A Day With Ralph McInerny

By special registration, participants can experience a six-hour long restricted admission interactive workshop with writer and faculty member Ralph McInerny. The workshop schedule will consist of a three-hour morning session, lunch with Ralph McInerny, and a three hour afternoon session.

Ralph McInerny holds degrees from the St.Paul Seminary, University of Minnesota and Laval University. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame since 1955, and since 1978 he has been the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies. For seven years he was director of the Medieval Institute; since 1979 he has been director of the Jacques Maritain Center. A specialist in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, he has written and edited 22 books about Thomistic and other medieval philosophies, including Aquinas and Analogy, The Question of Christian Ethics, Aquinas on Human Action and the Penguin Classic, Thomas Aquinas Selected Writing. In addition, he has written more than 60 novels, including the well-known Father Dowling mysteries, the most recent of which is Triple Pursuit (2001), the Andrew Broom mysteries, the Sister Mary Teresa mysteries and a series of mysteries set at the University of Notre Dame, the most recent of which is Emerald Aisle (2001). Blood Ties (St. Martins, July 2005), book 24 in the Father Dowling Series, will appear this summer.

He has served as president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, The Metaphysical Society, the American Maritain Society and the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. He has been visiting professor at nearly a dozen universities and is the recipient of various fellowships, honors and awards, among them the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement award. He is a fellow of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. His Gifford Lectures, delivered in Glasgow in 1999-2000, were published under the title Characters in Search of Their Author (2001).

President Bush in January 2002 appointed professor McInerny to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. The committee, established by an executive order in 1982, is charged with advancing public understanding of the arts and the humanities and forming new partnerships between the private sector and federal agencies to address critical issues in cultural life. First lady Laura Bush was the honorary chair of the committee.

Dr. McInerny is active in assisting struggling writers through his commercial writing courses, his work with the Elder Hostel, and his many workshops and presentations.

Workshop topic: Writing the Mystery Novel

Ralph McInerny will lead participants through an examination of the essential elements of the mystery novel and the novel writing process. Topics will include:

• Why a mystery novel? Why is it worthy of our consideration?
• The role of characters; their selection and development.
• Types of detectives: which is right for your story?
• The plot: what is it, what drives it?
• The importance of the puzzle and the laying of clues.
• Must evil be brought to justice?
• The mystery novel as metaphor.
• What kind of mystery is appropriate today?

Dr. McInerny will teach the techniques he has used so successfully in the writing of over 60 novels.

A Day With Lucy Rosenthal

By special registration, participants can experience a six-hour long restricted admission interactive workshop with Lucy Rosenthal. The workshop schedule will consist of a three-hour morning session, lunch with Lucy Rosenthal, and a three hour afternoon session.

Lucy Rosenthal - is a member of the faculty of the nationally recognized Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College where she teaches graduate and undergraduate workshops in the art and craft of writing fiction. Ms. Rosenthal received her B.A., University of Michigan. M.S., Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. M.F.A., Yale School of Drama. Fiction writer, critic, editor, playwright; author of the novel The Ticket Out and editor of the anthologies Great American Love Stories and World Treasury of Love Stories; reviews and articles published in The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune Book World, Ms., Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review and Michigan Quarterly Review; plays produced at Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Center, Waterford, Connecticut; recipient, Pulitzer Fellowship in Critical Writing; served on Book-of-the-Month Club's Editorial Board of judges and as the Club's Senior Editorial Advisor.

Workshop topic: Fiction Writing Workshop

Successful fiction writing is a pleasure that requires an educated patience as well as work. We will be working with short assigned exercises; these can either be complete in themselves or serve as springboards for longer stories. We will seek to show how the writing itself, as it unfolds, provides clues---in its language, story-line, distribution of emphasis, etc.–to the solution of its own creative problems. We will explore such questions as:

How can the writer best win and keep the reader's attention?
What shifts in approach would help?
Where is this story going?
What are its intentions?
How close does the writer come to realizing them–and how can we help the writer to realize them more fully?

We will look at the links between the answers to these questions and the writer's evolving voice. Discussion of student work will be supplemented by consideration of published short stories by writers ranging from Junot Diaz to James Thurber, from Ann Beattie to Toni Cade Bambara, others. The workkshop is open to writers at all levels.

The Harriette Austin Writing Program

By special registration, participants can experience a six-hour long restricted admission interactive workshop with the Harriette Austin Writing Program faculty and guests. The workshop schedule will consist of a three-hour morning session, lunch with Harriette Austin and her program faculty, and a three hour afternoon session.

Dr. Charles Connor, Director of the Harriette Austin Writing Program, will lead this workshop, with sessions presented by Harriette Austin and her program faculty, including national bestselling author Beverly Connor, author and writing instructor Judy Iakovou, author and reference librarian Diane Trap, and special guests.

Workshop topic: The Elements of Fiction

Learn to write and sell for today's market. This workshop begins at the beginning and is appropriate for any aspiring writer, but particularly for beginning and intermediate writers. The topics and techniques covered are those used in the Harriette Austin Writing Program courses.

• Types of Stories
• Where to Get Ideas: The Original Idea
• Where to Begin
• Creating Realistic Characters
• The Importance of Setting
• Dialogue
• Show, Don’t Tell
• Dramatic Tension
• Plotting the Story
• Using Telling Detail
• Writing, Editing and the Creative Process
• Finding an Agent, Editor, or Publisher
• Resources - What to Have in Your Home Reference Library