Poetic Imagery and Narrative Fiction: The Mystery Novel Considered – Charles Coe
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
6:30 to socialize
The meeting proper starts at 7pm

An engaging mystery novel pulls the reader in with a solid plot and interesting characters. It also conveys a mood that “paints a picture” of the story’s setting. Please join Charles Coe in a conversation about how the writer of narrative fiction can borrow from the poet’s toolbox to help create that mood. We’ll look at and discuss examples of how poetic techniques such as imagery, metaphor, and simile have been used by mystery novelists Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton, Mickey Spillane and others to enrich and enhance their “created worlds.”

Charles Coe is the author of four books of poetry: All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents, Picnic on the Moon, Memento Mori, and Purgatory Road, all published by Leapfrog Press. Charles Coe: New and Selected Works will be published by Leapfrog in the summer of 2024. He is also author of 2014’s Spin Cycles, a novella published by Gemma Media that tells the story of a homeless man surviving on the streets of Boston.

Charles was a 2017 artist-in-residence for the city of Boston, where he created an oral history project focused on residents of Mission Hill. He has been chosen as a “Literary Light” by the Associates of the Boston Public Library. He is an adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, and at Bay Path University, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where he teaches in both MFA writing programs. He serves on the Steering Committee of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, a labor union that serves freelance writers.

To join in person:
The Public Library of Brookline
361 Washington St
Brookline, MA 02445

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