Upcoming Events
The Shape of Time in Memoir
Description
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...
Planning A Novel: Making a Map and Avoiding Monsters
Description
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...
The Art of Making a Scene: From Fact to Story
Description
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...
Rapid-Fire Memoir: A Personal Piece a Day
Description
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...
Digging In, Sending Out: A Fiction and Editing Workshop
Description
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...
Edit Like a Zen Master
Description
This weekend class will focus on learning how to edit effectively while maintaining peace, confidence, and inner balance during the editing process. Editing is a crucial part of the writing process: Writing is neither good nor bad—it’s only finished or unfinished, and it’s in the finishing—i.e., the...
Whose Voice Is This? A Primer on Style
Description
This workshop provides a two-day entry into defining and manipulating prose styles. Most writers and readers will tell you that to have an engaging style, we need to capture the sound of a “real person speaking,” but it is equally true that good prose is not merely “writing down what people say.”...
Promptapalooza 2024: 10 Prompts to Generate 10 Beginnings in 2 Days
Description
Yes! It’s back again! The popular Promptapalooza prompt-a-thon promises to stock you with enough fresh material for 10 narrative essays, stories, or even a book, to flesh out over the months following the class. In an invigorating, supportive, no-pressure environment, we’ll use tested and effective...
“This Page Intentionally Left Blank”: The Silence of the Poem
Description
In this generative poetry writing workshop, students will learn about that which backgrounds our rhymes and our stories and our confessions and our voices: blank space. While the course will engage with practical questions—such as “What is the effect of the blank space in this stanza break here?”...
Triggers for Writing: A Workshop in Poetry & Prose
Description
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...