Creative Nonfiction Consultations with Louella Bryant
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Louella Bryant is the bestselling author of eleven books, including Sheltering Angel, Based on a True Story of the Titanic and her most recent novel,Willie Rum Running Queen, a fictionalized story of true-life bootlegger Willie Carter Sharpe. Her nonfiction book While In Darkness There Is Light, a biography of Charlie Dean, brother to former DNC Chairman Howard Dean, won the SouthWest Writers Award for Nonfiction. Her other books include novels for adults and young adults as well as an award-winning collection of stories. Louella’s short stories, poems and essays, have appeared in magazines and online. Formerly on the faculty of the Spalding University MFA in Writing Program, Louella now works as an independent editor in Vermont.
Louella will provide detailed comments on your manuscript as well as a cover letter. After receiving these files, participants who submit chapbooks and full-length manuscripts may also book phone/video conferences with Louella at no additional charge.
Louella is accepting everything from flash-length essays to full-length manuscripts. The fees and parameters for each of these categories are as follows:
- Flash Essays, up to 2 pages in length, $25
- Essays, up to 20 pages in length, $55
- Chapbooks, up to 40 pages in length, $275
- Manuscripts, up to 180 pages in length, $550
- Long Manuscripts, up to 300 pages in length, $795
All manuscripts should be double spaced and formatted in 12-point font with standard margins.
The deadline to submit work for this consultation program is August 31. Louella will complete her work and respond to all participants by September 30.
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Louella Bryant's Statement of Purpose
"Great writing is meant to crush us, entertain and move us, return us to ourselves with some greater understanding of the world and its workings,” says editor Betsy Lerner in her book The Forest for the Trees. Certainly that is the response all writers want from our readers. But how do you accomplish it? First, you need commitment and perseverance, even on beautiful summer days, to sit and write and read and write more. It also helps to have a mentor, someone who sees promise in your writing and nurtures that promise. That’s where I come in.
A mentor should help a writer find the heart of a story or essay. That is, instead of criticizing and tearing down your work, I’ll help you find precisely what you’re trying to say and how to coax that heart to the forefront of the piece, and I’ll do that by showing you how to listen to your own writing and trust what it’s trying to tell you.
Once you discover what enlightenment you’re trying to offer your readers, I’ll help you find your own voice to make your stories/essays/manuscript uniquely yours. Having said that, we don’t write in a vacuum. Even though it seems like a contradiction, I’ll point you toward writers who will serve as successful examples for what you are trying to achieve in your own writing. The best writers are also readers.
You’ll get some technical tools and advice, suggestions about broad qualities such as structure and flow, and direction on more specific elements such as sentence variety and word choice. And I’ll press you to write your best.
With your submission, I’d like an informal cover letter that will tell me something about you so that I can understand where your writing is coming from. I’m eager to dig into your work, so let’s get to it!