Upcoming Events
The Shapes of Queerness: A Multi-Genre Workshop
Description
Queer—in its original pejorative sense—denoted the peculiar, odd, or strange. This prompt-based course seeks to explore queerness as an orientation, as well as a sinuous avenue that meanders around seeds, roots, and stems, where strange fruits (rambutan, jackfruit, mangosteen) bloom. All writers...
Crafting the Travel Narrative
Description
We all take journeys every day, whether traveling around the world or around the block. And as we sojourn, we observe and interact with the places and people around us, and in turn are informed, changed. To translate such encounters onto the page into engaging personal essays not only requires an...
Poem as Conversation: A Workshop
Description
In this generative workshop, we’ll discuss participant poems alongside the subjects, voices, forms, and inquiries they’re in conversation with. When you write a poem, who are you talking to? What sources are you engaging with? What chorus can a poem hold? Does anyone really write alone? We’ll begin...
Kickstart Your Memoir
Description
You have a memoir to write—a true story seized from the beautiful chaos of everyday life. The question you face now is how to uncover its shape and give it full-throated voice, the ability to sing. Do you just start at the beginning and write through to the end? What is the beginning, anyway? And...
Dear Diary
Description
Dear Diary is a class on the diary as literary form and feminist practice. To keep a diary is to insist your stories are worth telling and you are the one to tell them. Participants will be invited to keep a diary for the duration of the class and will be encouraged to bring in diaries they have...
Writers Who Submit: Taking the Steps to Publication
Description
For writers who have taken a number of writing courses and have been practicing and honing their craft for a while, there may come a point when they feel ready to have the world read their work. But how do we get our manuscripts ready? And what is the right way to submit our work for consideration...
Inside-Out: The Suggestive Art of Implication
Description
A teasing, slightly elliptical way of saying “yes,” a loaded gesture, an enigmatic smile, a picture in place of a thousand words: the meaning of a story doesn’t have to be spelled out in black and white, and shouldn’t be; at the heart of showing, instead of telling, is leaving readers something to...
Under Pressure: Layering Conflict in Fiction
Description
In this generative workshop, open to writers at any level of experience, we’ll focus on conflict, a narrative element that can push our stories and novels in unexpected directions, propelling and complicating our work. We’ll read published pieces featuring a wide range of conflicts––high-drama...
Ficetry Potions! Finding Poetry in Fiction, Fiction in Poetry, and a Magical Friendship between Forms
Description
In this team-taught, generative workshop, poet Caryl Pagel and fiction writer Madeline McDonnell will wage a battle for generic dominance, trying to win students over either to the side of poetry or fiction once and for all, because writing is a zero-sum game. Just kidding! In fact, Caryl and...
Close Reading into Enlightened Writing: Generating Sonnets after Terrance Hayes & Diane Seuss
Description
A weekend of playful reading and writing featuring the “little song,” an ideal envelope in which ideas, feelings, and arguments are raised, considered, and potentially resolved. Gerald Stern called the sonnet “an explosion, an intense moment in time,” and the form offers up the drama of a single...