INWOOD — Uptowners harboring dreams of penning the next Harry Potter series need not travel downtown for writing lessons; a fiction class has sprouted in their own backyard.
The brand new Iceberg Writing Workshops will take aspiring authors through the ins-and-outs of creating fiction stories when it kicks off this fall in Inwood.
The course, which runs from September 25 to November 13 at Bread and Yoga's new 212th Street location, will take students through several exercises and help them get their ideas down onto paper.
"They're getting a lot of jump-starts, writing exercises and ideas for how to enter a story," said Inwood resident Danielle Lazarin, who will be teaching adults-only course. "I think a lot of people have these ideas and they get overwhelmed by them. Exercises help people go into a story under very low risk."
Lazarin adds that at the end of the exercises students will come out with a lot of material that they can work with.
Lazarin, a creative writing graduate and former teacher at the University of Michigan, said that the large number of creatives and artists in Inwood make the neighborhood a natural fit for such a class.
"I think Inwood has a great concentration of creative people who want everything in their neighborhood, just like everyone else," said Lazarin, who has been published in the Boston Review and Michigan Quarterly Review. "I think there's an untapped market here in Inwood, Washington Heights and Riverdale for people that want to have this kind of experience and be able to be home in 10-15 minutes."
If the class is successful, Lazarin said that other workshops for genres such as non-fiction and essay writing could also be held in the future.
"Hopefully it would continue with other classes," Lazarin said.
The eight-week Iceberg Writing Workshop costs $325, with a 10-percent discount for students that register before August 25. For more information visit www.icebergwriting.com.
