2011 Writing Workshop: Missions: Impossible…and Possible

About the Workshop
In Jonathan Safron Foer’s novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," we meet nine-year-old Oskar Schell who is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father who died in the attack on the World Trade Center.  All of us have undertaken searches, quests, journeys that others might have labeled “crazy,” “bizarre” or “obsessive.”  Sometimes those searches were public; sometimes they were conducted in secret. In Oskar’s case, it is grief and loss that propels him forward. What of the adopted child searching for her birth mother, the grandson searching for someone who knew how his grandfather died in the war, the scientist searching for the rogue gene? Or on a smaller, more ordinary scale, the child looking for the lost toy, the cook searching for her mother’s potato salad recipe, the unemployed carpenter looking for a job. In all of these searches there are stories, hilarious or heartbreaking, that link us to Oskar Schell; our mission, ultimately, has to do with the inscrutable and with our desire for human connection.

In the workshop, participants will explore such quests, through fiction, poetry, memoir and that vanishing genre, the letter, in order to tell our own tales

Workshop Leader:  Dr. Anita Skeen
Dates: Sept. 6, 13, 20
Time:  Workshop #1:  4 to 6 p.m. | Workshop #2:  7 to 9 p.m.
Place:  East Lansing Public Library

Workshop Reading Date:  Wednesday, September 28, RCAH Theater, 7 p.m.