Queer—in its original pejorative sense—denoted the peculiar, odd, or strange. This prompt-based course seeks to explore queerness as an orientation, as well as a sinuous avenue that meanders around seeds, roots, and stems, where strange fruits (rambutan, jackfruit, mangosteen) bloom. All writers...

A weekend of playful reading and writing featuring the “little song,” an ideal envelope in which ideas, feelings, and arguments are raised, considered, and potentially resolved. Gerald Stern called the sonnet “an explosion, an intense moment in time,” and the form offers up the drama of a single...

We'll spend a week together generating poems, and each day we’ll start something new together. Each class will kick off with a lyric “scramble,” a playful dive into language using liberating constraints to create fresh ideas. We’ll then consider the work of two poets (one contemporary and one pre...

We often think of literary settings as vast natural landscapes or bustling urban backdrops, but some of our most human stories take place in everyday, domestic settings. A yellow kitchen table, an old reclining chair, a child’s broken toy, or a door burst open can each give readers a sense of...

For many of us, the last few years have been strange, difficult, unpredictable, isolating, and sometimes just plain boring. Your muse has been stuck in the house along with you. At this point, you may not be on speaking terms. You might have a project that’s creaked to a dead stop. This course is a...

In his essay, “The Triggering Town,” Richard Hugo suggests that certain subjects inspire us to turn our attention to the music and play of language. In this weekend workshop, I propose we spend time discussing how our own triggering subjects—memories, places glimpsed in passing, an aroma that takes...

This workshop will focus on the element of time in your memoirs. In his The Art of Time in Memoir , Sven Birkerts says, “the manipulation of the double vantage point in the memoirist’s single most powerful and adaptable technique.” We will investigate how we might incorporate that technique into...

In this team-taught, generative workshop, poet Caryl Pagel and fiction writer Madeline McDonnell will wage a battle for generic dominance, trying to win students over either to the side of poetry or fiction once and for all, because writing is a zero-sum game. Just kidding! In fact, Caryl and...

It goes without saying that fiction writers need to read fiction—carefully, flexibly, broadly, deeply! But what clues and cues might be found for our written works in nonverbal forms? In this generative workshop, we will listen to music, look at art, and read the fiction and hybrid works of writers...

Writing can be a solitary, lonely endeavor that leaves us yearning for camaraderie and collaboration. Some writers enroll in MFA writing programs for this reason: to join a vibrant, supportive literary scene. Of course, most people can’t drop everything to pursue a multiyear degree. With that in...

In this generative workshop, open to writers at any level of experience, we’ll focus on conflict, a narrative element that can push our stories and novels in unexpected directions, propelling and complicating our work. We’ll read published pieces featuring a wide range of conflicts––high-drama...

John Boyne wrote The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in less than three days. Kazuo Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. About his process, Ishiguro explained, “The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere—I...