Serber, Natalie

Project 1: My New Best Friend
Working with the idea that interesting people make interesting stories, in this workshop students will invent characters using both physical and emotional landscapes. We'll begin by discussing favorite characters from favorite novels, and why we liked them. Then, using visual aids, we will invent our own people. Working individually and in pairs, we will conduct character interviews, imagine the secret inner lives of our new friends, learn how they speak and what they dream about. We'll place our people in challenging situations and see how they act, developing a short story starring our new friend. Voice, details and language will be the focus as we let our characters misbehave, get lost, learn something new, and basically get messy.

Project 2: Sensory Poetry
Using the five senses as a scaffold, this weeklong workshop will spend a day in each sense, using images, music, food, color and fabric to write poems. Each day we will look at poems of established, and not so established, poets, and talk them over and write some poems of our own, focusing on one of the ways in which we know our world. Smell is often linked to memory, touch and sound will include music and movement, and taste--well, that's just fun, and clearly linked to memory as well. For sight, we'll examine how landscapes and images make us feel. This workshop will focus on, among other things, sensory language, ideas/content, metaphor and simile. The final product will be a class poetry anthology.


Natalie Serber earned her MFA in fiction at Warren Wilson College, and her Elementary Teaching credential at U.C. Santa Cruz. Her writing has been published in Inkwell Magazine, The Bellingham Review, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Clackamas Literary Review, and the anthology Airfare: Stories, Poems and Essays on Flight. She is the recipient of a Fishtrap Writing Community Fellowship, was short-listed for Best American Stories of 2005, and the winner of the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the H.E. Francis Award for Fiction and the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction. She is currently writing a novel and a linked short story collection.