Writing Workshop with Mauricio Kilwein Guevara

Wed. Dec. 3 & 10 | 6:15–7:45 PM CST | In person at Woodland Pattern

Sliding Scale fee of $20–$150 (Please give what you can; all donations will go directly to the instructor)

From Mauricio: This interactive workshop is an opportunity for us to learn more about writing literary prose on a miniaturist scale, anywhere from a few sentences to a few pages. Extremely short literary prose forms go back to antiquity. In recent decades in the United States and around the world, there has been widespread interest in reading and writing very short prose works across three literary genres (fiction, poetry, and nonfiction). Anthologies such as Hint Fiction, Flash Fiction International, Flash Fiction America, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem have all been extremely popular. There are also a number of journals that now focus specifically on publishing these very short works. In our workshop, I’ll share several different examples of what I have playfully dubbed “microbrews,” and I’ll have exercises so you can try your hand at writing in these super short forms. You’ll have opportunities to share your exercise drafts with one another, if you choose to do so. My goal as the workshop leader is to foster an informative, supportive, and enjoyable community for us to learn, create, and toast the fruits of our labor.

At no extra cost, each workshop participant will also receive a digital sampler of microbrews across genres that I have selected (solely for educational use) and Autobiography of So-and-so, a collection of prose poems and micro-fictions. I led a sold-out version of this workshop last summer at the Good Contrivance Writers’ Retreat in Reisterstown, Maryland, so early enrollment is definitely recommended.

Praise for “A Flight of Microbrews”: “Please accept my sincere gratitude for the Microbrew workshop. It was such a refreshing and productive get away from my day job. I dove into my writing in a way I have not for decades. I feel like I found the door to a secret closet that I had forgotten I could open.”

Of European and Ecuadorian indigenous descent, Mauricio Kilwein Guevara was born in the Andes of Colombia and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of three collections of poetry, a collection of prose poems and micro-fictions, a comic play that was performed Off-Broadway, and a collection of literary translations published in Madrid, Spain. His first book, Postmortem, was the winner of the National Contemporary Poetry Series competition. His most recent collection, , received an International Latino Book Award. His literary work has been published internationally in Canada, the UK, México, Spain, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina, the Netherlands, Cuba, and China. He was the first person of Latin American descent elected as President of the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where he worked to diversify conference programming. He is Professor Emeritus and former director of the creative writing program at UW–Milwaukee.

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