This workshop is based on the premise that the whole story is made up of parts, that writing a memoir starts with a compilation of many pieces—episodes or anecdotes or vignettes or moments held in memory. Designed for those who are in the process of sketching out these moments, this workshop will look at ways to “fashion a text” as Annie Dillard says, from “fragmentary patches of color and feeling,” especially for those trying to write about family with its many competing voices. We will look for narrative potential in the fragmentary material, the narrative potential in family artifacts, and vividness in language and detail. We will spend some time looking at short nonfiction examples to discover the possibility of form and narrative structures, but the majority of the workshop will be given to reading your work by an informed and sympathetic audience. In this workshop, we will critique writing you bring from home. Please bring two short pieces of your work in progress, a variety of questions, and a curiosity about how all this is done.

Is being funny something that can be taught? Probably not. In fact, the idea of this course is foolhardy and might take several years off the instructor’s life. Here’s why: What people find funny is not universal. What’s considered funny changes across cultures, age groups, eras, and individuals. What’s tragic is much easier to agree upon, including the tragedy of people trying and failing to be funny. People who laugh at their own jokes won’t be barred from this course, but they will be administered horse sedatives. In truth, you don’t have to have any experience making others laugh, as long as you’re not humorless. It should be stressed that this is not a course for people who want to tell jokes. The instructor does not want to hear jokes and will regard jokesters with suspicion and fear. If you want to understand something about what makes a situation funny and why—in fiction, nonfiction, and yes, poetry, then this is the course for you. We will read and discuss humor across the ages, good and bad, in different forms and we will try our hands (limit: two) at being funny through daily exercises dealing with embarrassing memories, moments that went terribly wrong, and other means of making an audience laugh both at and with you. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts.

Are you a kid at heart? Got a great idea for a picture book? This course is designed with you in mind! The children’s book publishing market is alive, thriving, and very competitive. So, how do you make sure your manuscript stands out? Let’s explore! By reading and discussing award-winning books and ones that simply touch hearts, we will investigate why and how writing for children is different from—but not easier than—writing for adults. Please bring one of your favorite children’s books to the first class (hard copies or pdfs acceptable). We will sort out the “rules” of picture-book writing as we discern what makes these books work. In addition, we will examine craft tips about writing for children from experts in the field. There will be in-class writing prompts and assignments to complete after class. We will “workshop” (students read and comment on each other’s work compassionately) the writing generated inside as well as outside of class. The focus will be on fiction, but we will also touch on tips for children’s nonfiction. This course is for new writers and/or writers who are new to picture-book writing, as well as those who have written a picture book manuscript but have not yet published one. (Participants may have previously published works for adults.) Through our readings, group discussions, and writing prompts, and by workshopping the writing you generate, you will come away brimming with ideas. You’ll leave the week with a draft manuscript and/or ideas for revising a manuscript you already have in the works. We will also touch on the world of traditional publishing and marketing. (Disclaimer: I have no experience with self-publishing.) In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home. We will do it all!

Wallace Stevens once said, “The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used.” But what does that freedom look like for a poet? Does it mean following strict rules, or is there space for more intuitive exploration? In this workshop, we’ll dive into the exciting world of poetic forms, discovering how structure can spark creativity and open new possibilities. We’ll explore a mix of traditional forms like the sonnet and villanelle, as well as more contemporary and experimental forms, such as ghazals, golden shovels, cascades, and poetic collage. Through hands-on writing exercises and sharing drafts with the group, you’ll have the chance to experiment, play, and revise in a supportive and open environment. By the end of the week, you’ll leave with fresh material, new tools for embracing both the freedom and constraints of form, and a renewed sense of how breaking the rules can sometimes lead to the most surprising and exciting poetry. This workshop is open to novice and seasoned writers alike—no previous experience is required! In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

The profile, one of the foundations of narrative journalism, is a portrait painted in words. A profile writer serves as the reader’s eyes and ears, enabling the reader to experience the subject as palpably as one can without a direct live encounter. In this course, we’ll learn the interviewing and writing aspects of the profile process: doing background research on a subject, honing interviewing techniques, coming up with secondary interview subjects, and trying on various styles, all in order to most vividly and precisely bring the person to life on the page. We’ll also explore well-known profiles such as Lillian Ross’s “Portrait of Hemingway” and Bob Greene’s “Muhammad Ali is the Most Famous Man in the World.” This course is roughly half seminar (i.e., reading and discussion) and half workshop (executing a few reporting/writing assignments and sharing them with the group). Nothing to submit in advance, as we’ll generate all new work during our time together. Inquisitive wordsmiths at all levels of writing experience are welcome. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

You have all the ingredients for a great novel: a wonderful story to tell, fascinating characters to follow, and a compelling world to explore. Perhaps you’ve already written some pages and watched the sparks fly as your characters come together in all the complicated ways that real people do. The question now is how to make your novel work over hundreds of pages—and keep the reader turning those pages. The answer is planning. Planning includes plot outlining, of course, but reaches beyond plot to include basic decisions about structure, meaning which parts of your story to tell in scene and which parts to summarize in exposition—and in what order those elements should come. Planning also includes thinking through the conflict driving your story, as well as the characters that populate it, and the somewhat slippery concepts of tone and voice essential to narration. Planning creates a clearly marked road map for the writer to follow. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and in-class creative exercises that you will be invited to share with the group, we will: explore the desires that drive your most important characters to act; understand how the conflict that starts with your protagonist creates your plot; experience how scene works as a dramatic unit, and how it combines with exposition to cover large spans of time; make decisions about which parts of your story to tell in scene; and explore the idea of character arc, in which characters struggle and change in response to events. At the end of this course, you will have: a clear statement of what your protagonist wants, what stands in the way, and how this conflict is ultimately resolved at the end; a plot outline; a scene list; a character arc for your protagonist. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion has famously said. Don’t we know it. We tell ourselves stories to find order in chaos, to make sense of what may otherwise feel too big or incomprehensible to bear. Have you been on a wild ride lately? Maybe you’ve faced an unexpected or unprecedented event. Or perhaps you’ve experienced a hardship that brought you right to the edge of what you imagined you could handle. Or maybe you’ve found yourself questioning who you are and what you stand for in a new and unfamiliar landscape. You don’t know what just happened. You don’t yet know what it means. You have questions. And not just a few. Good! That’s a perfect place to start. This course, for writers of all levels, is part writing workshop, part philosophical inquiry, and part creative playground. Daily prompts and exercises will help you externalize your thoughts and emotions and transform them into prose. We’ll place a strong emphasis on stories as vehicles for meaning making, and even dip into the psychology of what’s called “sense-making” to help you understand your own narrative impulses. Arrive with your half-formed thoughts, your confusions, your unresolved conflicts, and your existential questions. Expect to return home with at least one new piece of work in progress. As we generate new material, we’ll allow our minds to explore big ideas on the page, and we won’t force phony resolutions. Honesty and authenticity will be our guides. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

This is a class for beginning fiction writers who want to learn the tools to create a short story or novel chapter they’ve always wanted to write, or advanced students who want to hone their craft tools and dive into a new work. Each day, we’ll introduce you to a craft element—sensory detail, dialogue, scene, and plot. We’ll discuss some examples of work by published writers to see how they use these craft elements. We’ll do generative work during class practicing this craft tool as well, and there will be opportunities to share them if you’d like. Over the course of the week, you’ll work on a two-page opening to your story, and you’ll share it with the class on the last day, where you’ll get some ideas for development. During our conference, we’ll discuss strategies for expanding your work into a longer story or novel. You’ll finish the week with a strong start to the work you’ve always been waiting to write, and ideas on how to move forward with it. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.

If you’ve taken a writing workshop, you’ve likely encountered that classic bit of feedback: “Put it in the body!” So much of narrative is about thought—memories of the past, ideas about right and wrong, and lived lessons that deliver new kinds of understanding. We can easily forget that our written characters are, like us, bodies. They, like us, are differently abled, and move through shared worlds with their own perceptual practices, physical proclivities, comforts, and pains. Nothing gets more directly to the truth of the human condition like our aging, aching, and above all changing bodies. And thus we chant, “Show! Show! Don’t merely tell!” To that end, let us center the body, so that we might make our prose as evocative as it can be. This weeklong generative writing lab will balance the work of pens and laptops with exercises designed to explore the lived experiences of bodies in the world. In class, we’ll look closely at fiction, essays, and other prose in which the human body is central to meaning making. Out of class assignments will center your and your characters’ real and imagined embodiments as they move through space and time. We’ll write toward new work, revisit work in progress, and, if we choose, share our efforts in a generous and enthusiastic environment. All bodies and all prose writers are welcome, of any ability. The only requirement is that you have lived and aged inside a body. Which, we’ll see, is a most magical bridge between what is written and what a reader feels, thinks, and carries away. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week. For one-on-one meetings, I will invite students to submit new or old work for discussion.

The personal essay is perhaps the most flexible of literary genres, sometimes leaning toward fiction in a storytelling fashion but often leaning toward journalism or scholarship or even poetry. In this workshop, we will read model essays that illustrate the options available to a nonfiction writer, including the narrative essay, the reflective essay, literary journalism, and the lyric essay. We will experiment with braiding and segmenting, and we will discuss when one form or mode of writing might be more suitable than others. Writers of all levels are welcome. Our aim is to expand our essay-writing horizons, finding inventive ways to generate new material that can be workshopped and strengthened during the time together. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

Romance is one of the most read genres in fiction with a voracious readership. Whether this takes the form of a sweeping romantasy, a Hallmark-ish rom-com, or an action-packed contemporary, there’s one thing every good romance has in common, and that’s well-written chemistry. The draw of a happily ever after is the crux of the romance genre, but romantic relationships exist on the page across the expanse of literature. This class will include an exploration of the facets of creating romantic chemistry on page, including the use of common and not-so-common romance tropes, the role of conflict in romance, how to use dialogue to build on chemistry, the skills needed to write physical intimacy that sparks, and more. This class will be ideal for those beginning or exploring their interest in writing romance and may be very helpful for those hoping to strengthen their skills in writing romantic relationships in other genres. This class will provide an opportunity to share existing work with classmates and to create new work through exercises and assignments. You will leave this class with: An understanding of genre expectations. An introduction to the structure of a romance arc through character and plot. Skills for creating chemistry between love interests. Exercises to build and strengthen romantic relationships in your writing. A roadmap to begin writing your romance (if you’re new to writing in the genre). Denise Williams is the author of ten romance novels and novellas and her work has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, been selected as an Indie Next Pick, highlighted by NPR, The Washington Post, and Good Morning, America, and she’s a Library Reads Hall of Fame author. Denise co-taught a university course on using romance novels to explore social justice concepts and is a regular contributors to Writer’s Digest. More importantly, she’s one of those voracious romance readers and loves love stories. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend; workshop writing you bring from home. Workshopping time will be limited, but there can be opportunity!

Character is at the heart of most of our work as writers, and characters who are layered and complex not only drive a narrative, but help a reader to invest, engage, and feel emotionally connected to a story. So, how do we create characters who feel real, human, but large enough to give a story the momentum it needs? In this weeklong workshop, we will look at characters who jump off the page across various genres and forms (novels, short stories, and drama) and aim to understand the tools writers use to do this work. What part does dialogue play, and how do we find a character’s voice? What is the relationship between plot and character? How can we build backstories that feel rich and help maintain tension? How do sensory detail, setting, and point of view work to create character? Discussion of texts; a good deal of generative writing in response to prompts; and an exploratory, hands-on approach that borrows techniques from the toolboxes of actors, screenwriters, and playwrights will help us create an array of characters to work with. There will be opportunities to workshop on the fifth day when writers will be invited to share a short, new piece built around one of their new, unforgettable characters. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.