Writing Workshop July 14, 2012

First Workshop: Writing What You Know (Or Don’t Know)
Join award-winning writer, Eileen Albrizio to explore writing challenges and more!
In this workshop we will explore what it means to write what you know, then go outside the realm of our own experiences and write what we don’t know.

It’s a simple philosophy, write what you know—perhaps too simple. We are creative people and writing about only what we’ve experienced seems limiting. What does it actually mean anyway? How can you write a science fiction, horror or fantasy novel if what you write must be based on only what you’ve experience in real life? Then again, how do you write what you don’t know? Does that mean spending time and energy doing large amounts of research? The answer is simpler than you think. Writing what you know is actually a good philosophy, but it’s not the entire philosophy. It’s just the start.

Eileen Albrizio is an American writer of poetry and prose as well as a freelance proofreader and editor. Her works have appeared in numerous literary publications, including the Common Ground Review and the Underwood Review. She is the author of three volumes of poetry: Messy on the Inside, Rain – Dark as Water in Winter, and Perennials: New & Selected Poems, which was nominated for the 2008 CT Book Award. A two-time winner of the GHAC Individual Artist Fellowship for poetry, she has also penned several plays, three novels, numerous short stories and essays, and ghostwritten several projects. Her one-act verse-play, Rain, was honored as one of the top twenty best-written plays of 1997 by Writer’s Digest. Albrizio has taught poetry and creative writing in several colleges and cultural institutions as well as the York Correctional Institute, Connecticut’s maximum-security prison for women, under the creative writing program made famous by best-selling author Wally Lamb.