FICTION with JERRY GABRIEL
Reading and Refining
This workshop will be two-pronged. First, we will respond to the draft manuscripts submitted prior to the conference. In our responses, we will be more concerned with describing than with prescribing, doing our best to help writers understand the readers’ experience of their draft. In my workshops, I veer toward answering three questions:
- What sticks with you (as a reader) about the story?
- Where is the story hitting on all cylinders?
- And where could the story be more itself?
Second, we will do a series of short, in-class writing exercises designed to tap into your creative self, to help you understand your process better, and possibly to serve as raw material for future stories.
YOUTH WORKSHOP with ROBIN MCCULLOUGH
Piece by Piece: A Youth Writing Workshop
In this workshop, students will explore the mosaic nature of memoir, short story, and poetry. We will begin by reading mentor texts, digging into the craft elements of each genre. Focusing on those elements, students will participate in writing exercises practicing various craft moves with the aim of drafting their own pieces of writing*. We will focus our workshop specifically on mosaic-style writing and how we can tell a story, piece by piece. In the end, students should leave with a portfolio of work that includes elements of memoir, short story, and poetry. While we will generate new material, students are encouraged to bring in their previous written works (poems, essays, or short stories) to use during the workshop.
POETRY with HEATHER GREEN
Poetry: Elegies, Odes, and the River
In this intensive poetry workshop, framed by a consideration of “elegies and odes,” poems of loss and poems of celebration, and lyric time, we’ll read and discuss participants’ poems alongside model poems (chosen in relation to participants’ poems), in search of a deeper understanding of poetic possibility, both within the poems at hand and in a broader context. Students will also write several new poems in response to generative prompts, which we’ll share near the end of the week.
CREATIVE NONFICTION with ANGELA PELSTER
Making Art from the Real
Nonfiction is an incredibly flexible form, capable of bending and contorting itself into any shape needed in order to hold what you want it to hold, but the heart of this genre is an attempt to make art out of the real. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to tell true stories even if we have incomplete information, flawed memories, or only partial archives to base our writing on. We’ll consider how other writers have approached this dilemma, what our options are when trauma, secrets, war, forgetting, death, or erasures leave us with truncated stories, and how we want to approach these choices in our own work.