Inprint

Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” This perhaps aptly describes the process of writing a novel—a long, difficult, and often fraught task—but it also underscores the exciting potential novels have to portray great swaths of our complex lives and experiences. In this class, we will take a deep dive into workshopping your novels and the complex lives and experiences they reveal. We will address how to revise and deepen overarching…

Sometimes the hardest experiences to talk about are ours. We may come up against brief moments of articulations in songs, poems and other works of art, but if you are as moved by memory and the need to express the indescribable as a lot of us are, then this workshop is for you. Here we will focus on the invention and development of essays about our peculiar experiences. We will look at reflecting, structuring, and expanding our perspectives, as well…

The G-Word In this course, we’ll be exploring that favorite epithet of the fiction workshop, genre. Instead of looking down our noses at writers of genre fiction—from romance to mystery, from sci-fi to spy-fi—we’ll be exploring what such writers can teach us as students of the craft. How can generic conventions and tropes serve as helpful reference points, and perhaps even as sources of inspiration? How do “literary” writers like Jorge Luis Borges use the conventions of genres like the…

Reframing the Text: A Documentary Poetry Workshop The documentary poem is one that relies upon source texts—interviews, court testimonies, historical records, etc.— as the (often) driving force for the poem. These poems tend to be rooted in themes of social justice, but not always. As with lyric poetry, documentary poetry works in various modes with some poems relying heavily on the form and style of a source text—as is found in the work of Solmaz Sharif and Layli Long Soldier—…

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,…

SMALL WONDER: A FLASH NONFICTION CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP Please note that this workshop is only open to K-12 educators. In this generative creative writing workshop, we will explore the emerging sub-genre of Micro Memoir/Flash Nonfiction (FNF) by reading published work, by sharing craft essays on form, and by writing—every week in class—new work of our own. For those new to FNF, flash prose includes any non-lineated creative writing piece that keeps under 750-words (roughly 3 pages double-spaced standard 12-point font).…

NOVELLA: Embracing the Long and the Short We often spend fiction writing workshops focusing on short stories or novels-in-progress. But what about the novella, which pushes the constraints of the short story at the same time as it avoids occupying the typical scope of a novel? This class will be dedicated to scrutinizing the form and exploring it in the best interest of the (long-ish) stories we aim to tell. How do we define a novella? As writers, what benefits…

“The godmother of creative nonfiction, Joan Didion, once wrote: ““The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.” In this creative nonfiction workshop, participants will be encouraged to follow their passions and tell the stories they are most drawn to. Through generative exercises and prompts, we will first focus on getting the dream onto the page. We will then explore how to “trick the reader into listening” through the building blocks of story, character, image, and theme.…