In this instructive creative lab, attendees will take their wish to write stories from their lives into inspiring practice. Allan Reeder, the founder of Hillside Writing, will lay the groundwork for moving from your initial impulse to write into a process of personal discovery. Building from the specifics of a moment, you’ll engage your own imagination to recapture a scene that holds the promise of a truth that you can share from your life. Come get inside your vivid story and learn how to invite others in through your writing! 

Allan Reeder is the founder of Hillside Writing (www.hillsidewriting.com). He began his literary career apprenticing under novelist John Irving, whom he assisted through several sentence-by-sentence revisions of a 1,000-page manuscript. The encounters with the writer’s practice led Allan to editorial posts at The Atlantic and DoubleTake magazines and into the sentence-making of a wide range of professional fiction and nonfiction writers. Finding a special satisfaction in encouraging the creative process, Allan subsequently turned to the classroom to teach while earning a master’s degree at the renowned Bread Loaf School of English.

For fourteen years he taught and mentored young writers at Walnut Hill School for the Arts, in Natick, Massachusetts, where he founded an international magazine for high school poets, story writers, essayists, and playwrights. Over the past decade at Hillside, Allan has built a team of practicing writers driven by a love of story, curiosity about human experience, and the shared belief in the growth a writer encounters through pursuit of a creative project.

Registration is required. Space is limited.

This program is made possible by the generous donors to the Cary Library Foundation.