How can playwriting give us new insight into fiction, poetry, and more? This workshop explores experiments in playwriting—for writers from across genres. It’s designed for anyone who’s curious about how techniques from theater can inform their work in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, scripted forms, a personal writing practice, and more. Come refresh your dialogue, come explore how theatrical formats can inspire your poems and essays, come revise a piece by considering ideas from theater and performance studies. We'll take inspiration from works that distinctly approach dialogue, character, staging, performance, pacing, format, and other elements. And we’ll ask how those techniques can help us generate and revise our work. This workshop supports the generation of new writing and/or the revision of older work, all in a supportive and close-knit environment. Activities will include in-class writing and discussion, review of one another’s work, and analysis of published sources. No previous experience with playwriting or theater is required, and the course warmly welcomes writers who have no interest in being performers themselves. For two days, we’ll ask what playwriting can inspire for our writing, helping everyone gain insights that can energize their work and help it come to life on and off the page. 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.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson wrote. In this all-genre workshop, we will take inspiration from Dickinson’s poem and tell it queer, approaching language and its joyful possibilities from an angle of queerness. During our weekend, we will read and discuss work by writers who illuminate queer points of view and we will generate new queer writing of our own. Through in-class prompts that build on one another, we will explore queerness not only as subject but as an artistic practice, the very lens through which we envision and release our writing. As we pick up our writing tools—the sounds and shapes of our words, the music of our sentences—we can ask: What makes a setting queer? How about dialogue? What choices does queerness offer our protagonists and poems? Where does our imagination go when we allow queerness to bloom at the very heart of our creativity? By writing, reading, and sharing together, we will foster a safe, resonant space to bend our language into an instrument of pleasure, witness, and truth—“The Truth’s superb surprise,” as Dickinson says. This workshop is open to all writers. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

Our travels through life are unavoidably interesting. Whatever happens to us—a hike through the desert, a night stuck in the airport, a trip to Hawaii, a stay in the hospital—anywhere we go and anything we do there—becomes a captivating adventure if we pay close attention and turn it into a story. And turning whatever happens in our travels into something we can write about makes us pay attention to whatever’s there, while something is happening or after the fact, and that makes everything more interesting and enjoyable; even the hard stuff becomes easier. In this class, we’ll use easy, fun, foolproof writing exercises to turn our travel stories into writing that’s fresh, exciting, and surprising. We’ll create a small creative community in a strictly positive environment. And we’ll talk about how to use writing as a life tool that can turn every trip we go on, whether it’s exciting and wonderful or not so wonderful, into a transformative experience, for us and our readers, allowing us to make the most of our travels through life. This class welcomes writers at all levels. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend. Feedback for in-class writing is strictly positive.