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 high school English and want to incorporate more first-person creative writing into your classes. Maybe you’re looking for new ways to help students connect to subject matter they find distant and abstract. In all these cases, personal essay assignments, if well designed, can help students think critically and express their ideas more clearly. (Dare we suggest they might even enjoy writing and editing personal essays?)

In this workshop, we’ll learn about writing short essays based on templates that provide structure but not the subject matter. First, we’ll write short personal essays ourselves using this approach. We'll examine what makes our essays work well, identifying the basic components of strong nonfiction prose. Then we will craft our own essay assignments using structural templates. And we’ll manage to cram in a bit of discussion about how to evaluate our students’ writing in ways that encourage and challenge them.

Since teachers work so hard the rest of the year, we'll aim to make this workshop one of experimentation, creativity, and encouragement—with lots of laughter mixed in. Nothing is required for this class except a desire to teach and a willingness to experiment. We will focus on generating ideas and learning new skills rather than critiquing our own writing. You will leave with new insights about personal essays, your own writing style, and how to design creative first-person assignments.

The Festival creates a marvelous ephemeral space for a very special community of writers to connect, write hard, share, think together, and inspire each other. Join us!

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.