The Smell of Fear: Building Suspense & Tension with Subtext

Join Straw Dog Writers Guild and presenters Elizabeth MacDuffie and Tamara Fricke for “The Smell of Fear: Building Suspense & Tension with Subtext” on Wednesday, May 22, 7-8:30pm, at the Northampton Center for the Arts,33 Hawley Street, Northampton, MA. In this craft workshop, writers will be guided in the art of creating suspense and tension in their writing. Using a series of prompts MacDuffie & Fricke will help writers increase reader engagement while moving the story forward. This is a generative writing workshop designed to give participants a working scene upon completion.

Elizabeth MacDuffie did doctoral studies in Writing and the Teaching of Writing at UMass, Amherst, where she was fortunate to be able to study under seminal professors Charlie Moran, Peter Elbow, and Anne Herrigton. She taught at UMass and later at Holyoke Community College. A few years after founding Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, she left academia to focus on this arts & literary journal. Meat for Tea now also includes a podcast and a micro-press.

Tamara Fricke is a co-winner of the Gertrude Claytor Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2010 and her work can be found in journals and collections including Meat for Tea, Poeming Pigeon, and Whisper and the Roar. Her chapbooks Our Requiem and Exit Means Eden are available online. She studied English and economics as a Francis Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College and currently works as a grant writer in the Pioneer Valley.