Fifty Pairs of Eyes: Creating Characters in Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry

“Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with,” Lily Briscoe thinks as she tries to paint a portrait of Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. We will focus in this workshop on cultivating practices that help us see further around the people about whom we write: learning from both visual and literary arts about how to bring the humanity of our characters closer to the reader, how to navigate the visible and the invisible, and how to shape portraits in words that reverence human dignity.

Memoir, fiction, sermons that bring biblical characters to life, sonnets that explore the interaction we had with our neighbor last week, accounts of the lives of long-ago ancestors—these all confront us with the literary and ethical challenge of crafting characters other than ourselves on the page. And, like most aspects of the writing life, this challenge has implications not only for how we write but also how we live. Writers of any and all levels are warmly welcome to this workshop. There will be opportunities to share writing with one another throughout the week.

On October 15, 3-5 pages of writing, which will be circulated to all workshop participants, will be due; specifics about those pages will be sent to you by September 1. There will be (no more than) 75 pages of pre-reading as well.

Finally, on or around October 13 and on or around October 20, participants will be sent a writing or creativity prompt – attending to them is entirely optional, and you won’t be asked to submit whatever you write in response; they’re simply an offering to help turn your attentions to our time together.

The program is limited to 11 participants and will be held at the Roslyn Conference and Retreat Center in Richmond, VA. Transportation to and from the workshop is the responsibility of participants. However, participants may be eligible to receive financial assistance to offset those travel expenses by completing a Financial Need Statement on the application form.

Stephanie Paulsell is the author of Religion Around Virginia Woolf, Honoring the Body: Meditations on Christian Practice, co-author (with Harvey Cox) of Lamentations and the Song of Songs, and editor of Toni Morrison: Goodness and the Literary Imagination and The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher. She is the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies Emerita at Harvard Divinity School where she served full-time on the faculty from 2001-2024. She recently moved to Albemarle County, Virginia with her husband, Kevin Madigan.

Application Process
The application deadline for this workshop has passed.