Creative Writing Workshop: Shapes and Stories

It’s easy to get caught up in the details of your writing – but how do you give your material a satisfying shape? And how can experimenting with structure change the story that you’re telling?

Our lives usually don’t make narrative sense or fit into neat structures, so craft decisions surrounding fiction can be particularly challenging when working with ideas and characters that feel – or are – real. In this workshop, we’ll combine lessons in craft, writing exercises and discussion to open up new possibilities for the architecture of our work, and how playing with structure can generate new ideas and paths for you to follow.

• traditional and experimental approaches to structure, and ways these vary across different types of fiction,
• methods for considering, and expanding, the relationship between form and content,
• ways in which structure can liberate, rather than constrain, material,
• some examples of how we - Anna and Pip - have experimented with structure in our own novels and shorter pieces.

Participants will have the chance to consider and discuss their own work.

Anna Kate Blair is a writer from Aotearoa based in Naarm. Her first novel, The Modern, was published by Scribner in 2023. Her essays and short stories have appeared in publications including Good Weekend, Cordite, Slow Canoe, Archer, Meanjin, The Big Issue's Fiction Edition, Landfall and The Lifted Brow and have won awards including the Wyndham Short Story Prize, the AAWP Slow Canoe Creative Nonfiction Prize and the Warren Trust Award for Architectural Writing. Anna holds a PhD in History of Art and Architecture from the University of Cambridge and previously worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Writers Victoria. She has taught writing and other subjects at universities and arts institutions in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia.

Pip Finkemeyer is a fiction writer living in Naarm/Melbourne. Her debut Sad Girl Novel was published in Australia, the UK and the US. Her fiction has been listed for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers, the Disquiet Literary Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has a Masters in Publishing and Editing from RMIT. She co-founded the Berlin-based zine Nothing to See Here, for which she led fiction and zine-making workshops. You can find her writing in Harper’s Bazaar, K*ll Your Darlings Magazine, Big Issue Magazine and more. She’s currently working on her second novel.

This event will take place on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung Peoples of the Kulin Nation. We would like to acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and pay our respects to elders past and present.

Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

WILLOWS & WINE is a wine bar and bookstore based in West Melbourne. https://www.blackbooksbar.com/

Host or Publisher Willows & Wine