Miami Book Fair

Laugh About It: Humor in Autobiographical Writing
2016-06-28 15:00 - 2016-08-02 17:00 (America/New_York) | Wolfson Campus, 300 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami, FL, 33132, United States
Tuesdays, June 28 – August 2 (6 weeks) / 7 – 9 p.m.
This class has been cancelled.
Writing funny can be a challenge. Humor writer Erma Bombeck says, “Anybody can bring out your tears. That’s a piece of cake. It is twenty times—no, make that fifty times easier to make people cry rather than laugh.” Yet, humor is a healthy part of life and often can be the sugar that helps the bitter stuff go down, and in personal essays or memoir, humor can be both a refreshing and a startling honest way to connect with your readers. This course will help you learn about the various types of prose humor and how to incorporate humor into your own creative nonfiction work. Using selected readings of humorous essays, we will explore the elements of humor writing, and workshop our own writing each week. Note: this is not a comedy writing or joke writing class. We will be writing essays, but we will break down the aspects of humor in ways that will enable comedy or joke writers to advance their craft on their own.
Dawn S. Davies has an MFA from Florida International University. Her essay collection, Mothers of Sparta, received the 2015 FIU UGS Provost Award for Best Creative Project. She was recently featured in the Ploughshares column, “The Best Short Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week.” She had a notable essay in Best American Essays 2015, and a Pushcart Prize special mention for nonfiction in 2015. She has a special interest in both the unreliable narrator and humor writing. Her work can be found in The Missouri Review, Fourth Genre, River Styx, Brain, Child, Hippocampus, Cease, Cows, Saw Palm, Ninth Letter, Green Mountains Review, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. www.dawnsdavies.com

How to Tell True Stories, Out Loud
2016-06-30 15:00 - 2016-07-28 17:00
Thursdays, June 30 – July 28 (5 weeks) / 7 – 9 p.m.
The stories presented at Lip Service—Miami’s showcase for true stories presented out loud—are personal, heartfelt, and honest. This five-week course, presented by Lip Service co-producers Esther Martinez-Kenniff and Nicholas Garnett, will show you how to identify, create, and present meaningful personal stories.
You’ll learn:

What qualifies as a story.
How to identify which of your personal stories have what it takes to make a great story.
How to structure a story for clarity and emotional impact.
The differences and similarities between writing for the page and the stage.
Editing and presentation techniques that immerse and engage an audience.

Each student will have the opportunity to present a final, edited story in front of their classmates and instructors. Participants will receive valuable feedback at each phase of the process, from story inception to final presentation.
A graduate of Florida International University’s MFA program, Nicholas Garnett is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. His writing has appeared in, among other places, Salon, Best Sex Writing of 2013, and as the title stories for two anthologies, All That Glitters, and Badass: True Stories, The Double Album.
Esther Martinez has a BA in Literature Writing from Columbia University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Florida International University. Her work has appeared in the anthology Badass: True Stories, The Double Album, in Pan ‘Ku, Quarto, The Columbia Observer, Sliver of Stone, The Daily Beast, and Newsday, as well as on NPR and PBS.
