Novelist and memoirist LAURIE LICO ALBANESE will present the second MEWS master class next Thursday, January 14, from 7 to 9 pm at the Unitarian Church on Church Street in Montclair.  The topic: Creating a sense of place in your writing.  Here’s a description of the class, which is free (donation requested to the church, which is donating the space) and limited to 20 MEWS writers:

Master Class: CREATING A SENSE OF PLACE

Suitable for Fiction, Nonfiction, and Memoir Writers, Beginner and Advanced

A vivid sense of place grounds our writing in the concrete.  It gives you, the writer, a stage and an entry-point for your characters and story. For the reader, it allows him/her to enter “your” world with confidence and abandon. How else would millions of readers believe Hogwarts, Oz, or even Holden’s version of Pencey Prep? When we can see it, smell it, feel it and hear it – when we can picture the houses, the streetscapes, the way people dress and comb their hair, what they eat for dinner and what they keep in their pockets  — we have an intrinsic and immediate insight into character and story.

How do we create a vivid sense of place in our own writing? And how does that sense of place allow us to enter our own stories more deeply?

This master class will consider brief examples from Alexandra Fuller (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight), Rick Bragg (All Over But the Shoutin’), Uwen Akpan (Say You’re One of Them), Hemingway, and Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible).

There will be several guided exercises focusing on objects and sensory details, and an opportunity for workshop feedback.  Writers are welcome to bring in work in progress for deepening of sense of place in ongoing projects.

MEWSie Laurie Lico Albanese is the author of the memoir Blue Suburbia and the novel Lynelle By The Sea, coauthor of the novel The Miracles of Prato, and creator of the blog My Big Walk.  She teaches private classes in memoir writing in Montclair.  Read more about her on her website.

TO RESERVE A PLACE IN THE CLASS, rsvp to Pam Satran at pam@mewsie.org.