Instructor: Suzanne McConnell
Monday - Friday
July 29 - Aug 2
9am - 12pm
5 sessions

What keeps a reader reading?  What’s at the heart of a story?  And how do you structure one? 
 “I guarantee you,” Kurt Vonnegut said, that no story “…will give a reader genuine satisfaction unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere.” Using some of Vonnegut’s writings on this, we will scope out the nature of plot.  We will visit re-visions.  We will conjure, shape, knead, and shift our own plotlines and stories." 

The class will be based on Chapter 25, “Plot,“ in the paperback edition of Pity the Reader:  On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell, and the accompanying “Practices” for that chapter.

 **It is suggested but not imperative that participants bring Pity the Reader to class along with pen and paper. This workshop takes place at the Main Campus, 10 Meetinghouse Road.*

Suzanne McConnell’s work has appeared in Provincetown Arts, The Huffington Post and many literary magazines, winning First Prize in the New Ohio Review’s fiction contest, Prime Number Magazine’s flash-fiction contest, and Second Prize in So To Speak’s contest.  She has published profiles of Kurt Vonnegut as a teacher at the Iowa Writers Workshop, lectured on his work at the American Academy in Berlin, and is the author of Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell.  She taught writing at Hunter College for thirty years and is Fiction Editor of Bellevue Literary Review.  The Philip G. Spitzer Agency is representing her recent novel, Fence of Earth.”