This weeklong course offers participants the unique opportunity to explore the craft of fiction through the lens of the guidelines, strategies, and principles that are commonly taught in MFA programs. Whether one is a seasoned writer or just starting out, this course is designed to build and strengthen your narrative skills in a supportive and enriching environment. This is a fiction workshop for participants with work in progress. We will cover essential writing principles such as voice, tone, character development, structuring plot, the art of creating compelling dialogue, and more. The course will also provide an exploration of various narrative techniques that can elevate a writing sample. Throughout the workshop, participants will gain experience with effective workshop techniques that encourage constructive criticism and detailed feedback. Writers will evaluate the work of their peers while also receiving thoughtful insights on their own writing. This collaborative approach fosters a community of learning, where one can connect with fellow writers and enhance one’s storytelling abilities. In addition to the craft of fiction, we will discuss the application process for MFA programs, offering guidance on crafting a strong statement of purpose and strategies for becoming a competitive candidate. This includes tips on presenting your writing application effectively and showcasing your artistic vision. By the end of this workshop, participants will emerge with a deeper understanding of the narrative craft, increased confidence in their writing, and valuable insights into pursuing an MFA in fiction. Join us for this unique experience as you take the first step toward honing your skills and advancing your writing journey in a dynamic and supportive setting. In this workshop, we will workshop writing you bring from home.

In this course we will look at what makes a satisfying mystery novel, and the relationship successful mysteries build with their audience. While we often consider mysteries to be a mastery of puzzle and plot, we will examine the propulsive power of character-driven action vs. situational plot. We’ll explore the processes of major mystery writers including classic, golden age, noir, and modern literary authors. Throughout the week, we will write a series of exercises to build our own versions of key elements of the mystery genre, and workshop new writing. This course is also a deep dive into the novelist’s dilemma of how much to know before you begin writing. How do we kindle our creativity, know where we are going and avoid frustration, especially in knowing what happens next? The mystery genre is an excellent container to explore the conditions of the writing process and find our own balance of structure and play, while examining suspense vs. tension and the possibilities of upending both our and the audience’s expectations. Participants can expect to leave this course with an expansive understanding of the mystery genre, nourishing tools to support their writing process, and a personal plan of how to develop and draft their own mystery novel. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

Why do we avoid certain topics in our writing? “Oh, I could never write about _____!” Even with the permission of storytelling, many of us avoid writing the truth—our truth. The truth can be scary. So we write about something else, something safe, while our unwritten words follow us across our days like a troubling shadow. In this all-genre workshop, we will enter the Danger Zone. If these words make your heart flutter, perhaps it is the right moment for you to take this journey. It will take trust, courage, and most of all support—from one another in our summer community, and from the examples we’ll read by other brave writers who have gone there before us. Do you have a manuscript underway, and can’t shake the feeling of circling your Danger Zone, round and round, remaining on the outside of your own writing and uncertain how to enter? We will workshop your pages and, together, look for openings. (Even a gentle, tiny crack can be enough to break the spell.) Do you hunger to write something true about your life but have told yourself, “I’m not ready”? Together, we will gently (there’s that word again) follow in-class prompts to translate your creative longing into the start of a new draft. This workshop is designed to be useful to, and respectful of, wherever you are in your process. By the end of our session, which is exuberantly open to all writers at any stage in a writing life, we will grow our confidence and lessen the sense of danger, coaxing into the light not just pages but a process we can build upon, one sentence at a time. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.

This workshop is designed for students writing their first novel (or short story) or those who are starting the next one. Purposefully crafted for the beginner or intermediate writer, Novel Bootcamp is created specifically for writers who are fuzzy about where to begin, what do to next, and how to develop a new story from scratch. Curriculum centers mainly around engaging writing prompts to help you generate ideas with results that will surprise you. Consider the writing prompts as idea-incubators for locating the emotional truth in your story. The goal is to find your voice, develop characters, zero in on theme and invent your story—whether that means uncovering your structure or developing the tools to build your fictional world. Each class will include in-class writing, workshopping the results, and craft talks on subjects like how to write believable dialogue, the elements of theme, and tips for staying the course. All fiction genres (literary, contemporary, speculative) and forms (novel, novella, short story, micro stories) are welcome. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

Whether your story unfolds in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, an urban stockyard, a college campus or a quiet neighborhood, setting is a vital element. It shapes mood, deepens themes, and influences character. Setting is not necessarily a lengthy description of native plants and trees, although—if it’s integral to the unfolding drama—it can be. Nor is setting simply a backdrop. Setting is more akin to the air we breathe and, in some stories, the way we breathe it. In this course, we’ll explore techniques that evoke atmosphere, integrate sensory details, and make setting an active part of the plot. Together we’ll analyze literary examples of iconic worlds and identify the elements that make them vivid and unforgettable. We’ll consider the scope of setting, by comparing stories whose drama sprawls across entire towns to those contained within a home’s four walls. We’ll consider how sensory details create mood, genre, and atmosphere. Since all worlds—whether speculative, contemporary, or historical—have their unique histories and rules, we’ll study a variety of techniques for worldbuilding. We’ll use the language of film, too, to think about framing place through long-shots and close-ups. Whether you’re seeking inspiration for a new project or revising something old, this course will help you hone the contours of your fictional worlds. Participants will be given writing prompts at the end of each class and will share their short responses on the following day. Feedback will be given in class. Through a combination of collaborative craft talks, writing exercises, and peer feedback, participants will learn how to infuse their settings with sensual details, to evoke tension and mood through setting, as well as how to frame their settings. This course is for beginning and experienced writers alike. Participants will revise existing material or generate new material in response to daily prompts. Participants will share their responses in class and receive instructor and peer feedback orally. While we’ll draw largely on published fictions for inspiration, this course welcomes writers of all genres who wish to imagine and compose evocative settings. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.

In this class, we’ll explore what the people, events, challenges, and experiences in our lives have to teach us, and what we feel, sense, and know—or don’t know—about hope, grace, love, life, and death. Every day we’ll “listen” with our writing to another part of our lives, using prompts and in-class writing to find the concrete details and textured emotional landscapes, the beginnings and endings, the everyday acts and overarching themes enfolded in our lives and stories. As anyone who has engaged with writing in any serious way knows, writing itself is essentially a spiritual endeavor, and in order to write well it’s necessary to tap into the flow of spiritual energy inside each of us, whether we call that energy creativity or inspiration or something else. In the class we’ll use my easy, foolproof method for tapping into the inner wellspring from which all good writing comes, generating new, often surprising writing in an energizing, strictly positive environment. We’ll also spend time working on editing the writing we get, using spiritual skills such as listening to intuition and briefly dropping down into the silence beyond thought, to improve our editing skills and finish some writing we’ve generated. Together we’ll create a small, close-knit community that fosters creativity, engenders fresh material and new ideas, and results in writing that shines from within. This class will be useful for anyone writing essays, a memoir, or a spiritual autobiography; for anyone struggling with perfectionism; and for anyone who’s just getting started or trying to locate their true material. The class welcomes writers at all levels. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week. Feedback on writing generated in class is strictly positive, but we'll work on learning to edit, too.

Every piece of nonfiction prose has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Of course we want the beginning to be inviting, even beguiling, and for the end, we want Closure with a capital “C.” But the pesky part is the middle, and sometimes the most bewildering question we ask about an essay in its early drafts is “How is the middle put together?” This workshop is for nonfiction writers who want to dive into the myriad ways to structure an essay or a memoir with power, momentum, and sustained impact on readers. Whether you are just starting out in writing nonfiction, or have many essays finished in your repertoire, this workshop will focus on questions about form. Writers have many options to arrange their prose, from conventional chronology or narrative, to the more postmodern forms, like the “braided” essay, or a “hybrid” form, in which the point seems to be to scramble conventional order so that the prose moves forward with disparate, contrary styles. No matter what we choose, what we want is the indelible feeling that the writing is moving forward, and a sense that the structure fits the language so powerfully that the reader couldn’t imagine the piece being structured in any other way. Our conversations about your manuscripts will give you a chance to listen to readers describe how they perceived form as the essay moved toward its conclusion. We will achieve this through a combination of workshop review of pieces we bring (short or long), as well as a few exercises to shake up our sense of the possibility in structuring nonfiction. We’ll pay particular attention to questions of order, sequence, suspense, and momentum, and we’ll work to describe and control those features that make the “middle” have its own power and depth. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home.

Memoirists face two essential tasks: First, to tell the story of plotted action, the narrative of what happened. And second, to tell the story of one’s own change and growth over time and reflecting on what it all means. That second story is where the author’s larger message is conveyed, elevating one person’s experience from the unique and personal to the universal and shared. It reveals what your story is about. But how do we bring that deeper message up to the surface and articulate it to readers in a meaningful way? And how can we expect to achieve this, if we haven’t yet identified what that larger message is? As Vivian Gornick has emphasized, what happened to an author is not what matters. What matters is what the author makes of those experiences. This class will help you clarify what you make of your own story, and give you tools for sharing these insights with readers. We’ll identify the underlying themes and archetypes of your nonfiction narrative. We’ll also work on creating passages of reflection and analysis that will resonate deeply with readers. Come to this intermediate-level workshop with pages you’ve already polished or first-draft work you’re ready to revise. You’ll generate new writing through in- and out-of-class assignments. Plan to share some pages during the week, and to offer other participants as much as you’ll receive. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week; workshop writing you bring from home. Bringing writing from home is welcome but not required.

This workshop is designed for fiction writers who are familiar with the workshopping process, who feel comfortable with at least some of the craft elements, and who have a story or novel excerpt that they would like to keep revising. The class will give constructive feedback on new manuscripts, highlighting what is working well in this draft and where the next draft might go. The workshop welcomes a wide range of story types, and our guiding principles will be to meet each story where it’s at and to see it on its own terms. As we read and comment on each other’s drafts, the conversation will also explore the writers’ toolbox, discussing topics such as plot, character, time management, point of view, language, image, and more. Looking at one’s work critically can be tough, but this session will be uplifting. The tenor will be professional, decorous, critically informed, and—I hope—inspiring. Plan to send, in advance of our meeting in Iowa City, the story or novel excerpt (no more than fifteen pages) you would like to share. In this workshop, we will workshop writing you bring from home.

If you were to find out that the heart of your poem is different from your own heart, would you still care about it? What if your poem doubted, or contradicted, something you have always believed or held dear? What if it misbehaved in public, got arrested, called you in the middle of the night to come down and bail it out—would you show up for it? If your answer is yes, then this workshop is for you. We will spend part of each session revising work participants submit in advance, and the other part composing new poetry. Revising and composing—every writer loves one of these a lot more than the other, but both are vital to master. To compose we must walk in the dark, go through doorways, and surprise ourselves on the page. We must be willing to play like children and not care about sucking. To revise we must put ourselves in the shoes of the reader, and zero in on what the poem wants to say, which is seldom (if ever) what we want to say. We must be ruthless, willing to cut even our best line if it advances the poem. This workshop is for anyone with a love of poetry writing, hungry to stretch their craft and deepen their approach. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; workshop writing you bring from home.