A weekend of playful reading and writing featuring the “little song,” an ideal envelope in which ideas, feelings, and arguments are raised, considered, and potentially resolved. Gerald Stern called the sonnet “an explosion, an intense moment in time,” and the form offers up the drama of a single...

In this team-taught, generative workshop, poet Caryl Pagel and fiction writer Madeline McDonnell will wage a battle for generic dominance, trying to win students over either to the side of poetry or fiction once and for all, because writing is a zero-sum game. Just kidding! In fact, Caryl and...

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 work out than work shop (although we’ll do a bit of that, too) that...

In real life, we’re always told not to make a scene—early training that may work at home or in the office but has unfortunate effects on our fiction. That’s because the life blood of fiction is scene: segments of fully dramatized action in which characters enter into conflict with other characters...

A teasing, slightly elliptical way of saying “yes,” a loaded gesture, an enigmatic smile, a picture in place of a thousand words: the meaning of a story doesn’t have to be spelled out in black and white, and shouldn’t be; at the heart of showing, instead of telling, is leaving readers something to...

While some writers might aspire toward creating “timeless” work, you never hear of anyone trying to make their writing “placeless.” Why is that? Without place, are one’s characters and ideas rootless and liable to tip over? What role does setting play beyond mere backdrop or window dressing? Is...

In this generative workshop, open to writers at any level of experience, we’ll focus on conflict, a narrative element that can push our stories and novels in unexpected directions, propelling and complicating our work. We’ll read published pieces featuring a wide range of conflicts––high-drama...

Every great writer has different strengths and weaknesses, but the one thing they all have in common is a terrific narrative voice. They somehow pull us in from the first sentence and keep us reading; their words haunt us, seduce us, and often put us through the emotional wringer, lingering in our...

For writers who have taken a number of writing courses and have been practicing and honing their craft for a while, there may come a point when they feel ready to have the world read their work. But how do we get our manuscripts ready? And what is the right way to submit our work for consideration...