This weekend class will focus on learning how to edit effectively while maintaining peace, confidence, and inner balance during the editing process. Editing is a crucial part of the writing process: Writing is neither good nor bad—it’s only finished or unfinished, and it’s in the finishing—i.e., the...

In this workshop, we’ll break down the elements of poetry in nitty-gritty style, unpacking various aspects of poetic craft. Subjects in this workshop will be tailored to participants, but may include strategies in creating and deploying imagery; choices in creating line breaks; methods of creating...

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...

In this generative weekend workshop, we’ll read a range of work by published memoirists, learning strategies to pull a reader in and jumpstart the vivid, urgent story only you can tell. As we read, we’ll write our own beginnings, and by the end of day one, you’ll have up to six starts to your memoir...

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...

This workshop provides a two-day entry into defining and manipulating prose styles. Most writers and readers will tell you that to have an engaging style, we need to capture the sound of a “real person speaking,” but it is equally true that good prose is not merely “writing down what people say.”...

In this generative poetry writing workshop, students will learn about that which backgrounds our rhymes and our stories and our confessions and our voices: blank space. While the course will engage with practical questions—such as “What is the effect of the blank space in this stanza break here?”...