Upcoming Events
The Character of Place
Description
While some writers might aspire toward creating “timeless” work, you never hear of anyone trying to make their writing “placeless.” Why is that? Without place, are one’s characters and ideas rootless and liable to tip over? What role does setting play beyond mere backdrop or window dressing? Is...
Sunny Side Up: The Light Stuff of Memoir
Description
News flash that should reassure all aspiring memoirists out there: You aren’t, in fact, required to have experienced tragedy or trauma, or possess highly unusual or bizarre life circumstances, in order to tell a compelling story. Memoir can be entertaining—even laugh-out-loud funny!—whether based on...
Go Ahead, Make a Scene! How to Tell Your Story through Dramatic, Vivid, Exciting Scenes
Description
In real life, we’re always told not to make a scene—early training that may work at home or in the office but has unfortunate effects on our fiction. That’s because the life blood of fiction is scene: segments of fully dramatized action in which characters enter into conflict with other characters...
Flash Fiction Five Hundred: A Writer’s Workout
Description
Ready to write stories you had no idea you’d ever write, explore subjects you never thought you’d explore, take risks, experiment, and surprise yourself in the process? Ready to write a lot ? This class will be more of a fiction work out than work shop (although we’ll do a bit of that, too) that...
Why Can't I Put This Book Down? Developing a Distinctive Narrative Voice
Description
Every great writer has different strengths and weaknesses, but the one thing they all have in common is a terrific narrative voice. They somehow pull us in from the first sentence and keep us reading; their words haunt us, seduce us, and often put us through the emotional wringer, lingering in our...
An Enormous Eye: Writing the Contemplative Essay
Description
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...
The Beating Heart: Developing the Central Theme that Drives Your Story, Essay, or Book
Description
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...
Artifacts: A Week of Writing Prompts
Description
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...
Losing “Your” Voice: The Art of Imitation in Poetry
Description
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...
Five-Day MFA: A Fiction Workshop
Description
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...