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The personal essay is a uniquely playful and liberating literary form. It’s fun, but not easy. More craft and conscious shaping is involved than people realize. We’ll read and discuss essays from Phillip Lopate’s Art of the Personal Essay and other examples of the form. We’ll do in-class exercises designed to help writers cultivate the ability to follow and record the undulations of their own thinking. Working in stages, we’ll each produce one substantial essay, offering one another constructive criticism and encouragement…

In water, surface tension pertains to the cohesion of individual molecules that allows liquid to resist external force and overfill the glass, as though taking on the form of something solid. In a story, tension is defined by the emotional investment of the reader. Created by engaging characters, conflicts, and settings, this tension is why a reader commits him or herself fully to a fictional world; it is the magic that allows that glass, or the story, to hold more…

Memoir is a legacy you can leave for people you love, but it takes craft and skill to convey the truth of a story. This is a nuts-and-bolts class, a roll-your-sleeves-up-and-sweat class, so come, not for catharsis or therapy, not to give or hear personal advice, but to get to the bones, the mechanics, the heart, of successful writing. We’ll learn and apply techniques of good fiction and explore the differences between fiction and memoir to build your memories into…

Made popular by writers like Stuart Dybek, Lydia Davis, and Amy Hempel, very short fiction or “flash fiction” is one of the newest and fastest growing literary genres. With many new writers leaving their mark on flash fiction every year, it’s an exciting time to get involved. Walking the line between fiction and poetry, writers of all genres will find themselves on equal footing since flash fiction has elements of both, but is neither. Flash fiction can be poetic, fantastic,…

For Rilke, poetry is a space where we can explore what we don’t understand. He writes: “…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” This generative workshop will explore how poetry is a language of possibility, a way of accessing those parts of our human experience that we may not see until they are written down. We will share…

The setting in a story refers to the establishment of time and place, but through language and focus a writer can endow this with deeper meanings that point to the essence of the story. Creating a setting in a story not only builds the world that your characters inhabit, making real to the reader the fictional or nonfictional world in which the tensions will unfold, but can also invoke mood, inform the reader about the characters and relationships, and transform…

This generative writing workshop explores the secret inner workings of poetry and the poetic psyche through the power of voice and power of place. We will engage in close readings of contemporary poets and talk about strategies employed. Workshop participants will write poems based on prompts and particular strategies discussed. Poems will be shared and discussed.

This workshop is for K-12 educators Classroom teachers often treat fiction as an unknown quantity, unique with respect to other art forms and disciplines, both urgent and enduring precisely because it cannot be planned, described, and compartmentalized. But this isn’t quite true. The urgent and enduring qualities of literature extend directly from the fact that literature is, as the novelist Douglas Glover argues, “a process of thinking with its own peculiar form.” This 6-week course will give experienced and inexperienced…

Almost any story or novel has at least one thematic concern at play, in addition to all the other elements of narrative craft – plot, characterization, and so on. But often in our own writing, these elements can come across too forcefully or not forcefully enough to our readers. So-called “genre fiction” often relies on ideas—science fiction in particular has famously been called “The Literature of Ideas”—and as a result, can offer techniques to writers of all types of fiction…