Registration is now open for FCLA’s creative writing courses—screenwriting, memoir, environmental writing and flash fiction. Scroll down for details.

Turning Memories into Memoir
Instructor: Neil de la Flor
Six Mondays: June 1-July 6, 2009, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Join this fun and innovative introductory course to memoir writing.  Open to everyone, from beginners to advanced writers, this course will encourage students to find what they’ve forgotten and turn those memories into fabulous works of prose and poetry. Through innovative writing techniques, such as exquisite corpse and other in-class writing games, students will experiment with language as a way to access their sub/unconscious memories. Students are encouraged to bring in old photo albums, thoughtful letters from family and friends, and other keepsakes to help jumpstart the process.

Neil de la Flor’s literary work has appeared most recently in Court Green, No Tell Motel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sentence, and Barrow Street. He is also the co-author of Facial Geometry, (NeO Pepper Press) a chapbook of collaborative triads written with Maureen Seaton and Kristine Snodgrass. He lives in Miami,  Florida.

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Writing Earth—An Intro to Environmental Writing
Instructor: Michel Hettich
Six Tuesdays: June 2-July 7, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

In this six-week workshop we will write and critique poems, stories and personal essays that take the natural world as their subject matter. In addition, we will attempt various writing exercises designed to develop students’ abilities to write in organic forms and to think in ways that attempt to capture something of the “inner life” of nature as it exists in South Florida and the larger North American landscape. We will also examine examples of great nature writing as we attempt to extend and deepen our conception of the genre’s possibilities.

Michael Hettich has published a number of books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Flock and Shadow: New and Selected Poems (New Rivers Press) and Swimmer Dreams (Turning Point), both of which were published in 2005. His most recent chapbook, Many Loves, was published in 2007. A new book, Like Happiness, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press in 2010. His poems have appeared in such journals as Witness, Poetry East, Orion, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly. His website is Michaelhettich.com.

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Writing Really Short Stories—All About Flash Fiction
Instructor: David Beaty

Six Thursdays: June 4-July 9, 2009, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.

Flash fiction? Sudden, mini, micro, postcard, short-short? These are names for very short stories, between 250 and 1,750 words long. The genre is experimental, the word length variable. In this workshop we’ll investigate very short stories, and we’ll write our own. We’ll read and discuss anecdotes, scenes, advertisements, jokes, parables, prose poems, and very short fiction by established writers such as Hemingway, Peter Altenberg, and Jayne Anne Phillips. Expect writing exercises in workshop, and be prepared to bring in your own very short fiction to be discussed.

David Beaty has lived and worked in Greece, England and Brazil. A graduate of Columbia College, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University, where he was a recipient of the Josephine Friedman Award For Fiction. His short stories have appeared in Miami Noir, Unbound Press, Having A Wonderful Time, and other anthologies and literary journals. His short story, “Ghosts,” was chosen for The Best American Mystery Stories 2000; and, most recently, his story, “The Last Of Lord Jitters,” received honorable mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2007, edited by Carl Hiaasen.