Audiences teach you the difference between what reads well on the page and what reads well
to the ear. -- Billy Collins
This workshop prepares you for the public reading of your work. The skill of creative writing is a gift; it is also a result of years spent honing craft -- drafting, editing, rewriting. Yet the reading aloud of the work of those years is often treated as an afterthought.
Authors, in their public readings, often assume that the listener should appreciate language as it was placed upon the written page; the sound and sense of the human voice -- the affect of personal presence -- are thought to add nothing, and should not interfere.
But readers love good oratory for the reason they love good writing -- the felt joy of language. Good writing deserves good oratory, and is preserved by it.
The instructor is Dr. Layne Longfellow, who was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame in 1986.
He has read the works of authors from H W Longfellow to Leonard Cohen to Billy Collins at venues
throughout the US, Canada, and Europe. He is the narrator of "The Mountain Waits," "The Story of the Acadians," and travelogues for northern Maine, featured on Maine PBS. |
