Voice is Everything (Morning)
with Nicholas Delbanco
It is an honor and a privilege to have Nicholas Delbanco conduct a master class at the Kauai Writers Conference.
John Updike said Delbanco “wrestles with the abundance of his gifts as a novelist the way other men wrestle with their deficiencies.” He is a writer that other writers, including many of the most celebrated, look up to and have sought out for advice. He’s served as both chairman of the fiction panel of the National Book Awards and as a judge for, among other contests, the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction..
Delbanco is the author of thirty-two books, both fiction and nonfiction. He was the founding director of the Bennington Writing Workshops and served for many years as head of the esteemed creative writing program at University of Michigan. There he was director of the Hopwood Awards Program, the oldest and best known series of writing prizes in the academy.
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner paraphrases Delbanco, who “remarked that by the age of four one has experienced nearly everything one needs as a writer of fiction: love, pain, loss, boredom, rage, guilt, fear of death.” Yet Delbanco’s recent book, Lastingness, the Art of Old Age, reflects on the qualities that transcend age in the lives of authors. His most recent work of non-fiction, Still Life at Eighty continues that exploration, both in personal and in professional terms.
Delbanco has a unique voice. His workshop will focus on helping writers find and refine their own individual voices. He says: “My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table.” Instead, in his storied career of helping authors, he has found the gift of identifying, honing, and perfecting the individual style of each one.
In this interactive master class, participants will submit excerpts for analysis and discussion by Delbanco.
We can promise that those fortunate enough to find a spot in Delbanco’s workshop will find it a seminal event in their writing careers.
4 Mornings: Monday 11/2 – Thursday 11/5, 9:00am-12:00pm
$895.00
In stock
Nicholas Delbanco has published thirty-one books of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent novels are The Count of Concord and Spring and Fall; his most recent works of non-fiction are The Countess of Stanlein Restored and The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life. As editor he has compiled the work of, among others, John Gardner and Bernard Malamud.
Nicholas has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards. He’s The Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and heads the MFA Program as well as the Hopwood Awards Program. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, twice, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship. His teaching text for McGraw-Hill is entitled Literature: Craft and Voice, and he edited a three-volume Introduction to Literature with Alan Cheuse. in 2004 he published The Sincerest Form: Writiing Fiction by Imitation. His new non-fiction book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age was published by Grand Central Publishing in 2011.