We’ve all heard campfire stories designed to provide a collective shiver; we’ve all heard traditional ideas of heaven and hell. But how can we use these concepts in our fiction in ways that enhance our writing?

In this workshop, author Heather Startup will examine several novels and one short story, searching for commonalities among their portrayals of the afterlife as well as the unique aspects of each story. Heather will discuss techniques to strengthen characters, the narrator’s reliability, and your story as a whole.

Stories for discussion include: “Louise’s Ghost,” by Kelly Link; The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver; The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien; and The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.

• Tuesday, June 23, 7 p.m. at the OCLS Alafaya Branch.
  12000 E. Colonial Dr.
  Orlando, FL 32826

Register here. For more information, contact the library at (407)-835-7323.

How different are Modern and Biblical Hebrew? What Biblical Hebrew words continue to be the source of so many disputes? How did Hebrew survive in the USSR when the language was forbidden? Dr. Norman Berdichevsky, author of Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language will answer all of these questions.

• Tuesday, June 16, 6:30pm at Orlando Public Library, Library Central
  101 E. Central Blvd.
  Orlando, FL 32801

For more information, contact the library at (407)-835-7323.

From 6pm-8pm on Thursday, June 18, join Writer’s Block for wine and conversation with David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals, at Writer’s Block Bookstore (124 E Welbourne Ave, Winter Park).

In each of the stories in this remarkable debut, award-winning writer David James Poissant explores the tenuous bonds of family—fathers and sons, husbands and wives—as they are tested by the sometimes brutal power of love. His strikingly true-to-life characters have reached a precipice, chased there by troubles of their own making. Standing at the brink, each must make a choice: Leap, or look away? Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin writes that Poissant forces us “to face the people we are when we’re alone in the dark.”