Mail & Guardian reporter
Get those stories out of your bottom drawer – or start writing now! The South African Internet literary journal, LitNet, which has been a notable success in Afrikaans and is now expanding into English, is running an online creative writing workshop and is calling for stories.
WriteAgain, sponsored by Penguin publishers and supported by the Mail & Guardian, takes after its Afrikaans predecessor, SkryfNet, aiming likewise to provide a creative writing workshop for writers of prose who had not yet made a solo debut in book form.
Entries must be submitted before February 10 2000. They can be e-mailed as attachments to [email protected]. Authors are asked to send in three stories. The convenors will select one story each from the five authors picked for the workshop. These will be published on the site, discussed and reworked.
The workshop will run over some three months. The first phase will start soon after the selection of the stories has been made. Once the five stories have been selected, the writers-in-residence will comment and report to WriteAgain.
The stories, rewritten in the light of the reports, will then be republished on the site. This process will be repeated over three months, until the final, polished versions of the stories are handed in. The process is open to comment from anyone browsing the site at all stages. In the end, the authors of the best stories are likely to be offered the chance to have their stories published in book form.
Stories submitted should be no longer than 5E000 words. A participation fee of R100 is payable (in advance) once an author is selected for the workshop.
There will be no direct contact between the author and the writers-in-residence.
Stories should be free of errors, so have them proofread. Copyright remains with the author of each story and he or she is free to publish them elsewhere after the workshop.
The convenors of the site are Izak de Vries and Etienne van Heerden. Both are published authors. Van Heerden has been teaching creative writing at the universities of Rhodes, Cape Town and Antwerp for a number of years. He is the editor of LitNet. Check out the LitNet site, and get more details of the WriteAgain project, at www.litnet.co.za.
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