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Write Like a Child: Writing Fiction From the Child's Point of View
w/ Amina Gautier

Amina Gautier will be reading her work for the Edge Reading Series at Casa Libre on January 18 more info...

Thursday, January 19
6-8 p.m.
Cost: $40

Is there a difference between writing about childhood and writing children's literature? How can writing from the point of view of a child help writers develop their craft and technique? How can one capture the authentic voice of a child or adolescent or write about children without sentimentalizing or romanticizing them? The writer Flannery O'Connor once said that anyone who'd lived past the age of six had enough stories for the rest of his or her life. Given the assertion that the first few years of one's life yields a lifetime of writing material, the ability to write from the child's point of view is a valuable tool for any writer to have in his or her arsenal. In this workshop, we will explore the means and methods of writing from the child's point of view, discuss its pros and cons, review excerpted examples, and experiment with various writing exercises in an attempt to master the child's point of view.

Teacher Bio

Amina Gautier (photo credit: Dayo Nicole Mitchell) is the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for her short story collection At-Risk (University of Georgia Press). Over sixty-five of Gautier's stories have been published, appearing in Best African American
Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Review among other places. Her work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Ucross Residency, and Sewanee Writer’s Conference and has been awarded the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Award, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, the Danahy Fiction Prize, and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Gautier teaches at DePaul University. She can be found at http://www.aminagautier.com/

This reading is supported with generous funding from Poets & Writers.