A Sense of Place: A Writing Workshop with Emily Rubin

From the 2024 LIGHT Virtual Festival!
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Emily Rubin (she/her) is the author of the novel, STALINA, a selection in the Amazon Debut Novel Award Contest. Rubin’s short stories, essays, and poetry have been published in the journals Confrontations, Red Rock Review, Ghost City Review, Oldster Magazine, Poets & Writers, among others. She founded the Write Treatment Workshops, creative writing workshops offered to the cancer community in New York City and upstate New York. She founded Loads of Prose, a reading series that takes place in laundromats around the country. Rubin was the first recipient of the Sarah Verdone Writers Award 2011, a finalist in the International Literary Awards, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She has received grants and fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, Heidi Paoli Fund, Marissa Acocello Foundation, Millay Colony, Poets and Writers, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the NY Foundation for the Arts. Rubin has a BA from Bard College, where she majored in Dance and Theater, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University. She lives, writes, and teaches from her home in Columbia County, NY. www.emilyrubin.net
ABOUT THE SESSION
“Often our everyday, ordinary places have been witness to extraordinary events. These may be significant enough to have been recorded in the annals of history, or perhaps they are the less consequential-but no less significant-moments of daily life, the memories of which have been passed down the generations. These are places traversed as much by stories as by footsteps. Sometimes they take their identity for their myths; at other times, the myths emerge from the place itself.”
-From Place by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar
An in-workshop writing session led by author Emily Rubin to explore the ethos of place and setting in a story, poem, or memoir. The workshop will consider how the details of where a story is located can center our writing. Considering place as a character in our writing can broaden the scope of empathy for places and our relationships with these places. Details of entering a space with all the senses, along with cause and effect, will focus the writing. Defining place(s) in our writing, whether real or imagined, safe or treacherous, can bring together internal and external conflicts and resolutions within the emotional world of a story. Rubin will guide the participants with prompts and timed writing exercises.
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