Award-winning author and former board member Jennifer Morales, whose Council for Wisconsin Writers honor book Meet Me Halfway was reviewed in the Fall 2016 Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine, is offering an online course, “Hearing Voices,” about that frequently elusive aspect for writers. The five-week workshop begins on March 14 and covers how to create authentic, believable, and distinctive character voices in fiction, nonfiction, and performance writing.
The link to register is at https://app.ruzuku.com/courses/20139/about.
Morales’ short story collection, Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories, is an award-winning book that narrates a set of racially charged events from a wide range of perspectives: a black teen protagonist, an elderly white neighbor and her best friend, a mixed-race Puerto Rican teenager, a Latina landlord, and others.
“During Q&A sessions with readers,” Morales says, “an inevitable question comes up: ‘How did you create all those different voices?’ My answer: Science. My natural inclination is to hear the world as a linguist does, to study and practice the subtle shifts that make one voice different from another. But even if that isn’t your natural orientation to the world, that science is learnable, and it’s what I’ll be teaching in my online course, “Hearing Voices,” starting March 14.
“‘Hearing Voices‘ is an opportunity to learn how to listen like a linguist to create authentic, believable, distinctive character voices that your audience will remember. Fiction and nonfiction writers, as well as storytellers and performance artists, will benefit from this 5-session online course. In addition to learning new skills in the creation of distinct character voices (or, in the case of nonfiction “characters,” learning how to hear and present them accurately), we will practice revising existing work and consider the ethics of depicting the voices of characters from language groups different from your own.”
For more information about CWW and CWW awards, please go to www.wiswriters.org.