Why do we avoid certain topics in our writing? “Oh, I could never write about _____!” Even with the permission of storytelling, many of us avoid writing the truth—our truth. The truth can be scary. So we write about something else, something safe, while our unwritten words follow us across our days like a troubling shadow. In this all-genre workshop, we will enter the Danger Zone. If these words make your heart flutter, perhaps it is the right moment for you to take this journey. It will take trust, courage, and most of all support—from one another in our summer community, and from the examples we’ll read by other brave writers who have gone there before us. Do you have a manuscript underway, and can’t shake the feeling of circling your Danger Zone, round and round, remaining on the outside of your own writing and uncertain how to enter? We will workshop your pages and, together, look for openings. (Even a gentle, tiny crack can be enough to break the spell.) Do you hunger to write something true about your life but have told yourself, “I’m not ready”? Together, we will gently (there’s that word again) follow in-class prompts to translate your creative longing into the start of a new draft. This workshop is designed to be useful to, and respectful of, wherever you are in your process. By the end of our session, which is exuberantly open to all writers at any stage in a writing life, we will grow our confidence and lessen the sense of danger, coaxing into the light not just pages but a process we can build upon, one sentence at a time. 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.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson wrote. In this all-genre workshop, we will take inspiration from Dickinson’s poem and tell it queer, approaching language and its joyful possibilities from an angle of queerness. During our weekend, we will read and discuss work by writers who illuminate queer points of view and we will generate new queer writing of our own. Through in-class prompts that build on one another, we will explore queerness not only as subject but as an artistic practice, the very lens through which we envision and release our writing. As we pick up our writing tools—the sounds and shapes of our words, the music of our sentences—we can ask: What makes a setting queer? How about dialogue? What choices does queerness offer our protagonists and poems? Where does our imagination go when we allow queerness to bloom at the very heart of our creativity? By writing, reading, and sharing together, we will foster a safe, resonant space to bend our language into an instrument of pleasure, witness, and truth—“The Truth’s superb surprise,” as Dickinson says. This workshop is open to all writers. In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our weekend.