We’re constantly seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching things in the world…and we inevitably compare what we sense with other things. These acts of comparison—seeing one thing as or like another—are at the heart of poetic making. On Day 1 we’ll enjoy reading model poems and try fun exercises that highlight how metaphor helps working minds naturally (and evocatively) move from sensory perception into realms of thinking and feeling. On Day 2 we'll explore how metaphor sustains different poetic forms—in particular, the sonnet, the pastoral, and the elegy—and consider figurative strategies that 1) liberate formal parameters, 2) sustain and challenge our ideas of place, and 3) generate, out of absence or the threat of loss, vivid and satisfying poems. An excellent course for poets of all levels and for fiction writers who want to explore the power of metaphor. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments.

This is a “doers” workshop, designed to address the problems that present themselves to the writer faced with a public performance or presentation of their own work. We will investigate tactics and techniques essential for making those presentations stronger. How do I take the stage? How do I use my voice well? How do I relax in front of people? What do I wear? Do I use a prop? Do I memorize? How do I hold the text? Can I have fun? We will look at these questions, working through the presentations of every student in the class. We will begin with a monologue, essay, group of poems, or short story that you have chosen from your own writing. Suggested length is ten to twenty minutes when read aloud. Please plan to send your work to Beau two weeks before we meet in Iowa City, if possible (if you register later, no worries! We will adapt). In this workshop, we will provide feedback on writing you produce in our weekend; critique writing you bring from home.

One of the most effective ways of developing a story or poem or essay is to work in layers of different narrative or thematic material. When the layers come from different realms of experience or thought (personal experience, science, history, folk lore, work, religion, politics, food, art, etc.), or when they carry different emotional charges (comic, tragic, mysterious, mundane), they complicate each other in distinctive ways. Things get interesting that were maybe flat and predictable before, and the writing achieves depth, originality, and rich intensity. This workshop is focused on using techniques of layering to bring that kind of power and richness to your own writing. Read more...

Strong feeling is often what drives us to write. We want our reader to experience the sadness or outrage, the delight or sense of betrayal we feel when thinking about a fictional (or nonfictional) situation. But how do we do that, exactly? How do we tell a story that’s not cold, but that’s not melodramatic either? This class will offer exercises and prompts to explore a variety of ways to get emotion on the page. We will experiment with description, dialogue, action, and gesture, and also how we use language itself. For each technique, we will look at examples from the pros, discussing how a range of writers have tackled these challenges. At the end of the weekend, you’ll have several new tools in your tool belt, and you will have written some pages that can serve as a springboard for more complete works. Together we will strive to make our classmates cry, laugh, gasp, and maybe even tremble with fear. Useful for both beginning and more experienced writers in any prose genre. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments, and provide feedback on writing you produce in our weekend together.

You can write a narrative all the way to the end and still not be able to say what it is about. Uh-oh. Learn how to capture the essence of a story in a few clear sentences. That analysis becomes your North Star. It is your way into drafting or revising a story, and it's your way into convincing someone they really should read it, with a pitch, synopsis, or flap copy. Learn to articulate the subject and idea of your story as a guide to its development and promotion. The workshop is fast-paced and fun and very practical. You will: 1.develop an umbrella statement of the action and its impact; 2. describe the vision and the world of the story, and 3. say how the fate of your protagonist proves your concept of the story world. Go away with a veritable banner of intention and focus! In this workshop, you will generate new material through discussion and exercises, and you will receive feedback from peers and the instructor throughout the two days.

Writing a short story can seem confusing, especially when there’s so much you want to say and so little space to say it in. What do you do with all those important details, those great side characters, and those pages of history? And how do you tie it all up in a meaningful way? This weekend course is designed to give you a simple, clear roadmap to the writing of the short story, and to travel that road with you step by step, so that you become familiar with each twist and turn. Through a series of in-class exercises, you will develop a character, design a world for her/him to inhabit, discover a plot, and then write a narrative with a clear beginning, middle and end. By the end of the course, you should have a complete first draft of a short story to revise—and to serve as a model for future stories. Read more...

Ready to write stories you had no idea you’d ever write, explore subjects you never thought you’d explore, take risks, experiment, and surprise yourself in the process? Ready to write a lot? This class will be more of a fiction workout than workshop (although we’ll do a bit of that, too) that will challenge you to write a complete, 300-500-word flash fiction by the end of the weekend, one that is ready to go out into the world. How will we do that? By thinking of our writing as an exercise. An exercise in dialogue, tone, imagery, point-of-view, setting, characterization—you name it, just don’t call it a “story” quite yet. That comes later. Together we will explore the world of flash fiction (stories of 500 words or fewer) through discussion of published examples and through multiple writing exercises that will break you out of your comfort zone. We’ll roll up our sleeves together and think of art as exercise. Whether you have a dozen story ideas in mind or none whatsoever, you will leave this class with a greater appreciation of the flash form. Read more...

Creating a public display of emotion is one way to describe “making a scene.” We’ve all been there, usually as onlookers, occasionally as participants. Most often, public spectacles are spontaneous, but scenes on paper are anything but. Particularly in the early stages of the writing process, scenes require considerable planning and forethought. In The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer, author Sandra Scofield defines scenes as “those passages in narrative when we slow down and focus on an event in the story so that we are ‘in the moment’ with characters in action.” If the scene is compelling enough, the reader becomes a bystander of sorts, and characters come to life. Anyone who writes short stories, novellas, novels, memoirs, screenplays or dramatic plays must be proficient at creating compelling scenes. Think about it: All the significant moments in any narrative get conveyed through scene. Scenes are the building blocks of narrative, regardless of the form that narrative takes. If the event or moment is significant in the life of the story, chances are you will develop it through scene. What’s less important tends to be summarized. Read more...

“Voice”—what poet Tony Hoagland has called “the distinctive presentation of an individual speaker”—can be among the more difficult elements of poetic craft to define or teach, but it’s also one of the most important: a compelling poetic voice engages and connects us to the reader. Developing our voices into what poets Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux have called “a more flexible instrument” also can be an exciting key to generating poems in which we make discoveries that surprise both us and our readers. In this workshop we’ll focus on the concept of voice, both with an eye to expanding what Hoagland calls our poetic “repertoire” and as a mode of generating new poems. We’ll spend our week together writing and sharing new work, in a supportive, no-pressure exchange, in response to exercises designed for voice, as well as reading and discussing the work of other poets for inspiration and models. Our goal will be to spend the week in pleasurable creative activity as we explore the possibilities thinking about voice opens for us, and to discover the gifts that can lead to new poems from the exercises we draft. This is a generative workshop, open to poets at all levels of experience. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments.

As anyone who has engaged with writing in any serious way knows, writing itself is essentially a spiritual endeavor. 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 this class, we’ll generate new work in an energizing, strictly positive environment, using prompts and in-class writing to explore the places in our lives where the moments and details intersect with meaning. We’ll use my easy, fool-proof method for tapping into the inner wellspring from which all good writing comes. And we’ll 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 exercises and assignments.