Jon Sealy

Description, historical imagination, even a perfectly crafted villain: all are vital elements in writing a great story. Aspiring writers of various levels can learn more at this year’s Writers’ Workshop at Isothermal Community College, Spindale.

The dozen-year-old event will be held on Saturday, March 28, from 9 to 2 p.m. in the Business Sciences Building.

This year’s featured writers are John Lane and Jon Sealy, both of South Carolina. The topics will include “Using Description in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction,” “Sympathy with the Devil” and “The Historical Imagination.”

The registration cost will include snacks, coffee and tea. The deadline to register is Friday, March 18.

Lane is professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College and director of the college’s Goodall Environmental Studies Center. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose and has won numerous awards and fellowships, including the 2001 Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment by the Southern Environmental Law Center.

In 2011 he won the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for his essay, Sardis, and in 2012, Abandoned Quarry won the SIBA Poetry Book of the Year prize. His novel, Fate Moreland’s Widow, was published by USC Press in early 2015.

Sealy’s family worked in the cotton mills of Chester County, S.C., and he grew up listening to stories about life there during the Depression. He has an MFA from Purdue University and lives in Richmond, Va. Jon is the author of The Whiskey Baron (Hub City Press 2014).

The Richmond Times-Dispatch said, “The Whiskey Baron is what you’d get if Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner co-wrote the HBO series ‘Boardwalk Empire’ while on an especially inspired, existentially tinged bender.” Sealy’s short stories have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines, including The South Carolina Review, The Normal School, PANK, and The Sun.

For more information or to register, contact Dr. Kathy Ackerman, Isothermal’s dean of Arts and Sciences, at kackerman@isothermal.edu or call 828-395-1301.

-Submitted by Mike Gavin