The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host southern writer Susan Cushman for an online writers workshop, Moved by the Spirit: Using Your Spiritual Life to Inform Your Fiction, on June 23 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Limited to 15 participants, the workshop will be hosted on Zoom with a $45 registration fee. Learn more and sign up at https://patconroyliterarycenter.eventbrite.com
This workshop is for anyone wanting to write fiction informed by one’s spiritual life. Susan will discuss the ways in which her spiritual life informs her fiction, and also share examples from other writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Dostoyevsky, Chekov, and several contemporary authors. There will be a discussion about the difference in being an author who writes spiritual or religious fiction vs. being a religious or spiritual writer. The class will also include a writing exercise to turn a personal memory into fiction, with feedback from the instructor and fellow participants.
Workshop instructor Susan Cushman is author of four books: Tangles and Plaques: A Mother and Daughter Face Alzheimers(memoir), Cherry Bomb (novel), Friends of the Library (short stories), and John and Mary Margaret (novel). She is editor of three anthologies of essays by other authors: A Second Blooming: Becoming the Women We Are Meant to Be, Southern Writers on Writing, and The Pulpwood Queens Celebrate 20 Years! Growing up in the Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, and converting to Eastern Orthodoxy has been an interesting spiritual journey for Susan, who has also studied and taught Byzantine iconography. She has included many of her spiritual experiences in her writing, including numerous essays: “Icons Will Save the World,” published in First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, “Chiaroscuro: Shimmer and Shadow,” in the anthology Circling Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, and “Watching,” which appeared in the Saint Katherine Review.
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center is located at 601 Bladen Street in Beaufort and open to the public for tours from noon to 4:00 p.m. on Thursdays through Sundays, or other times by appointment. Learn more at www.patconroyliterarycenter.org.
