How They Must Have Felt: developing an emotional landscape in historical fiction. 

This workshop created and led by Breena Clarke is one of six being offered as part of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers’ Fall Workshop Series. We’re entering our ninth year of platforming the work of women writers across all genres. Since 2013, we’ve held a three-day Festival of readings, workshops, panels and performances in Hobart, New York, the Reading Capitol of New York State. The pandemic has caused us to suspend the in-person Festival again this year. We’ve maintained presence for women writers, however. In September 2020, though we were unable to come together in person, we created several virtual readings https://bit.ly/3rA4xLT featuring videos made by Participating Writers. 

Beginning in September 2021, we are offering six, four-week zoom workshops. Each session will be 90 minutes. These workshops are priced at a very friendly fee and are under the leadership of six distinguished professional writers: Bertha Rogers, Breena Clarke, Mercy Tullis-Bukari, Elena Schwolsky, Stephanie Nikolopoulos, and Mary Johnson. 

Breena Clarke, co-founder and co-organizer of The Hobart Festival, is the author of three historical novels. Join her for How They Must Have Felt: developing an emotional landscape in historical fiction, to explore how you can fill the gaps in the mainstream narrative to richly build the interior lives of your characters. 

Have you begun a novel? Have you come too far to turn back, but feel you’re stuck in a slurry of characters and events and ideas and points of view and styles and genres? Then, you confront the skimpy historical record for people like your protagonist. How do you engage the rich interior lives you are looking for? 

Authors often face empty spaces when researching the past for the voices of people outside of the racial, social, and economic mainstream of American history. – Breena Clarke

Faced with the incomplete historical record of people of color, fiction writers must speculate about the past, filling in the interior lives of people left out of mainstream narratives. The process of constructing these lives requires reimagining geography, history, sociology, etymology and popular culture. Over the course of four consecutive weeks in September – 9/11,9/18, 9/25 & 10/2 –  Breena Clarke will help you explore the techniques fiction writers can use to create voices of the interior lives of the past. Participants will discover practical strategies to get started laying out an emotional landscape for their fiction.  

As a special bonus, Breena Clarke will read and critique your first 50 pages. Are you off to a great beginning for your novel or are you confused about where to start? All participants in this workshop may submit a manuscript (limit 50 pages) at the completion of the workshop and each will receive a comprehensive critique of their work. 

Though writing a novel is often compared to a long-distance run, it can also be compared to a 50-yard dash. There is value to both approaches. Putting your head down and pushing forward quickly with all you’ve got can energize your project. Come join me and we’ll see how far we can take your novel. Make a commitment to yourself and the novel inside you. Tell your story.

We hope you’ll support Hobart Festival of Women Writers by registering for a workshop with one (or two or all six) of our participating writers. This is a great way to help us maintain a platform for women writers and a way for you to develop your own creative work. 

We’re pulling through and it is because of you. 

Please note: All workshops are open to every lover of books and language regardless of gender. 

This workshop is offered as part of the Fall Workshop Series for Hobart Festival of Women Writers. Information at www.hobartfestivalofwomenwriters.com

https://www.hfwwnow.com/blog/bhqrfagi734gcvabdadjj6ifhoivl3 Read “An Accumulation of Grievances,” Breena Clarke’s most recent work in NOW, the online journal of the Hobart Festival of Women Writers. NOW is an online platform for the most important and scintillating work in essay, fiction and poetry by Participating Writers of Hobart Festival of Women Writers. Go to http://www.hfwwnow.com

Read the most recent book in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series I’M SPEAKING NOW: BLACK WOMEN SHARE THEIR TRUTH IN 101 STORIES OF LOVE, COURAGE AND HOPE, edited by Breena Clarke and Amy Newmark with an introduction and two personal essays by Breena Clarke. This book includes 101 personal narratives of the lives of Black women living today. https://bit.ly/3fVUzPx.