May 21, 2006

"What’s Your Plot? The Keys to Developing Plot From A Superbly Developed Teacher And Author"

Plot, as we all know, darlings, is the bedeviler of us. Or almost all of us, at any rate. And those who plot flawlessly and with no need of cranial pilates will still reap many benefits from encountering this month’s speaker, Jessica Barksdale Inclán.

She teaches plot development—among other literary skills—and, boy, does she also develop them! Jessica is the author of the novel Her Daughter’s Eyes, a final nominee for the YALSA Award for the best books of 2001 and best paperbacks for 2001. Since then, she has published four other novels and was a recipient of the CAC Artist’s Fellowship in Literature.

Her poems and short stories have been appeared in Rockhurst Review, Hotwired, The Salt Hill Journal, Free Lunch, The West Wind Review, The Prairie Star, Gargoyle, and many other journals and newspapers.

When not writing, Jessica teaches composition, creative writing, mythology, and women’s literature at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, and online creative writing courses in the novel for UCLA extension.

For us, she will also reflect on differences in her life as a writer before she got published and now that she’s there—agent, contracts the whole deal. What was the reality of the experience versus what she thought it would be?

And get ready to be dazzled and do some plotting. Jessica Barksdale Inclán’s got the energy of four ten year-olds.