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Kevin Winchester, who lives just south of Charlotte in the small town of

Waxhaw, has made his way as a writer with stories of life in the neo-gothic south where many of his characters struggle to make their way in a hostile world determined to beat them into submission. In Everybody’s Gotta Eat (2009), an early collection of short stories, Kevin staked his claim to a place among the great southern writers and storytellers. A later story, “Waiting on Something to Happen,” the winner of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2013, made good on that claim.

Kevin’s first novel, Sunflower Dog: Dancing the Flathead Shuffle (2020) – “a rare delight, a rollicking dark comedy with a heart of pure gold” (Jessica Handler, author of Magnetic Girl) – won a Silver Medal for regional fiction from the Independent Publisher’s Association. He has published additional work in a variety of literary magazines: Tin House, Gulf Coast, Barren Magazine, StorySouth, Barrelhouse, Dead Mule, Barren Magazine and the anthologies Everything But the Baby and Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas.

The holder of an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University, Kevin currently teaches writing at Wingate University. When he’s not writing, teaching, playing in the band Flatland Tourists, or hanging with his family, he’s hiking, riding his Harley, or working in his garden.

Developing Realistic Main Characters
We all know it—readers identify with characters. That’s why they keep reading.  But as writers, we want to tell the story. Sure, the story has characters, a protagonist, an antagonist probably, and those characters are directly involved in the story. But, if we want those readers to keep turning pages, we have to get out of the way and let our characters tell their story. The better we know those characters, the easier it will be to step aside and let them shine.

This program will provide tools and techniques for creating a new character or fleshing out one you already have. Through a series of guided questions and explorations, attendees will come away with a character they really know, and know intimately, and they’ll also gain techniques to find, identify, and employ conflict that arises naturally from character to create stories (and characters) readers remember.

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Kimmery Martin, who lives with her husband and three children in Charlotte, North Carolina, is an emergency medicine doctor and a self-proclaimed “literary nerd” whose voracious reading led her to “become curious if I could write a book too.” That self-imposed question led to her first novel, The Queen of Hearts (2018), described by Publishers Weekly as “difficult to put down . . . “a story of friendship shrewdly plotted [that] contains a cast of flawed, rich, believable characters.” Her second book, The Antidote for Everything – “Intense and vibrant . . . a binge-worthy page-turner” (Kerry Lonsdale, bestselling Wall Street Journal author) – followed only two years later. She is currently at work on a novel about an infectious disease specialist whose children become ill during an emerging viral pandemic (scheduled for publication by Penguin Random House, Fall 2021).

When she’s not busy writing or being a mom, Kimmery promotes reading, interviews authors, and teaches writing seminars, speaking frequently at libraries, conferences, and bookstores around the United States. She is particularly proud of her extensive work with the library foundation here in Charlotte.

No Matter the Genre, Suspense Is the Key to a Successful Novel
Let’s examine the basic structure of a story: it consists of a character—the protagonist – who wants something – and an obstacle or adversary – the antagonist – who threatens to keep the hero from getting what she so desperately wants.

If you want the novel to work, you have to put the reader through some degree of hell. It’s paradoxical. In real life people tend not to enjoy the sensation of constantly being on edge, but in fiction, tension is what keeps them turning the page. In this program we’ll discuss a list of specific strategies for building tension and suspense in your novel, plus several things to avoid.

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Reviewers of Daren Dean’s first novel, Far Beyond the Pale (2015) sing his praises as “the laureate of fallen angels,” a writer who takes his readers into “a dysfunctional world characterized by broken people, broken spirits, and broken promises.” The same “grit lit” tone emerges again in his 2019 collection of short stories, I’ll Still Be Here Long after You’re Gone. What might at first seem overwhelmingly grim is, however, redeemed by the redemptive soft spot in the author’s heart “for those fighting back against the darkness.” A second novel, The Black Harvest is slated for publication by the University of West Alabama’s Livingston Press in 2021.

Dean holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and currently teaches at Lincoln University in Missouri. His fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews have appeared in Louisiana Literature, BULL (Men's Fiction), Maryland Literary Review, The Oklahoma Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Ecotone, Image, Midwestern Gothic, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Red Dirt Forum, Yemassee, Ploughshares, The Huffington Post, Bloom, and others. He has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in fiction.

Writing from the Unconscious
Do you worry so much about grammatical errors that it interferes with your writing? Does that pesky little voice in your head, the internal editor who chants “not good enough,” keep you from your desk? Do you lose time waiting for the muse to descend before you can pick up a pen or sit down before a keyboard? If so, help is on the way. Following the lead of Robert Ohlen Butler – “Fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness” – Daren Dean will show you how to revolutionize the way you write by inviting you to step away from crippling rationality and harness the power of the unconscious to make you the best writer you can be.

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When Boris “Bluz” Rogers sits down to write, he sets out “to take words, shape them, and put them in places where they don’t necessarily belong” in order to create visuals that will allow his audience to see the world in new ways. The long list of awards and recognitions he has garnered provides ample evidence of how thoroughly he has succeeded: four Emmys, six Poetry in Motion Awards, three times National Poetry Slam Champion as well as Southern Slam Grand Champion.

“People sometimes forget,” Bluz contends, “that Charlotte is a really cool town.” A community builder, a community booster, Bluz sees his voice as a progressive tool to foster transformation; he strives to create “work that uplifts people when they hear it, encourages them to take pride in where they live and who they are.”

In Charlotte, he has done just that. Bluz has worked with Blumenthal Performing Arts to host the Slam Charlotte and Breakin’ Convention, led and facilitated workshops as part of ASC’s Connect with Culture Days, represented Charlotte as Poet Delegate at the All-America City Awards, and written poetry for Opera Carolina’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration. He has hosted the CIAA Fan Fest, done voice-overs for the Carolina Panthers and Raycom Sports, performed at the Foundation for the Carolinas Anniversary Luncheon and the Jazzy Holiday Gala at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture at the Levine Center for the Arts.

Details to be posted when available.

AT A GLANCE - The Entire 2020-2021 CWC Year's Main Activities by Month

Click HERE to get printable 2020-2021 At a Glance Club Activity Calendar

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