In addition to hosting a live online meeting, we will also record it and post the link in the next month’s issue of The eQuill newsletter.

 

July 18, 1:30-4:00 p.m. – Online (https://atlantawritersclub.my.webex.com/atlantawritersclub.my/j.php?MTID=m0f89a2214a1f4a2695e2c19507a53910)

 

1:30-1:40 AWC Announcements about upcoming events.

 

1:40-4:00  Memoir Writing Workshop::Finding Your Personal Treasures

Joan Didion called them shimmers. Emerson called them gleams. In this writing workshop, we’ll write from prompts to “excavate” our lives for those writing gems that often spark poems, stories and memoirs. These glimmers can be seemingly incidental moments that occurred on a staircase or they can be actual objects. What we start in this workshop will likely be the seeds to bigger projects for writers of poetry and prose; fiction or nonfiction. The idea here is to leave with a stockpile of material to kick start your creative work.

We will also examine the dramatic weight of personal objects. This isn’t Antique Road Show, but participants are encouraged to consider meaningful object in their lives. Since we will be writing from our homes, we might have these objects right in front of us. We’ll do some drafting around these objects or remembered, absent objects during our time to explore how our personal stuff can lend immediacy and depth.

 

About the workshop leader:

Margaret McMullan is the author of nine award-winning books including the novel, In My Mother’s House, the story collection Aftermath Lounge, the anthology, Every Father’s Daughter, and the memoir, Where The Angels Lived: One Family’s Story of Loss, Exile, and Return, based on her Fulbright research in Hungary. Margaret’s young adult novels How I Found the Strong, When I Crossed No-Bob, and Sources of Light have received best book awards from Parents’ Choice, School Library Journal, the American Library Association, and Booklist among other educational organizations.

 

Margaret’s essays have appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Herald, Glamour, The Millions, The Morning Consult, Teachers & Writers Magazine, The Montréal Review, National Geographic for Kids, Southern Accents, Mississippi Magazine, and other periodicals. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Deep South Magazine, StorySouth, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, Other Voices, Boulevard, The Arkansas Review, Southern California Anthology, and The Sun among other journals and anthologies. A recipient of a National Endowment of Arts Fellowship in literature and a Fulbright at the University of Pécs in Pécs, Hungary, Margaret has served as a faculty mentor at the Stony Brook Southampton Low-res MFA Program in New York where she also taught on the summer faculty. She was the Melvin Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Evansville, where she taught for 25 years. She writes full time now in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where she lives with her husband, filmmaker, Patrick O’Connor.