Join American Library in Paris Scholar of Note Ladee Hubbard in a two-part writing workshop devoted to historical fiction.
During the workshop, participants will focus on how to write history: conducting historical research, adopting historical language, and situating themselves in foreign time. Led by Hubbard, they will demystify archival research, and consider the imagination required in recreating an era. How do we write characters into the traps of history, and how do we write them out? They will consider the boundaries between fact and fiction: what is our relationship to accuracy, and how do we define this?
Simultaneously, participants will consider the axes of socially conscious literature. History is constantly adopted, appropriated, used and abused to serve political and artistic ends. Is all historical writing necessarily political writing? How do plot and character map onto the interstices of the personal and the political? When we wield history as a tool for narrative, what is our responsibility to the present?
