Jayne Anne Phillips, Fiction Workshop

Quiet DellPhoto by Elena Seibert
Jayne Anne Phillips' new novel, Quiet Dell, is forthcoming from Scribner on October 15, 2013. She is the author of Lark & Termite, MotherKind, Shelter, Machine Dreams (novels), and two widely anthologized collections of stories, Fast Lanes and Black Tickets. Winner of the Heartland Prize, she is a National Book Award Finalist, (2009), a National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist (2009, 1984), and a Prix de Medici Etrangers Finalist (2009). Her works are published in nine languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, a Howard Fellowship, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark (www.ncas.rutgers.edu/mfa), the State University of New Jersey. See information, essays, and 'Behind The Words' text source photographs at http://www.jayneannephillips.com.

Workshop Description

Jayne Anne Phillips' fiction workshop, limited to eight participants, will discuss two stories per member during the four weeks; each participant will also have two one-on-one conferences with the instructor, to be arranged. Stories submitted for the workshop must be no more than 22 pages long, 12 point type, double-spaced. Students should arrive with 10 copies of the stories they wish to workshop. Instructor will suggest a reading list to peruse before the workshop, and some craft exercises (to be written outside of class) will be assigned. Topics for discussion: compression and lyricism; meaning, sense and clarity in prose; importance of line editing; intent vs. execution; rhythm and breath; discerning and building on the spiritual core of the narrative.



Quiet Dell

"Phillips's prose is as haunting as the questions she raises about the natures of sin, evil and grace."

-Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review

"In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It's the story of a serial killer's crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity."

-Stephen King

"Quiet Dell has all the elements of a murder mystery, but its emotional scope is larger and more complex. It combines a strange, hypnotic and poetic power with the sharp tones of documentary evidence. It offers a portrait of rural America in a time of crisis and dramatizes the lives of a number of characters who are fascinating and memorable."

-Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary