Introducing the new Director of the Quarry Heights Writers' Workshop!

Recently, I accepted a job as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, which means I will be moving to Tulsa with my family this summer. While I'm sad to leave behind Columbia's vibrant writing community and the many friends I've made here, I'm excited for this new opportunity!

I'm very happy to announce that after I depart, the Quarry Heights Writers' Workshop will live on under the leadership of the writer Gordon Sauer! 

Gordon Sauer earned his MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where he was a Teaching Fellow. His fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and his nonfiction in Columbia College Today. While living in New York City, Gordon interned at The New Yorker, worked as a freelance writer for Columbia College Today, and was on the board of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. He's been a resident on scholarship at the Vermont Studio Center and has been teaching creative writing for the past five years. Currently, Gordon is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. 

Gordon is an excellent writer and an experienced teacher; I had the pleasure of observing him teach a fiction workshop at Mizzou, and he leads his workshops with an informed, probing intelligence. And he will be offering his first QHWW class soon, beginning August 6th and extending until October 1st, with a break for Labor Day. Expect more information about that class soon, and in the meantime, mark your calendars!

I have every confidence that Gordon will continue the QHWW's tradition of exciting and rigorous craft-focused workshops. Please don't hesitate to get in touch with me or Gordon if you have any questions about this transition, and please help me in welcoming Gordon to the QHWW family! You can still reach us at the Workshop email address, quarryheightsworkshop@gmail.com.

This year marks the fifth anniversary of QHWW. Thank you for a wonderful experience. I've made many lifelong friends through this community. Long may it continue here in CoMo!

-Keija

Contact Info

Please add your contact info as a comment under this post.

Great Ending Authors

Hi, All -

Maybe it'd be a good idea to store our list of great ending authors on our blog so we can refer back to it in the future (rather than dredging through backlogged e-mails). I've added Laura's e-mail from yesterday to our list as well as one of my own suggestions. Feel free to comment on this post - or make your own - with stories' whose endings you've enjoyed.

As a poet, I don't read novels or short stories on a very regular basis. Any reading time that's not devoted to my thesis is spent on modern poetry collections. But in the interest of learning the craft of fiction (I feel like you guys must love it for some reason!), I Googled tips for writing short stories and came upon this great article posted last month by faculty at Steton Hill University in Pennsylvania.


Check it out here.
 


Here's Laura's great ending author input:

Annie Proulx. She is probably best known for the Pulitzer-winning The Shipping News and her story Brokeback Mountain, but as far as endings go, I like her short stories Them Old Cowboy Songs and The Half-Skinned Steer the best. I have them if anyone wants to borrow them. Also, her novel Accordian Crimes is amazing in that she manages to craft a fabulous ending to a story that follows an accordian through a century of the various immigrants who own it. I couldn't put the book down until the end and I was not disappointed. And the ending of Charles D'Ambrosio(Keija's teacher!)'s story The Scheme of Things is terrific and memorable.   

All Things Important

Today's post on All Things Important:


http://annie-allthingsimportant.blogspot.com/2011/04/farmer-among-tombs.html


This is the blog that I started in late February to help get myself in a writing space for our workshop.



Ann

Welcome

Greetings, Workshoppers -

I've set this blog up as a place where we can share questions and comments about the workshop, provide links to interesting articles or works we find, and even share our own writing that doesn't make it into Keija's class.

Blogger is pretty intuitive, but if you have any questions about how to use the software, just ask. I've been using it to run my own blog for quite some time now.

Excited to see you all on Monday.

-Chelsea