Craft Talks with Claire Luchette & Wayétu Moore

Fiction Craft Talk: Crafting a World with Claire Luchette

A story should transport a reader to a place they’ve never been or allow them to see a familiar place in a new way. This talk will focus on the craft of worldbuilding and how to get the most mileage out of a story’s setting. We’ll study examples of rich and three-dimensional worlds in contemporary fiction, and analyze the authors’ use of detail, voice, and imagery. Attendees will leave with a sense of how and why to build worlds of their own on the page.
 

Nonfiction Craft Talk: Character Strategies in Nonfiction with Wayétu Moore

Heroes sin and villains are occasionally good. Struggles of good vs. evil are happening within, so why not write our characters that way? Especially when these characters are real people? This craft talk looks at various technical approaches to building realistic characters in nonfiction writing, challenging the binary form. Characters are as complex on the page as they are off the page, and we will explore this tension through theory, discussion and a writing exercise.

 

Claire Luchette is the author of the novel Agatha of Little Neon. Their stories and essays have appeared in Best American Short Stories, the New York Times, Ploughshares, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Kenyon Review. A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, Claire has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

 

Wayétu Moore is the author of She Would Be King, released by Graywolf Press in September, 2018. Her memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women was also released with Graywolf on June 2, 2020. She is the recipient of the 2019 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction. She Would Be King was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly, and BuzzFeed. The novel was a Sarah Jessica Parker Book Club selection, a BEA Buzz Panel Book, a #1 Indie Next Pick, and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award. The Dragons, The Giant, The Women was a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, Time Magazine 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, Publishers Weekly Top 5 Nonfiction Books of 2020, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie medal for excellence in nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Moore is a graduate of Howard University, University of Southern California and Columbia University. She lives in New York.