We’re pleased to announce our next Writers’ Workshop: Lori Ostlund on 3rd-Person Close Perspective. This Zoom-based Writers’ Workshop will take place on April 22nd from 11am to 2pm PST. Purchase your ticket today (and please feel free to spread the word to any of your writer friends!).
“I’ve found that often people think that 3rd-close is just a variation on 1st-person, or that widening the distance from the character means that the narrator becomes invisible or neutral, even bland,” says instructor Lori Ostlund, “but I think of 3rd-person close as a way to have the best of both worlds: to be inside and outside our POV character, depending on what suits the story’s needs from line to line, page to page.” In this class, we will discuss when, how, and why to move in closer to a character’s thoughts and when to maintain distance, looking at ways to signal this movement clearly. We will look at excerpts from short stories and novels and engage in generative exercises that focus on improving participants’ understanding of and facility with 3rd-person close POV.
Lori Ostlund’s novel, After the Parade, was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award. Her story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist. Her work has appeared in the Best American Short Stories and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories as well as in ZYZZYVA, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Georgia Review, and other journals. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a finalist for the 2017 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has been a teacher for over twenty-five years in New Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, and North Carolina and is currently on the Mile-High MFA faculty at Regis University in Denver. She is the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and a board member of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, which supports feminist women in the arts.