WEBINAR | Fact, Memory, Imagination: Connecting the Dots to Uncover Meaning in Our Moments
February 4 @ 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm EST
You have the raw materials of a story or the start of an idea. But how can you turn information into artful narrative? By exploring the craft of the literary list, you’ll find the moments of surprise and epiphany that turn bare facts into powerful art.
For Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, & Poetry
Unexpected juxtapositions create meaning. Unusual sequences. Well-framed themes. In writers like Tracy K. Smith, Sonya Huber, Pablo Neruda, and Christina Sharpe, we discover—and can learn from—the power of deliberately chosen details and masterfully constructed themes.
Just as a puzzle becomes a picture, it’s the connections and the order of information that transform moments into a compelling narrative. In this webinar, we’ll examine how Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection Odes to Common Things proves the power of the list as a starting place for a story and see how poems that begin as seemingly simple declarations evolve into compelling narratives.
We’ll learn from the masters. We’ll practice artful list building. We’ll explore, as well, the child’s dot-to-dot puzzle and how its emphasis on dots, lines, and color can help us frame our works in progress.
Prepare to write briefly to prompts. Prepare to discover epiphanies. Prepare for a process that is not just fruitful but fun. Beth will close by sharing the process she used to write Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story, which draws on fact, memory, and imagination—on dots, and lines, and color.
In this webinar, you will:
- ENJOY the clever evolution of Neruda’s poems
- EXPLORE the power of lists in the making of stories, prose and poems
- LEARN to convert stodgy facts into interesting scenes
- GAIN insights into the literary fulcrum and cascade (and what, precisely, those are)
- PURSUE the elevated ending in your own writing
- LEARN how Beth Kephart developed a constellation of dots to create the hybrid novel based on her family history
This webinar is ideal for writers who:
- having compiled or discovered facts, wish to advance the story
- wishing to write intimate memoir, poetry or fiction
- begin with lists, or writers who have eschewed them
- wishing to have more fun with the process
Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔
ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER
National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of some forty books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, a paper artist, and the author of the popular Substack, The Hush and the Howl. My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera was a finalist in the 2025 Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award. Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story was a Silver Medalist in the North American Book Awards (historical fiction). “Conversations with Women in Blue” won the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Prize from The Porch.
Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com
FULL REFUNDS ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.
