(Butler, PA) Butler County Community College’s fourth public reading in its $6.4 million, state-of-the-art Heaton Family Learning Commons will feature Dr. Damian Dressick, an award-winning Slippery Rock author who earlier Nov. 9 will teach guests to “mine their own experiences with an eye toward creating very short stories.”
Dressick will read from his historical novel “40 Patchtown” and collection “Fables of the Deconstruction” at 6 p.m. as part of the college’s Northern Appalachia Reading Series in the academic and community library on BC3’s main campus in Butler Township.
Ellaura Shoop, of Grove City, will conduct a self-publishing workshop from 12:45 p.m. to 2 p.m. and Dressick, the flash-fiction workshop from 5 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.
“I’m super excited about this. There’s always been this sort of vision or idea of having … one-stop shopping for all these topics about reading and writing."
The workshops and reading are free and open to the public.
“I’m super excited about this,” said Mike Dittman, a professor in BC3’s liberal arts division and author. “There’s always been this sort of vision or idea of having … one-stop shopping for all these topics about reading and writing. Meeting people is really important to writers too because we’re so introverted doing a lot of our work alone.”
Dressick’s reading will be followed by a question-and-answer period, book signings and light refreshments.
“A beautiful structure to learning”
His reading will be the fourth in BC3’s 5-year-old Heaton Family Learning Commons since October 2018.
The Northern Appalachia Reading Series workshops and readings will be the first in BC3’s academic and community library.
“When people go there, they just get inspired,” Dittman said. “This is a beautiful structure to learning and to education and to writing and to conversation.”
BC3 is temporarily requiring face coverings to be worn indoors at all BC3 locations.
Face coverings must be worn by all students, faculty, staff and visitors in shared spaces inside college facilities, including classrooms and communal spaces, regardless of vaccination status. Individuals with a medical exemption must provide proper documentation from a medical professional.
“A better understanding” of self-publishing
Shoop graduated from BC3 @ LindenPointe in Hermitage in December with associate degrees in English and in psychology.
She has self-published four books in 2021: “The Meer – Perilous Ground,” “The Meer – Blaze,” “The Meer Coloring and Activity Book” and “Husk – A Collection of Poetry and Short Stories.”
Shoop said she also plans to self-publish two more books before Christmas.
Guests “are going to get a better understanding of how self-publishing works, and why one should choose to self-publish,” Shoop said. “I will elaborate on the differences between traditional publishing, going to big publishing houses, my experience with self-publishing and my reasons for choosing that route.”
While acknowledging that statistics vary among sources, the nonprofit Alliance of Independent Authors in 2020 stated that books written by independent authors accounted for up to 34 percent of all electronic book sales in the largest English-language markets.
“When I first started, writers looked down on people who self-published,” Dittman said. “But now that has completely changed. … More and more people are doing it, whether it’s to publish a book about their memories of their families or whether it is people who are looking to make a living from it.”
Dittman is a member of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia. He is also the adviser of the college’s writers club, an adviser of the college’s annual art and literary magazine and the author of “Small Brutal Incidents,” “Masterpieces of Beat Literature” and “Jack Kerouac: A Biography.” His books have been published by Contemporary Press and by Greenwood.
“The stories are very short”
The flash-fiction workshop is limited to 12 guests who want to learn about what Dittman called “a relatively new sort of writing. It’s pretty popular. Really, really short stories. Sometimes less than 100 words. They are almost like short stories encapsulated in a paragraph.”
Dressick developed and taught “Writing the 1,000 Words (or less) Story” at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
He has taught creative writing classes at Penn State University, Clarion University of Pennsylvania and at Robert Morris University; literature and creative writing at BC3, and literature at the University of Pittsburgh. He is vice president of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia.
His flash-fiction workshop “is a wonderful way to get people interested in exploring creative writing,” Dressick said. “The stories are very short. It’s not like ‘I have to produce 15 pages of text. I can produce 500 words, 1,000 words, and I’ve got a story.’ … It’s such an amazing form in terms of helping people to grow as writers.”
Dressick’s “Fables of the Deconstruction” was published by CLASH Books in 2021 and “40 Patchtown” by Bottom Dog Press in 2020.
“40 Patchtown” about young miner
He has won the Spire Press 2009 Prose Chapbook contest, the Harriette Arnow Award for short fiction and the Jesse Stuart Prize for the first chapter of “40 Patchtown” – the story of a 14-year-old miner who was asked to provide for his family during the 1922 coal miners’ strike in western Pennsylvania, Dressick said.
“One of the most brutal labor struggles in American history,” Dressick said. “The genesis of the story was my grandfather, who was the age of the protagonist. He talked about what it was like during the strike. So this is very much grounded in the reality of the 1922 coal strike.”
“Fables of the Deconstruction” is a collection of flash-fiction, Dressick said, with more than 60 stories in a 175-page book.
“It plays a lot with form,” Dressick said. “Some of the stories are lists. Some are PowerPoints. Some are using the comment section on Microsoft Word. One of the stories is a series of pie charts.”
The college is planning to host a poetry-themed Northern Appalachia Reading Series at the Heaton Family Learning Commons in the spring, Dittman said.
To reserve a spot in the flash-fiction workshop or for more information about the Northern Appalachia Reading Series, contact Dittman at mike.dittman@bc3.edu or at 724.287.8711 ext. 8251.
