Heidi Durrow - Four Ragdale Events

Join us for four fantastic events with Heidi Durrow, Ragdale alumna and award-winning author of the novel The Girl Who Fell from the Sky.  Ragdale is thrilled to present these programs with several of its most important partners.  Learn more about them by clicking on their websites.  For more info about Heidi and her book, click here>


Author Luncheon with Lake Forest Bookstore at South Gate Cafe
April 5, 10:00 - 12:30
655 Forest Avenue, Lake Forest   
Tickets:  $38

10am – Check-in
10:30 – Author talk, Q&A and book signing
11:30 – Lunch is served

Register by calling Leslie Brown at 847.234.1063 x. 205

Books will be available for sale at the event by The Lake Forest Book Store

Our Partners:

More info on South Gate Cafe: Click here>
More info on Lake Forest Bookstore:  Click here>

Reading and signing at Open Books
April 5, 6:30 –8:00
213 West Institute Place, Chicago
Free to the Public – Open Admission

**Please consider bringing a book to donate to Open Books, a nonprofit social venture that operates an extraordinary bookstore, provides community programs, and mobilizes passionate volunteers to promote literacy in Chicago and beyond.       

Our Partner:

For more info about Open Books:  Click here>

SOLD OUT! SOLD OUT!

Write Yourself Into Fiction – A Class with Heidi at StoryStudio Chicago
April 6, 6:30 – 9:00pm
4043 North Ravenswood Avenue, Chicago
Class Fee: StoryStudio Non-Member:$40; Member:$35
Register by clicking here>

Class Description

The old adage says “write what you know,” but it can be tricky to build a fiction structure on real life experiences and emotions. How do you fictionalize life? How do you know which details to leave in and which to cut out? How do you navigate between real people and characters on the page? How do you write about real people without getting sued?

Award-winning author Heidi Durrow will share her experiences in writing, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, a new novel which recently won the Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change. This story deftly combines elements of Durrow’s own life with a dramatic event she culled from the news. The process of imagining the lives of fictional characters led her to include questions from her own life, making the novel a deep exploration of mother-daughter relationships and mixed-race identities.

Whether it’s events or emotions you wish to explore, this class will help you rethink turning real life into fiction. We’ll write, read, and discuss various ways of approaching material that is so close to our personal experience it can be difficult to render in words.

We’ll also talk about the logistics of living the writer’s life — the process of writing and getting published.

Who Should Attend: Anyone interested in incorporating aspects of real-life experiences into long or short fiction.

 

 

About Heidi:

Heidi W. Durrow has won the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition and the Chapter One Fiction Contest. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the American Scandinavian Foundation, and the Lois Roth Endowment and a Fellowship for Emerging Writers from the Jerome Foundation. Her writing has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Literary Review, and others. Her novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, a new novel which recently won the Barbara Kingsolver’s 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change.