Mr. Marlin Bart Barton

Marlin "Bart" Barton, a skilled storyteller, will offer a daylong workshop on writing life and family stories.Mr. Barton is a graduate of The University of Alabama and Wichita State University and lives in Montgomery.A former teacher of Creative Writing at Huntingdon College, Barton received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Alabama Council on the Arts, as well as the Andrew Lytle Prize and an 0.Henry Award.In addition, he received The Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook Award for his volume of short stories, The Dry Well.

Barton is currently the assistant director of a unique project for juvenile offenders called "Writing Our Stories".This program teaches fiction and poetry to youthful offenders age 13-18 at Mt. Meigs and two youth facilities in Birmingham, and encourages the students to write about the things that shaped their lives, hoping that the writing will have a therapeutic effect on their lives and give each student a better sense of self-worth.Each student is told that, if they stay in the program for the duration of their stay in juvenile detention, their best work will be published in an anthology, which Barton says provides the students with a sense of pride in having completed something.

Even though the program at Huntingdon will only be a one-day workshop, Barton will use the same approach with the adults he uses with the youth, which includes bringing in examples of good writing that the class will read and explore as a group.He teaches about the technical aspects of the story, such as point of view and image, and then asks the students to complete simple writing assignments, many times modeled after the work they just read.During the Huntingdon workshop, he will teach aspiring writers using excerpts of memoirs by well-known and not-so-well-known writers, many of whom are from Alabama, and discussing how they structure the stories they write about their lives.The students will learn how to chose and write the stories they want to tell about their own lives and those of their family.

Being a former teacher of fiction and nonfiction at Huntingdon, Barton is looking forward to being there again.He believes Huntingdon has a strong writing program in its Continuing Education Department and he is excited to be a part of it.For more information on this or any other program, call the Office of Continuing Education at 334-833-4522.

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