How useful the emoji! Beyond their charm, these little images clarify tone, save us time and sometimes trouble, and offer pops of flair to our otherwise mundane communication (fireworks! dancing lady in red!). How, we wonder, did we ever communicate without them? And now that they’re here, how can written language hope to keep up? Well, consider this two-day bootcamp a celebration of that most incredible of human technologies—the sentence. We all have our patterns for sentence-making, our go-tos of syntax and diction. Which means that we’re all at risk of settling into ruts. This class aims to diversify our toolkits, starting with a clean distinction between two primary types of sentences. From there, we’ll move among in-class, generative writing exercises, brief craft lessons, and close-reading discussions about exemplary sentences drawn from novels, stories, essays, and poems. Because the best way to become a better sentence writer is to become a better sentence appreciator. We will emulate, appropriate, and absorb from literature’s best teachers. This course will benefit new and experienced writers alike–any sharing of work will be voluntary and the critical atmosphere will be one of discovery, exploration, and mutual support. All students will leave this weekend with a richer understanding of diction, syntax, and the interplay between speaker and voice. And, perhaps, a better understanding of what we mean by that elusive, slippery thing we call “style.” In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

Let’s say you’re looking forward to a visit from your dear old Aunt Ida, but when she arrives, you’re disappointed by how tiresome and dull she is. Actually you’re disappointed in yourself: Aunt Ida has always been dull—why should this time be any different? Likewise, as writers, if we expect to succeed by working in the same way every time, no matter the subject, falling back on habitual patterns, we’re just inviting old Aunt Ida (bless her heart) for another visit. Even worse—we’re becoming her! As a teacher, I introduce writers to a multiplicity of practices for making discoveries on the page. But if I could only teach one, it would be “working against your drift.” Working against your drift is a dynamic practice that trains us to never be complacent, never settle for even a smart idea or clever move, never “get high off your own supply.” When we work against our drift, we adjust ourselves into greater precision and possibility, inviting the world’s subtlety and surprise onto the page. This workshop will include models, discussion and practices to help any writer, no matter the subject or genre. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

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 us back years, for example—might lead us forward in our own writing. We will begin our weekend by discussing the process by which such triggers prompt the imagination, the need to find words in response, and the desire to "fashion a text," as Annie Dillard says. I will share a few prompts, poems, and exercises that might “trigger” imaginative possibilities for your poems and prose (both new and in process) as well as suggest ways to develop your work. There will be time for writing in and out of class and sharing where these exercises have led you. Bring short pieces you have started, or attend simply to generate new material. By Sunday, I hope that we can share our work with each other and serve as a sympathetic and thoughtful audience. Our goal will be to discover new possibilities for our essays and poems, to come away with new material, and maybe even to discover new approaches to generating our written work. 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.

When we write memoir, personal essay, or autofiction, we have to make choices about how to represent our various selves at different moments in time. In order to bring the past alive, it becomes necessary to think of the shifting self as a character. Our task becomes to find ways to represent this self on the page—just as a novelist must do when writing fiction. This attempt plays a role in the choices we make around setting, dramatic movement and tension, voice, narrative distance, and more. In this weekend workshop, you’ll learn from a variety of ways authors have written themselves as characters. We’ll read excerpts from the work of Marguerite Duras, Vivian Gornick, Jamaica Kincaid, and others as we try our hand at a range of strategies. By the end of our weekend, you’ll have lots of material, and you’ll have discovered new ways to represent the self on the page. We will end the weekend with time for everyone to share new work with the group and leave with plenty of ideas for moving forward. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.