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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’re adept at narrativizing our own lives. Even the dullest and most dreadful experiences become fodder for a good barstool story. Yet when faced with the blank page, too often our skill and our joy abandon us. In this generative workshop, we’ll transform our rich experience as veteran storytellers into the key to unlock our voices and our narratives. The goal of this course is to translate our stories to the page, to mine our memories for sensual details, and to find new meanings in the stories we keep telling. This course is for poets and prose writers who long to write about their lives but don’t know where to begin. We’ll draw inspiration from published work across genres, building an arsenal of stylistic and structural approaches to writing. Through a guided discussion, generative writing exercises, and peer feedback participants will tap into their wellspring of self-narratives and explore those moments where the page invites greater depth and nuance. This class is for beginning and experienced writers alike. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.

Romance is one of the most read genres in fiction with a voracious readership. Whether this takes the form of a sweeping romantasy, a Hallmark-ish rom-com, or an action-packed contemporary, there’s one thing every good romance has in common, and that’s well-written chemistry. The draw of a happily ever after is the crux of the romance genre, but romantic relationships exist on the page across the expanse of literature. This class will include an exploration of the facets of creating romantic chemistry on page, including the use of common and not-so-common romance tropes, the role of conflict in romance, how to use dialogue to build on chemistry, the skills needed to write physical intimacy that sparks, and more. This class will be ideal for those beginning or exploring their interest in writing romance and may be very helpful for those hoping to strengthen their skills in writing romantic relationships in other genres. This class will provide an opportunity to share existing work with classmates and to create new work through exercises and assignments. You will leave this class with: An understanding of genre expectations. An introduction to the structure of a romance arc through character and plot. Skills for creating chemistry between love interests. Exercises to build and strengthen romantic relationships in your writing. A roadmap to begin writing your romance (if you’re new to writing in the genre). Denise Williams is the author of ten romance novels and novellas and her work has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, been selected as an Indie Next Pick, highlighted by NPR, The Washington Post, and Good Morning, America, and she’s a Library Reads Hall of Fame author. Denise co-taught a university course on using romance novels to explore social justice concepts and is a regular contributors to Writer’s Digest. More importantly, she’s one of those voracious romance readers and loves love stories. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend; workshop writing you bring from home. Workshopping time will be limited, but there can be opportunity!

In an effort to get over ourselves as personal storytellers, we’ll strive in this intensive course to make every sentence, indeed every word, count. What must be there for a reader to get a sense of us? What’s that inciting incident, organizing principle, heat-seeking moment, that could drive our memoirs? We’ll spend Saturday talking about how we all have many memoirs in us, but each needs to be a specific slice—the statue within the block of marble, the sculpture within the lump of clay, the story-within-the-story. What’s this particular memoir about? (“Me” or “My life” aren’t precise enough answers.) We’ll also engage in in-class writing exercises, to see what memories rise to the surface as crucial memoir kernels, and discuss excerpts from published works—by economical personal writers such as Jeannette Walls and Karen Schneider—to energize and inspire us. Overnight, we’ll write our “life stories” in 500 words, allowing the narrower story to start taking shape. Sunday, we’ll share our pieces and workshop them on the spot. Nothing to submit in advance. Open-minded introspectives with a desire to communicate, at all levels of writing experience, 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 weekend.

For writers, getting your work published and recognized is a step toward realizing your goals as an author. However, finding the right contests or publications can be challenging, time consuming, and even mystifying. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll talk through all the joys and perils of the submission process and the world of publishing poetry. We’ll review lists of helpful tips, look at ways to identify and find publishers who might be receptive to your work, practice methods to track and manage your submissions, and even talk about how to deal with rejection. We’ll cover strategies for submitting individual poems to literary journals, as well as strategies for submitting chapbooks and book-length manuscripts for publication, using the features of Submittable, a submission management system for the literary world. There will be a lot of time for questions and discussion, and our workshop will in part be tailored to your curiosities and interests. You'll leave armed with tools to identify journals and publishers that are a good fit for your work, the know-how to create a personalized submission strategy, and a new confidence in sending your work out for publication.

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 us back years, for example—might lead us forward in our own writing. We will begin our weekend by discussing the process by which such triggers prompt the imagination, the need to find words in response, and the desire to "fashion a text," as Annie Dillard says. I will share a few prompts, poems, and exercises that might “trigger” imaginative possibilities for your poems and prose (both new and in process) as well as suggest ways to develop your work. There will be time for writing in and out of class and sharing where these exercises have led you. Bring short pieces you have started, or attend simply to generate new material. By Sunday, I hope that we can share our work with each other and serve as a sympathetic and thoughtful audience. Our goal will be to discover new possibilities for our essays and poems, to come away with new material, and maybe even to discover new approaches to generating our written work. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend; workshop writing you bring from home.