Workshops

Fiction with Matt Burgess

Craft & Community

This workshop class will focus on the essential elements of fiction writing. Participants will be asked to read and discuss classic short stories, support one another through peer workshops, and work on short in-class writing assignments designed to generate future material. Throughout the week, our focus will be on creating an artistic community that encourages everyone to nurture their own individual creative voice. Outside of class, participants will also have an opportunity for individual meetings with the instructor.

 

Food Writing with Jennifer Cognard-Black

The Edible Essay

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection.” —Anaïs Nin

Food is much more than the stuff that keeps us alive. Food is memory. Food is storytelling. Food is self and community. As writers, we can look to food as the basis of all kinds of creative nonfiction writing, including edible essays that weave together the personal with the culinary. In this workshop, we’ll start with taste memories—those recollections of specific foods, dishes, and meals that reveal our sweet, sour, salty, and savory selves. From here, we’ll explore these memories to consider how eating is our way of letting the world in: teaching us how to think and feel, what we love and loathe, and even what we believe. Our workshop will culminate in producing edible essays that draw on these culinary combinations of body and mind to represent everything from history and geography to religion, politics, economics, and art. Outside of our workshop, we’ll also have opportunities to learn from a local chef and to visit our campus community farm.

 

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:

1. What sticks with you (as a reader) about the story?
2. Where is the story hitting on all cylinders?
3. 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 Erik Dionne

Word by Word: A Youth Writing Workshop

Regardless of a writer’s preference for poetry or prose, many of the skills required to make great poetry are the same qualities that make for great prose. In this workshop, writers will explore how poetic forms and devices can improve their writing across the craft, from lyrical to free verse to genre fiction to memoir. Participants will write and workshop to find the value in experimenting with forms within and beyond their typical practice.

Note: This workshop is designed for high school-age students (grades 9-12 or equivalent).

 

Poetry with Karen Leona Anderson

Lyric Narratives

In this poetry workshop, which will be organized around the idea that every poem, no matter how fragmented and abstract, also tells a story, we’ll read and discuss participants’ poems alongside lyric poems that trace and delineate the significant shifts in our inner lives. Students will write poems in response to prompts, and we’ll have a chance to hear these late in the week.

 

Creative Nonfiction with Randle Browning

The Vital Endeavor

In a world where computers can tell the stories for us, why should we do the hard work of writing them? This nonfiction workshop will hinge on the conviction that paying attention to our world and sharing our stories remains a vital endeavor worth our time and energy. We’ll explore the many modes and possibilities of nonfiction—a slippery, amorphous, and expansive genre that is, according to its name (not fiction), about telling true stories. We’ll think together about what it means to make art from human experience, and all the tools available to us as nonfiction writers.