Online Events

Online events will take place on Zoom unless otherwise specified. If you have any questions, please contact disquietinternational@gmail.com.

 

 

maaza mengiste author photo

The Craft of Revision with Maaza Mengiste

Saturday, Feb 20 4-6PM EST

Goodbye story, hello revision

“That’s the problem with you Americans, you care too much about story.”
–Dasa Drndic to Maaza Mengiste

 

What else is there to care about, if not story? Doesn’t story make a…story? In this session, I want to talk to you about my own sometimes overwhelming, sometimes paralyzing, always agonizing steps towards a real re-visioning of my latest novel. I learned to produce writing in my MFA but it wasn’t until I completed my first novel and was faced with the task of revising that I realized that no one had spoken to me concretely about the steps towards revising. How do you move from feedback to new work? How do you approach the task of revising a manuscript when you can’t figure out what exactly isn’t working, but you know it’s not? What questions do you ask yourself to help you get started? What do you look at first? We’ll talk through all of this and I ask that you come with a scene you’d like to work on.

  $150 | Closed

 

 

smaller.t.kira.photoThe Power of Perhaps: Speculative “Nonfiction” and Memoir with T Kira Madden

 Saturday, March 20 4-6 PM EST

Terms like surrealism and magical realism are most often used to describe works of fiction, but what about the inherent magic and time travel of our true, lived experiences? In this generative session, we will discuss alternate realities, hypothetical what if’s and ways of perhapsing into the surreality of our everyday lives. We will focus on isolation and compression, and on finding the narrative heat and emotional potency in our memories, our selves, and all the selves we’ve been. We’ll talk magical objects, the electricity of sensory experiences, and forge new pathways and connections between seemingly disparate thoughts. The scaffolding behind short published work (sent in advance) will serve as blueprints for our discussion and in class writing exercises.

$90 | Register at Submittable