November 18, 12:45 p.m.-4:00 p.m. at Georgia State University: Perimeter College – Dunwoody Campus, 2101 Womack Rd, Dunwoody, GA 30338, Building N-C auditorium and café. (If you’re not on our mailing list, use the form here to add yourself so you will get any updates about this meeting.)
This meeting may be recorded; if so, the recording link will be shared in the following month’s eQuill newsletter.
12:45-1:30 p.m. Nosh and Networking Mixer for members and first-time visitors in the café
1:30-1:45 p.m. AWC announcements and upcoming events with AWC President Jill Evans
1:45 p.m.-4:15 p.m. Speaker – Peter Selgin: First-Page Workshop
Peter Selgin is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction. He is the author of two children’s books, three books on the craft of writing–including Your First Page: First Pages and What They Tell Us about the Pages that Follow Them–two essay collections, and three novels, including the forthcoming A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space (from Regal House Publishing, Fall 2024). Confessions of a Left-Handed Man, his memoir-in-essays, was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize. His memoir, The Inventors, won the 2017 Housatonic Book Award. His recent novel, Duplicity, won the 2021 Best Indie Book Award and the 2021 Indie Excellence Book Award. His work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, The Sun, Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. His illustrations and paintings have been featured in The New Yorker, Forbes, Gourmet, Outside, Boston Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. His full-length drama, A God in the House, based on Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his “suicide machine,” won the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference Award and was most recently produced by the Town & Gown Players in Athens, Ga. A visual artist as well as a writer, Selgin’s paintings and illustrations have been featured in The New Yorker, Forbes, Gourmet, and other publications, and his cover designs appear on many award-winning books. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia College and State University, where he is art director and nonfiction editor of Arts & Letters, an international journal of poetry and prose.
On November 18, Peter will present a workshop on the importance of the first page of a manuscript. The first page establishes the crucial bond between writers and readers, setting us off on a path toward the heart of a narrative, or failing to do so. The workshop—developed in conjunction with Peter’s book of the same title—is based on the premise that just about everything that can go right or wrong in a work of fiction or memoir goes right or wrong on the first page. We will analyze and discuss participants’ first pages and extrapolate general insights and craft lessons that can be applied to all the pages that follow the first one.
4:15-4:30 p.m. Book signing for Peter Selgin in the café