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Writers Workshops

Fiction: Jumpstarting Your Prose Portfolio – Online 2021-201

Course #2021-201
Thursdays Starting April 22 6:30 pm–8:30 pm running 6 weeks
Cost: $240 Instructor: Theodora Ziolkowski
This workshop is full

Please note that this is an online workshop conducted via Zoom. Participants will be provided information on how to join the online sessions.

This six-week generative workshop is designed to get the creative juices flowing and onto the page. For our first four meetings, we will look at a variety of short prose pieces, identify and examine the strategies being employed by their authors, and respond to fun writing prompts that engage with some of the techniques being exercised in the published work we explore. Throughout this “crash course” in generating short prose material, we will also strive to identify the writing “obsessions” (e.g. images, voices, themes, etc.) that “haunt” our writing, and use this knowledge toward looking at the world around us to inspire yet more work—in and beyond the workshop.

After we reach the halfway mark of our six-week workshop, writers wishing to discuss and receive feedback for one of the brief prose pieces they have written during weeks 1-3 will have the option to share a draft of this piece with fellow participants and the instructor for a mini workshop, for which time will be set aside in weeks 5 and 6. During these final two sessions, we will also discuss approaches for compressing and expanding individual pieces, for sustaining one’s writing, as well as for revising and sharing one’s work beyond the class.

Intended for novice and veteran writers alike, the aim of ‘Jumpstart Your Prose Portfolio’ is to generate a swath of new material that participants can choose to revise, or even—for those with a propensity for the long(er) narrative form(s)—expand into larger projects. Participants can expect both a variety of engaging in-class exercises as well as optional “take-home” exercises to try out between sessions. By the end of our six weeks together, writers will walk away having generated a mini portfolio to use as a foundation for projects to keep them writing through summer and beyond.

About the Instructor

THEODORA ZIOLKOWSKI is the author of On the Rocks and Mother Tongues. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Writer’s Chronicle, Short Fiction (England), and Prairie Schooner, among many other publications. A three-time Pushcart Prize and two-time Best New Poets nominee, Theodora’s prose has been listed in Wigleaf’s Top 50 List of Very Short Fictions (2020). She has received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the National Alumni Association (University of Alabama), and Inprint (Houston, Texas). Theodora is a recipient of the Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing. Recently, she served as Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast and Fiction Editor for Big Fiction. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. Visit her at theodoraziolkowski.com.

Please note that online workshops are nonrefundable. By registering for an Inprint Writers Workshop you are agreeing to Inprint’s registration policies. If this workshop is full when you try to register, please sign up on the waiting list here so you receive priority registration the next time this class is offered. For details and a schedule of all the current workshop offerings, click here