Let’s Write with BettyJoyce Nash

Words, pictures, and objects will poke and prod the subconscious and inspire participants to write whatever they choose. Writing under a time constraint applies more pressure, which keeps us from thinking too hard. Our brains can be our enemy in the drafting stage. Trust your subconscious to surprise you! Who knows what will flow from our pens as we scribble way too fast for our brains to question–or berate–us. We’ll read short pieces aloud and, as a group, discuss what we ‘hear.’ What words or phrases catch our attention? What’s worth further exploration? How did you feel as you wrote? Bored? Excited? Engaged? Meh? This process never fails to yield insights, especially when we are stuck. We will decide as a group where to go from here — further develop what’s on this page or start again with a different prompt? Participants will come away with several pieces to revise later — fiction, nonfiction, essays, poems, or that hybrid beast we call “creative nonfiction.”

Class meets in person Saturday, October 26, 1 – 3 pm.

Class size: Minimum 5, maximum 12.

Member discount: Members of Write On receive a 10% discount on all classes and workshops. To become a member, please click here. To receive the discount, members must log in to the website using their unique password and enter member10 in the promotion code box. The code is case sensitive.

Teaching Artist

BettyJoyce Nash’s recent novel, Everybody Here is Kin (Madville Publishing, 2023), was a runner-up for the 2024 Eric Hoffer Award. Her essays, articles, and stories have aired on the NPR-affliate WVTF and have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, North Dakota Quarterly, Reckon Review, Across the Margin, Broad River Review, Writer’s Digest, and Publisher’s Weekly. In 2015, she won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Prize. She co-edited Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, a collection of literary short stories that probe America’s complicated relationships to firearms (University of New Mexico Press, 2017). Her fiction has been recognized with fellowships from Wildacres; Write On, Door County; MacDowell; The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; VCCA-France; The Ragdale Foundation; the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland; and the Weymouth Center. She earned an MSJ with distinction from Northwestern’s Medill Journalism School and her MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. She teaches fiction at WriterHouse in Charlottesville. She has also taught writinng at the University of Richmond and the Albermarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.