Upcoming Events
Fearless Fiction: Three Steps to Move the Big Idea into Bold and Daring Prose
Description
In this weekend workshop for beginning and intermediate writers, you will learn the three essentials on how to write fearless and engaging fiction that will not only captivate your readers but also help take you to the finish line with your novel. The triad is simple: learn how to develop a...
Everything about My Life: Structuring Memoir through a Single Category
Description
In this fun weekend workshop, we'll write our life stories through one single category of objects or experiences. All about my life, according to ... the shoes I wore, the houses I lived in, or the cars I drove. My life told through my most important conversations or the photographs I wish had been...
A Matter of Time: Narrative Clocks
Description
A clock ticks inside every story. The clock might measure a decade, a day, or a single moment. Your story’s clock might not even look like a clock. Your clock might be a river, a tree, or a rock reflecting years of erosion. To locate your story's clock is no small thing, because it means unlocking...
Embodied Stories, Unruly Narrative
Description
Virginia Woolf challenged future writers to break the sequence of traditional narrative so it might better convey the true stories of women’s bodies. This challenge has been taken on, not only by women, but by queer writers, writers of color, and writers living in differently abled bodies...
Creating the Linked Story Collection
Description
In this workshop, we will explore various ways to unify a short story collection, focusing on character development, imagistic patterns, and narrative tensions both within each story and between stories. Linked story collections depend on parallels and contrasts, repetitions and surprises to create...
Free-Writing Intensive: A Workshop for All Genres
Description
Free-writing is, most often, how we honor an impulse to write, during which that impulse either catches fire or peters out. Many writers know this, but few approach free-writing as a practice , one with a wide range of methods and purposes. There are, in other words, as many ways to fill a blank...
Turning Life into Fiction
Description
This course will use as its basis my craft book, Turning Life into Fiction , which has been in print for thirty years (though it’s not necessary to purchase the book). As the title suggests, our week will focus on the transformation process needed to take a real event and turn it into compelling...
Telling the Tale: A Nonfiction Workshop
Description
All of us encounter dramas in life that seem tailor-made for narrative. But when sitting down to pen such seeming “ready-mades,” we often find that they don’t come to life, drag, or simply seem to lose their once-brilliant shine when committed to paper. So, we ask, how do writers such as Bill Bryson...
The Intersection of Comedy and Poetry
Description
Comedy and poetry have much in common. Both transform ME experiences into US responses by framing our emotions within a broader human context. Both create surprise—the Yahtzee of all social responses—which inspires us to re-engage with increasingly complex environments by firing more dopamine...
Home-Building: Writing Setting and Scene in Domestic Spaces
Description
We often think of literary settings as vast natural landscapes or bustling urban backdrops, but some of our most human stories take place in everyday, domestic settings. A yellow kitchen table, an old reclining chair, a child’s broken toy, or a door burst open can each give readers a sense of...