Summer Craft Intensive: Jamila Minnicks

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Editor's Note

Let the People Speak for Themselves: Finding Character Voice and Making it Shine with Jamila Minnicks
Saturday, August 5
10 AM – 1 PM PST/ 4 PM – 7 PM EST
Online

Who are the people in your stories? How do they observe the world, move through spaces, deal with bosses, loved ones, mechanics, cats? Are the people in your stories exercising autonomy, using their own voice, or merely acting as an extension of the writer?

Fiction is a magnificent way for us to explore the subconscious. Our characters have so much to teach us all about what it means to be alive. In this intensive class, we will discuss how to allow the people in our stories to speak for themselves. Through reading exercises and generative exercises, we will learn how to find, and maintain, immersive character voice; how to spot false notes; and how to separate writer voice from the characters’ lived reality. My goal is for you to leave this class equipped to experience, and write, how your characters experience love, vulnerability, pain, a blue sky, a belly laugh, a shattering disappointment.

Scholarship
We have one scholarship available for this intensive. Scholarships are conducted through a lottery. If you are interested in submitting your name, please fill out this form.

BIO:  Jamila Minnicks’ novel Moonrise Over New Jessup (Algonquin Books, 2023) won the 2021 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. In 2022, she was awarded a Tennessee Williams scholarship for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and she also earned a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her short fiction and essays have been published in CRAFT, Catapult, Blackbird, The Write Launch, and elsewhere. Her piece, Politics of Distraction, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Minnicks is a graduate of the University of Michigan, the Howard University School of Law, and the Georgetown University Law Center. She lives in Washington, DC.