Events
COVID-19 Schedule Changes
On March 11, MTSU's President made the following announcement:
...as we take these prudent measures to reduce the risk of exposure, we are canceling all events (including official university events, student events, non-University or external events, co-sponsored events and university-sponsored events) through Sunday, March 29.
Therefore, in accordance with that decision, the Spring Saturdays event with Melissa Maxwell scheduled for March 21 has been cancelled. We will continue to monitor the situation and work with our administration to determine if April events will go on. Please be patient and follow us here and on social media for any updates.
Each session, MTSU Write hosts events that nurture the writing community and celebrate literary life. Check here for updates as events change from season to season.
Throughout the year, MTSU co-sponsors Poetry in the Boro, a monthly reading and open mic event. Follow the schedule and learn more about featured writers here: https://www.facebook.com/PoetryInTheBoro/?fref=ts
Spring Session
February 21: SHIFT, Volume 2 Launch Party
February 22: Spring Saturdays with Amie Whittemore
March 7: Storytelling Workshop with Mark Lamb 1-5 PM MTSU Student Union Building Room 220
www.marklambdance.org/donate or Venmo @Mark-Lamb-14: $50
March 21: Spring Saturdays with Melissa Maxwell
April 11: Spring Saturdays with Fred Arroyo
April 11: Book Launch party celebrating Fred Arroyo's new book Sown in Earth: Essays of Memory and Belonging
April 14: Rutherford County Arts Alliance Meeting, hosted by MTSU Write
Spring Saturdays Series
Spring Saturdays Master Classes are held in the MT Center, Sam Ingram Building, on the MTSU Campus, from 9 am until noon. Come ready to write!
February 22: Amie Whittemore
REGISTER HERE
Portraits & Personas:
How do we write about ourselves without navel-gazing? How do we write in other voices without appropriating others’ lives? We’ll explore these tough questions through serious play, by discussing example self-portrait and persona poems and experimenting with writing prompts that will encourage poets to write about themselves and others with verve and precision.
Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and the 2020 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.
March 21: Melissa Maxwell: CANCELLED
Intro to Playwriting
Geared toward beginners with little knowledge of playwriting, but open to anyone interested
in learning more about how to craft a story, this session will cover: stage vs. film
vs. novel, how does the story-telling differ; a discussion of the various tools and
techniques of the trade—conflict (how/when to introduce it), subtext, element of surprise,
exposition (what it is and how to bury it)—and how to utilize them.
Melissa Maxwell is an award-winning playwright, director, actor, and motivational speaker. She recently directed Crumbs from the Table of Joyat Julliard and Machinalat Queens College, and she played M’Lynn in Steel Magnoliasat the Guthrie Theater. She’s a company member at the Great River Shakespeare Festival. She’s also appeared on TV in Madam Secretary, Mrs. Fletcher, Law & Order, and The Sopranos.
April 11: Fred Arroyo
Having Faith in Fragments: Writing Flash Forms
I’d like to capture an individual in a single sentence, a soul-stirring experience on a single page, a landscape in one word!
—Peter Altenberg
Our lives are often informed by small moments that come to have a great significance.—Robert Kroetsch
In this workshop we’ll explore brief flash forms: flash fictions, prose poems, and lyric essays. We’ll consider the creative possibilities of image, structure, compression, elision, fragmentation, juxtaposition, lyricism, and the word-work of writing with brevity. We’ll consider how these brief forms often cross, mix, and break down boundaries—and why flash forms are some of the most compelling and beautiful to read and write. We’ll also consider how a faith in fragments can become essential for our creative writing, writing that may seem incomplete, writing that discovers its power in conciseness.
This workshop will benefit beginning and advanced writers, writers of poetry and prose, and everyone will leave with a draft of a flash writing they can continue to hone through the tool-box of creative elements they take away to craft their writing. My hope is that we’ll each discover new elements of creativity for making the most of our writing in whatever form or genre, regardless of the word count, since making the most of our writing is take make every word count.
MTSU Write continues to sposor Poetry in the Boro, a monthly community poetry reading and open mic event here in Murfreesboro.
Summer Session
Coming soon...
MTSU Write continues to sposor Poetry in the Boro, a monthly community poetry reading and open mic event here in Murfreesboro.
Fall Session
Coming soon...
MTSU Write continues to sposor Poetry in the Boro, a monthly community poetry reading and open mic event here in Murfreesboro.
