Experience the thrill of creative effort! Do you long to jumpstart – or bolster – your writing practice? Need submission guidance? This workshop checks those boxes and more! Our goal by week’s end is for you to write and share (always optional) two to three “brave, unflinching” concise essays to submit to The Sun Magazine’s Readers Write section. The Sun is an outstanding literary magazine that reaches more than 70,000 readers. The overall goal for the publication, as stated by editor and co-founder, Sy Safransky, is to create a feeling of connection between contributors and readers. We’ll work energetically, remembering that serious work takes serious play. We’ll first look deeply into The Sun Magazine, whose issues “evoke the splendor and heartache of being human.” We’ll then have several focused mini-lessons with guided writing prompts that elicit your best writing, followed by constructive group feedback. Expect lively, interactive sessions and breakthroughs aplenty. Read more...

There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. ––Octavia Butler In this workshop, open to writers at any level of experience, we’ll focus on fiction that breaches the parameters of strict realism by incorporating the supernatural, the surprising, and the absurd. We’ll consider why writers invent alternative realities and discuss the challenges of constructing imagined worlds. We’ll also examine how surreal narratives can illuminate real-life issues and tensions by framing them through a different lens. How do the altered realities portrayed in our fiction intersect with the reality we’re living in now? In our first meeting, you’ll submit a short story or novel chapter you’ve previously written that includes surreal or speculative elements. This might be a piece influenced by sci fi, fantasy, fairy tale, or horror, or a narrative that skews reality through exaggeration, experimentation, or satire. Throughout the week, we’ll have in-depth conversations about each writer’s submission, in unsilenced workshops guided by the writer’s questions and aims. We’ll also complete generative writing exercises when we meet, inspired by the pieces workshop members submit. By the end of the week, you’ll have concrete feedback to fuel revision of your work-in-progress and a portfolio of strange scenes and sketches you might expand in the future. In this workshop, we will critique writing you bring from home and generate new writing through exercises and assignments.

This workshop is based on the premise that the whole story is made up of parts, that writing a memoir starts with a compilation of many pieces—episodes or anecdotes or vignettes or moments held in memory. Designed for those who are in the process of sketching out these moments, this workshop will look at ways to “fashion a text” as Annie Dillard says, from “fragmentary patches of color and feeling,” especially for those trying to write about family with its many competing voices. We will look for narrative potential in the fragmentary material, the narrative potential in family artifacts, and vividness in language and detail. We will spend some time looking at short nonfiction examples to discover the possibility of form and narrative structures, but the majority of the workshop will be given to reading your work by an informed and sympathetic audience. In this workshop, we will critique writing you bring from home. Please bring two short pieces of your work in progress, a variety of questions, and a curiosity about how all this is done.

Any prose work benefits from sharpening the major tools of playwriting: monologue, dialogue, and silence. We will look at your draft of a new play, and engage in a workshopping process: reading aloud, then discussing edits and rewrites to align your work with your intentions and objectives. Over the course of the week, you will hear your script come alive, and you will be challenged to bring it to completion through daily input and rewrites. Please plan to send Beau your initial draft by the last week of June, if possible (if you register later, now worries! We will adapt). Any length is welcome, but please keep it to one project/script. In this workshop, we will provide feedback on writing you produce in our week; critique writing you bring from home.

Characterization—creating believable and interesting people on the page—is an essential part of successful fiction writing, and it is equally important in narrative nonfiction forms such as memoir and literary journalism. It is also one of the most complex elements of craft, with many different means of achieving it and quite a few ways in which it can fall short. In this weeklong workshop we will examine a variety of successfully realized characters in published fiction and narrative nonfiction, exploring how the authors managed to bring them so richly and intensely and memorably to life. We will place particular emphasis on discovering the uniqueness of characters, whether imagined or drawn directly from life, the individual’s “strangeness,” the distinctiveness that makes a person real to us as well as surprising. Through daily writing exercises, some in which you can address excerpts from pieces already drafted and some drawing freshly on memory, observation, and imagination, you will generate and share new and significantly revised scenes that put into practice a wide range of characterization techniques, strengthening your command of those with which you are already familiar and experimenting with those you haven’t used before. This workshop is designed to be useful to writers with all levels of experience who have at least some fiction or narrative nonfiction writing in progress. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments, and provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

Often when we’re writing a story, we start at the beginning and try to get everything done at once: compelling plot, best point of view, engaging characters, beautiful images, and so on. Sometimes this works, but oftentimes it feels like so much to juggle that we get stuck, or don’t feel that the story we end up with is as rich as we’d like it to be. This class invites you to try a different approach. We’ll begin by writing a short (500 word) sketch, then expand it day by day while adding a new element—and not necessarily the obvious ones mentioned above! We will look to published models for inspiration, and we will help each other see what’s working, and what could work better, as we progress through our drafts. By the end of the week, your sketch should be transformed into a shapely, sturdy, and affecting work of fiction. You’ll also take home a new method for approaching writing, and some new perspectives on what a story can do. This workshop welcomes writers at all stages. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments, and provide feedback on writing you produce in our week together.

What is theme? How do I structure a novel? Why can’t I discover and write exciting characters? What’s the difference between writing scene versus exposition, and how do I do it? If you have asked any of these questions of yourself while staring at the blank page, this is the right course for you. Geared toward beginning and intermediate fiction writers, this class will provide fun, engaging writing exercises, fascinating handouts, lively discussions and a safe and supportive critique workshop. Step-by step instructions on basic skills will help you uncover with simplicity and precision the fundamental craft of writing fiction. New work will be generated during class but students are also free to revise and work on their previously written fiction. Everyone will have a chance to workshop their writing, (bring yours from home or start fresh in this workshop) and ask questions about how to move forward. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through exercises and assignments; provide feedback on writing you produce in our week or bring from home and edit during class.

There are so many reasons to write about your life. Capture what would be lost. Remember what could be forgotten. Make your own myth. Create history. Segue into fiction, essay, poetry, drama, song. Some stories cry out to be told. Some are secret but you own the page. This class is for those of you who want the time--and the gift of companions--to collect and record ideas to feed your writing, and for those who are compassionate and curious to hear others' stories. It will focus on new ideas and writing in the week, rather than prior manuscripts, with an emphasis on oral interaction. You will work with an array of forms. You can expect to make discoveries in the class--don't plan to recycle old ideas, though you may find yourself revisiting your writing and seeing new possibilities. You should go home with strategies for writing truly new work. In this class, you will generate new writing through exercises and assignments and will share it in class.

All novels are constructed with intricate mechanical parts that create the whole, but what are the parts beyond general character and plot? What are the smaller, unseen levers and gears that help build novels? In this workshop for novelists of all levels and genres, we’ll examine the interconnected architectural parts that yes, develop the basics like characters and plots, but also the smaller, unseen parts that build story structure, create narrative time, activate settings, and produce conflicts to fuel the overall story. We’ll study these architectural parts in published examples, increase your craft vocabulary, and discuss how they might apply to your own novel. In this workshop, we will also generate new writing through exercises and assignments and provide feedback on writing you produce in our week.

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 re-read a zillion times, so often that you’ve practically got it memorized by now—that you aren’t able to see? What is it? How might you address it in your next draft? In this weeklong workshop, we will explore what it means to “dig in” when drafting and revising our stories, from sentence-level concerns (we’ll identify those “weasel words” that show up again and again without our notice) to larger considerations, like character motivation, verisimilitude, plausibility, psychological depth, and complexity. We will also explore the submission process from an editor’s perspective, reading sample published stories with a behind-the-scenes look at why those stories were selected for publication. Our goal will be to demystify the submission process while developing greater appreciation for the connection between drafts that “dig in” before they are sent out into the world. Read more...