire experience.
--Energy to get discussion going.
--Additional print-offs for participants to take with them.
--He will infuse conversation for tips/insights applicable for everyone so they might take their writing to the next level.
--A hell of a good time.
​ For questions email info@humanitiesnd.org or call 701.255.3360
(Exact location on campus will be emailed to program participants upon registration.)