90-Minute Workshop. Session #5: Saturday, February 18, 3:15 PM – 4:45PM
So You Want to Access Your Inner Humorist?!
Are you screamingly funny? But can’t translate this into your work?
This workshop will show you how access your inner humorist.
First we will explore the work of some of our greatest humorists—Mark Twain, PG Wodehouse, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris, and yes, Jane Austen.
Then, moving into the practical, the workshop will discuss the actual writing of humor, discussing the techniques needed to crack that page up! For instance, how to carry an idea to its extreme, how to turn a visual sight gag into prose, how to make dialogue snap…as in the importance of the incomplete thought and the role of creative punctuation.
Humor is manna. Humor gives joy. As former poet laureate Billy Collins says “humor is the door to the soul.”
Ruth Yunker is a humorist, a columnist and blogger, a short story writer and essayist. Her short story “The Corner View” appeared in The Missouri Review, and was included in 1989 Best American Short Stories.
Currently she writes a column for The Laguna Beach Independent, called “Laguna Observed.”
Pearls and Amber, The Wit Is On the Wall was her first blog, a literary cartoon, and will soon be released in paperback. Her new blog, Everyday is Travel, chronicles Yunker’s travels, from the local hardware store and beaches of SoCal, to the streets of Paris and beyond. www.ruthyunker.com
Yunker’s book Me, Myself and Paris was released in the summer of 2010. Me, Myself and Paris Deux is scheduled for release February 2012.
Flashes of memory and déjà vu are what reading this enormously entertaining book stirred up for this reader…My favorite of all was her eloquent observation on navigating Parisian streets with an umbrella. Reader Review
Ruth Yunker experiences Paris in morsels. A touch of awe, a touch of delight and travel paranoia, a touch of surrender, conquest, anticipation…creating delicious tension that becomes a source of humor and insight…” Samoko
Wonderful compilation of funny essays…quite hilarious…written in a wonderfully witty style… Rebecca Reads
Ruth Yunker has a way with words, making the mundane seem extraordinary…this book was hard to put down…” Ami Blackwelder
Yunker is a wordsmith of the highest order… Jane Fulton
“…cheerful, entertaining and a bit cheeky…” Reader’s Favorite
