Upcoming Events
So You Find Yourself Teaching Writing: Using Personal Essays to Explore Any Subject and Improve Students’ Writing (And Your Own!)
Description
This class is designed for teachers who find themselves teaching writing. Perhaps you’re teaching history, or the sociology of education, or physics, and you find yourself wringing your hands over your students’ prose and trying to figure out how to help them write more clearly. Or you’re teaching...
Literary Selfies: The Personal Essay
Description
The personal essay might be the original selfie: a snapshot of the self, written by the self. The beauty of the personal essay is its smallness, what Phillip Lopate calls its “access to the small, humble things of life,” and a “taste for the miniature.” A love of uneven potato chips, an errand in...
Writing the Unreal: A Speculative Fiction Workshop
Description
The best works of speculative fiction aren’t just imaginative, they’re immersive. As spec fic writers, we want readers to sink into our stories, to sense the “truth” of the tale, no matter the strangeness of the setting or situation. So how can we create emotionally round, authentic characters who...
Plotting the Plot in a Weekend
Description
W. Somerset Maugham has said that there are three rules to writing a novel but that, unfortunately, no one knows what they are. We might safely assume, though, that one of these rules might have something to do with plot: Maybe we should have one in our novels? Maybe it would be helpful to plan the...
Killer Characters in Fiction & Nonfiction
Description
At the heart of every memorable narrative are characters that snap, crackle and pop on the page. Good characters, bad characters, heroes and villains, all must spring into three-dimensional life. In this workshop designed for prose writers at all levels, you will be asked to bring a 500-800 word...
Scene: The Essential Building Block of Story
Description
Whether we’re memoirists or playwrights or writers of fiction, whether we’re at work on fantasy or romance, whether it’s a personal essay or an epic novel, whether it’s all taking place in contemporary times, in times historical, or in times utterly invented, we’re all up to the same thing—we’re...
Making Sense: Poems from the Body
Description
In her poem “Homage to My Hips,” Lucille Clifton offers the reader a proud—not to mention, funny—tribute to her body. And, in turn, to the body of her people. It’s an example of how sensory perception and an awareness of our physical being can serve as keys to unlock poetic expression. On Saturday...
Finger Exercises in Fiction
Description
The first love of most readers of fiction is, of course, “story.” But what makes for a powerful story? A great story isn’t defined by subject matter. What is dross in the hands of one writer can be gold in another’s. In The Art of Fiction , John Gardner asserts that, first and foremost, a successful...
Fast Drafting: The Art of Speed and Imperfection
Description
John Boyne wrote The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in less than three days. Kazuo Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. About his process, Ishiguro explained, “The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere—I...
Writing Grief and Loss
Description
Many of us come to the page out of grief, loss, or heartbreak; we write to make sense of the impossible, the irreparable. In this workshop, we will read a range of short work by writers who have written themselves around and through and beyond these moments. We’ll find inspiration and let these...