Wyoming Arts Council

Nina McConigley leads June 13 Writers in the Park workshop

Featured News | June 5, 2015

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The Grand Teton Association offers a free writing workshop in Grand Teton National Park, Saturday, June 13.  The guest writer is Nina McConigley, this year’s winner of the National PEN Award.  She will lead the workshop for writers of any genre and any level of interest.

For the workshop,  meet at the flagpole in front of the Craig Thomas Discovery Center at 9:00 am.  From there we will go to a good place to write and talk together.  Bring paper and pen, appropriate outdoor clothing for variable weather conditions and, if you like, water and something to sit on.  The workshop ends at noon.  Hope to see you there.

Nina McConigley  is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which won the 2014 PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. She was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and an MA from the University of Wyoming. . She has been a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and held scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Salon, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. She lives in Laramie, Wyoming and teaches at the University of Wyoming and at the MFA program at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

Workshop title is “Writing What You Know: Using Autobiography and Nature in Your Writing” which McConigley describes this way: “The old adage is to write what you know. Which is great — but as writers, it’s sometimes safer to fictionalize what you know. In this class, we’ll talk about how to write about real life experience and fictionalize it – but we’ll be using the natural world, the world we can tangibly see, as inspiration. The twist of this class is we’ll discover how to write about what you know (and knowing means going out and exploring our environment) — and how to use the truth to go into not only imaginary places, but real spaces in nature.”

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