According to art critic Herbert Read, “True art persists as an object of contemplation.” One of the reasons that it has this capacity to hold our attention—like the note of a tuning fork after it has been struck—is that it has been created out of contemplation. The contemplative essay, also called...

Whether you’re a memoirist, biographer, fiction writer, or poet, objects can be used to unlock language, characters, memories, and your imagination. It’s no secret that objects can hold special meaning beyond their original functions. Open the junk drawer in your kitchen, go through boxes in your...

Do you have a story you’ve been sending out for a while that keeps getting rejected? Even as you revise it here and there, hopeful it will find a home at last? What keeps the editors from saying yes? Is there something about your story—that story you’ve reread a zillion times, so often that you’ve...

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...

We will discard the age-old adage of “finding your voice” in favor of listening to and mimicking the extraordinary lyric voices that we encounter in this weeklong generative poetry writing course. That’s how babies learn to speak, after all; hence, writers of all levels are welcome here, insofar as...

Sometimes a short story can be drafted in a great surge of inspiration, but a novel is a different kind of literary beast. How do we prepare ourselves to keep a story going over several hundred pages? What do we need to know in advance, and what might we hope to discover along the way? In this...

In the words of American humorist S. J. Perelman, “Keep it crisp.” If you haven’t got time for the pain of writer’s block, this is the workshop for you. Starting at our first meeting Sunday evening, each day we’ll get a prompt for a 250-500 word “micro” personal piece to write overnight...

One challenge of translating research into writing is building scenes or descriptive details from facts. How do writers of literary nonfiction and poetry create characters, places, and dramatic narratives rooted in true details? And how do you move back and forth between researched material and...

Vivian Gornick once wrote about what she called “The Situation” and “The Story” in narrative writing projects. As Gornick put it, “[e]very work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that...

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...