“In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative…” ~Twyla Tharp

Kathy says:
I’m a big believer in the value of pre-writing as a necessary first step to drafting new work. Over the years, I have developed some exercises and activities aimed at immersion and deep work before beginning the joyful task of creating new art. The result? Fresh, original drafts of surprising depth and beauty. In this engaging, interactive three-hour session we will begin with a series of fun and interesting activities and prompts that will prime our brains for creative expression. From these, we will put together “toolboxes” for story writing, equipping ourselves with our own unique word banks, vocabulary, images, characters, settings, even titles. In the last hour, we will draw on these tools to draft rich, resonant stories that might not otherwise be written had we not arrived at the page primed, prepared, energized, and inspired.

Kathy Fish has published five collections of short fiction, most recently Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, and numerous other journals, textbooks, and anthologies. Fish’s “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,” was selected for Best American Non-required Reading 2018 and the current edition of The Norton Reader. Her newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, provides monthly craft articles and writing prompts and is free to all. Subscribe here: https://artofflashfiction.substack.com.