Realer Than Real: Writing With All Five Senses
You can’t draw the reader into your world without first creating the world. Madison Writer's Studio founders Michelle Wildgen and Susanna Daniel present a workshop about sensory writing and how to use it in your fiction and nonfiction. We’ll help you pay closer attention to the world-building details you have at your disposal and discuss how to select the most effective and evocative ones. We’ll read brief excerpts to stimulate thinking about language and description, and we’ll discuss how the excerpts work and which words create which effects. Does a passage make us feel queasy or hungry, cozy or anxious? How did this mood affect the way we experienced the story? Finally, we’ll use prompts to get you thinking about all five senses. Participants will have time to write, and some of you will have time to share and discuss your work as well.
Registration is required for this event. Register online at http://host.evanced.info/madison/evanced/eventsignup.asp?ID=78376.
Michelle Wildgen
Michelle Wildgen’s fourth novel will be published by Zibby Books in August 2023. Her first novel, You’re Not You, was adapted into a feature film starring Hilary Swank and Emmy Rossum. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Modern Love, O Magazine, RealSimple.com, Best Food Writing, and elsewhere. A former executive editor with the award-winning literary journal Tin House, she is a freelance editor and creative writing teacher in Madison, Wis. Her featured novel is Wine People.
Susanna Daniel
Author Susanna Daniel’s debut novel, Stiltsville, was awarded the PEN/Bingham prize for best debut work published in 2010, and her second novel, Sea Creatures, was named an Amazon Editors’ Top Pick of the Best Books of August, 2013. Susanna was born and raised in Miami, Florida, where she spent much of her childhood at her family’s stilt house in Biscayne Bay. Susanna is a co-founder, with author Michelle Wildgen, of the Madison Writers’ Studio. She is a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her writing has been published in Newsweek, Slate, One Story, Epoch, and elsewhere. Susanna lives with her husband and two young sons in Madison, Wisconsin, where during the long winter she dreams of the sun and the sea, and of jumping off the stilt house porch at high tide.