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Meet THe Team
Utilizing dialogue—an aspect of craft that’s often overlooked—can elevate your fiction and give you, the writer, an even deeper sense of your characters and setting. This course will introduce key concepts like gesture, conciseness, and texture. We’ll delve into complexities of characters talking on the page, such as accent and regional patterns of speech. We’ll also do highly generative, fun exercises that get writers out into the world to listen to real-world speech and that writers can return to again and again. Writers will leave with a new suite of techniques that add this underutilized tool to the toolbox (and lots of new writing that moves your dialogue beyond “Oh, hi.”) Accompanied pre- and post-reading that includes Percival Everett, Joy Williams, Peter Matthiessen, and lots of surprises.
Anne Ray was raised in Ellicott City, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, and has worked as a waitress, a gardener, an English teacher, and a fishmonger. She is the author of Scenic Overlook, her debut novel-in-stories, published in 2023 and recipient of an Awst Press award. A two-time fellow at MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, her fiction has appeared in more than 10 literary magazines, most recently STORY and North American Review. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Pushcart notable citation. She had a second life daylighting as an editor in academic publishing and scholarly communications. From 2020-2023 she was the Managing Editor at Reveal Digital, a project of JSTOR, where she oversaw digital archives of radical and historical press materials, including a first-of-its kind archive of American prison newspapers, featured in 2023 on the podcast Criminal. She’s a graduate of the Creative Writing program at Carnegie Mellon University and the MFA program in fiction at Brooklyn College.
Anne is new to The Porch. Welcome!
