Writing Workshop Fundraiser with author Katharine Weber

Reading & Writing the Unreliable Narrator

Writing Workshop Fundraiser* with author Katharine Weber

When: Tues., Sept. 6, 2011
6 PM – 8 PM
Where: Avid Bookshop's raw space/preview space
493 Prince Ave
Athens, GA 30601

Cost: $35 per person, $30 for students, including light buffet dinner from a local restaurant

Register: Pre-registration is required. Call 706-352-9047 to leave a message, or email avid.athens@gmail.com

(Keep reading to see how you can save $5 on registration!)

**
Note: Katharine Weber will be doing a reading &
book signing after the workshop at 8:15 PM. The signing is 
FREE and open to the public. Workshop attendees will receive a discount on Katharine’s books as well as any of the books from 
the suggested reading list below.

In this two-hour writing workshop on reading and writing the unreliable narrator, Katharine Weber will lead a discussion about the varieties of unreliable narrator and offer reasons and strategies for writing effectively in the unreliable narrative voice. Why does a novelist make this choice? How can we decide if this is the best way to tell this story? There will also be consideration of ways to enhance the reader’s appreciation for the unreliable narrator.

The discussion will explore a variety of unreliable narrators, with consideration of the tellers of Zoe Heller's novel Notes on a Scandal, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and Ian McEwen’s Atonement. What makes a narrator unreliable, what are the varieties of unreliability, how do we recognize the "truth" of the story, and how does the authorial voice differ from the narrator's voice?

The advantages and limits of telling the story through different sorts of unreliable narrators will be examined. What succeeds? What fails? Why? Participants will experiment with brief exercises in narrative voice while considering a range of narrative unreliabilities, from the deliberate liar to the misinformed or deluded narrator, both of whom mislead the reader (how far can the writer go without cheating the reader?), to the deluded or compromised narrator who believes his own version of reality while the reader has growing awareness of the actual truths of the story.

Katharine Weber is the author of five novels, most recently True Confections, which features the unreliable Alice Ziplinsky as narrator. Her newest book is a memoir, The Memory Of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities. She has taught fiction writing at Connecticut College, Yale, the Paris Writers Workshop, and Goucher College, and is a thesis advisor in the MFA program at Columbia University. Her website is www.katharineweber.com, and her writing blog ishttp://www.staircasewriting.blogspot.com/.

Books discussed:
Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Atonement, Ian McEwen

Suggested additional reading:
True Confections, Katharine Weber
Edwin Mulhouse, Steven Milhauser
The Remains of the Day, Kasuo Ishiguro
Human Croquet, Kate Atkinson
The Comforters, Muriel Spark

Note: this event takes place at 493 Prince Ave., future site of Avid Bookshop. The store is still in pre-opening phase, so as an attendee of the workshop or the subsequent book signing you will get a special VIP glimpse into Athens’s newest bookstore! 

++Want to save five bucks?++ As we’re still working on opening and haven’t bought all our furniture yet, we may be short on chairs. If you bring your own chair to donate, you will receive $5 off the workshop registration fee! Some chairs will end up staying in Avid’s collection; any leftover chairs will be donated to charity.

*Katharine Weber has been exceedingly generous with her time and resources: she has asked that we bill this as an Avid Bookshop fundraiser. As a fervent supporter of Avid Bookshop, Katharine has decided that workshop proceeds will go toward the bookstore. We at Avid are touched by her kindness—she reached out to us long-distance long before we met in person and has continued to be one of our biggest cheerleaders.