Have a drink. Write a story. Have another drink. Write a better story.

Miami Book Fair presents First Draft, a series of informal writing events that turn happy hours into great stories.

You’re inspired. But you’re also thirsty. Bring your own drink and log in for a First Draft event and a guided writing prompt. Share your writing. You never know what you might knock out as you knock one back!

Every artist is a thief. And any piece of writing is an invitation to scavenge another writer’s craft for techniques you can apply to your own work.  By practicing thoughtful emulation, we can learn to look for the invitations a writer is giving you to borrow from them.

Drink: The Bogtrotter: An Autumnal Intoxicator

This drink is easily prepared from local ingredients found amongst the shores of Northwest Ireland. It's best if you ferment the ale and the mead yourself. You should be prepared to raid a French schooner for the wine.
Ingredients:

Pour mead into a shaker. Add butter and seaweed. Grind with pestle. Add all other ingredients and shake until your bicep veins begin to pop like Colin Farrell's.  Pour into a stout glass. Garnish with a raw seagull egg.

Two of these, consumed quickly, will turn you right merry. Note: This drink is best paired with wild boar ragout and barmbrack.

Dawn Davies is the author of Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces published by Flatiron Books in 2018. Mothers of Sparta won the Florida Book Award Gold Medal for General Nonfiction and the GLCA Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her essays, short stories and poems have been Pushcart Special Mentions and Best American Essays notables. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Alaska Quarterly, The Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, Fourth Genre and in other journals and anthologies. She currently mentors creative writers and teaches self-paced and instructor-led workshops and writing classes at whistletreewriters.com. You can find out more about her at dawndaviesbooks.com.

First Draft: A Literary Social with Dawn Davies