Events, Classes, and Seminars

During this eight-week course we’ll read and discuss genres and craft elements like fabulism, magical realism, absurdity, unreliable narrators, trick mirror logic, and more. Through generative prompts and constructive feedback, we’ll begin to craft our own acutely surreal realities. Expect to leave with several fresh starts to weird and wonderful works.

This weekend course is for all levels of writers and readers. We will read and discuss excerpts from contemporary authors who write the self. Students will spend about an hour in each class working on writing the self, based on prompts.

This eight-week memoir workshop teaches writers how to transform personal experiences into compelling scenes that captivate readers. Students will learn to craft authentic moments from memory, weave reflection seamlessly into narrative, and build scenes that invite readers into their lived experiences while revealing deeper emotional truths.

A generative writing workshop to create material from a variety of prompts, models, and methods. We will build community with each other, learn some revision hacks, share feedback, and come away from the weekend intensive with plenty more to think about and develop in our writing practice.

Visual poetry is as expansive as it is playful which can complement any writer’s practice. Over the course of this six-week workshop, writers can expect to generate four new poetry experiments, one complete visual poetry project, and leave the workshop with a working knowledge of this exciting genre.

In this focused workshop, you’ll learn the key components of a compelling book proposal—from crafting a powerful overview and defining your audience to identifying comps and writing a sample chapter that shines. Ideal for nonfiction writers with a solid book concept who are pursuing traditional publishing and want to create a professional, pitch-ready proposal.

In this six-week class, using 2024’s Best American Short Stories as our guide, we’ll explore a selection of contemporary fiction—deemed this year’s best—with an eye to steal from them. This year’s guest editor, Lauren Groff, writes that these stories “buzz with their own strange logic.” We’ll examine the inner workings of these stories to decipher some of that strange logic, but more pointedly, we’ll focus each week on one technique, discuss how the author is achieving a desired effect, and practice employing it in our own writing.

In this six-week course, we will develop stories we are not yet sure how to write and uncover just how effective and dynamic our unique storytelling can be. We’ll bring them to their fullest consideration by adventuring through our ideas and returning to the joy of imagination and invention.

Learn the craft of narrative writing. Participants will learn to write perceptively – deploying their five senses and delving into feelings as they write. They will learn how to leverage narrative distance, writing between their ideas and the immediacy of their experiences to see how distance can affect the emotional weight of the work. They will learn how to use metaphors as a means of discovery, to harness verbs, and to modify sentences for focus and impact.

This foundational series is for personal nonfiction writers ready to shape real-life experiences into engaging stories with intention and clarity. Over four sessions, you’ll learn how to identify your memoir’s deeper message, build a strong narrative arc, and make structural choices that serve both your story and your reader.

In this four-week class, we’ll read and discuss ekphrastic poems by a wide selection of writers, creating our own definition of ekphrasis, pushing the boundaries of what an ekphrastic poem can be. We’ll engage with several essays by poets to get us asking questions and diving deeper into our craft.

In this workshop, students will learn the fundamentals of what makes an effective pitch and receive guidance, insight and support about how to navigate the pitching process.

In this four part class, we will consider the what, why, who, and how of form: what form is, why we might choose to write in an inherited form, alter an inherited form, or write in a made-up form, and how we might go about doing so.