Teacher Feature: Patrick Dacey
Join Muse teaching artist Patrick Dacey for Writing the Weird on Saturday, July 24 from 10am-12:30pm.
In this seminar, we will look at making the most out of what’s on the page. Often, after a few drafts, we still don’t feel fully invested in our own work. What’s missing? Have I entertained every possibility? Am I willing to get a little weird to make this story pop? Through an engaging process of sharing ideas, writing prompts, and revision, we will further develop the characters, settings, and plots that your story has had all along, but just needed a closer examination in order to make it come alive. Likewise, we will also discover what’s unnecessary, and, as they say, kill your darlings.
Patrick Dacey is also teaching Where Do I Begin? on Saturday, August 7 from 10am-12:30pm.
Whether in a long piece of fiction or a short personal essay, there are specific tools writers use to begin a story. Likewise, the reader needs to follow you, and they, too, come to your story with their own ideas, stories, and past experiences. Essentially, we want our readers to care enough about our story to not only read it, but read it again, tell a friend, and build an audience of readers. In order to do that, we want to hook them at the beginning.
Patrick Dacey is the author of the story collection We’ve Already Gone this Far and the novel The Outer Cape. His work has appeared on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and in The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All Story, and Guernica, among other publications.
Patrick’s story “O Despot! My Despot!” won a 2022 Pushchart Prize! You can read it here.
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***Tuition assistance and flexibility is available to all who request it, no questions asked. Just select the “I want to talk about tuition assistance” box when checking out!
