In this generative weekend workshop, we’ll read a range of work by published memoirists, learning strategies to pull a reader in and jumpstart the vivid, urgent story only you can tell. As we read, we’ll write our own beginnings, and by the end of day one, you’ll have up to six starts to your memoir...

Every great writer has different strengths and weaknesses, but the one thing they all have in common is a terrific narrative voice. They somehow pull us in from the first sentence and keep us reading; their words haunt us, seduce us, and often put us through the emotional wringer, lingering in our...

If you’ve already written the better part of a novel—or maybe even completed a rough draft—chances are there’s still a lot to do before it’s ready to submit to an agent or publisher. In this class, we’ll focus on the revision process, with a heavy emphasis on your first thirty pages and overall...

Do you have a story you’ve been sending out for a while that keeps getting rejected? Even as you revise it here and there, hopeful it will find a home at last? What keeps the editors from saying yes? Is there something about your story—that story you’ve reread a zillion times, so often that you’ve...

Ready to write stories you had no idea you’d ever write, explore subjects you never thought you’d explore, take risks, experiment, and surprise yourself in the process? Ready to write a lot ? This class will be more of a fiction work out than work shop (although we’ll do a bit of that, too) that...

Dear Diary is a class on the diary as literary form and feminist practice. To keep a diary is to insist your stories are worth telling and you are the one to tell them. Participants will be invited to keep a diary for the duration of the class and will be encouraged to bring in diaries they have...

In this fun weekend workshop, we'll write our life stories through one single category of objects or experiences. All about my life, according to ... the shoes I wore, the houses I lived in, or the cars I drove. My life told through my most important conversations or the photographs I wish had been...

This class is designed for teachers who find themselves teaching writing. Perhaps you’re teaching history, or the sociology of education, or physics, and you find yourself wringing your hands over your students’ prose and trying to figure out how to help them write more clearly. Or you’re teaching...

In real life, we’re always told not to make a scene—early training that may work at home or in the office but has unfortunate effects on our fiction. That’s because the life blood of fiction is scene: segments of fully dramatized action in which characters enter into conflict with other characters...

You have a memoir to write—a true story seized from the beautiful chaos of everyday life. The question you face now is how to uncover its shape and give it full-throated voice, the ability to sing. Do you just start at the beginning and write through to the end? What is the beginning, anyway? And...

This workshop is designed for students writing their first novel (or short story) or those who are starting the next one. Purposefully crafted for beginning and intermediate writers, Fiction Bootcamp is created specifically for writers who are fuzzy about where to begin, what do to next, and how to...

In this weekend workshop for beginning and intermediate writers, you will learn the three essentials on how to write fearless and engaging fiction that will not only captivate your readers but also help take you to the finish line with your novel. The triad is simple: learn how to develop a...