Events, Classes, and Seminars

This class is for experienced writers who are dedicated to starting the first draft of a story collection over the course of 6 months. We will have 22 class meetings between January and June, with a two-week break in March/April to focus on generating and revising our work. Participants should have experience writing stories and familiarity with the elements of literary short fiction including scene, character, conflict, place and some revision. We will study individual stories by authors, read craft essays, and discuss several published collections and how the stories unite to form a book.

Writing Authentic Characters is a four-week course for writers who want to understand their characters more deeply and make them feel believable and relatable to readers. Each week will include examples from fiction or film, discussion, and guided writing exercises. In the final week, you’ll spend more time developing a short extract, either from your own work or from one of the prompts provided, using the techniques from the course to strengthen the character’s motivation and subtext.

In this generative online writing class, each class will be devoted to exploring a different form of the lyric essay. We will glean our invitations for writing from sample essays and end the course with a reading of short lyric essays written during our time together.

Ideal for writers in the early stages of developing their novels, this ten-week class will explore plot, voice, character and narrative structure in the novel form.

Writing prompts will encourage students to experiment with structure and voice and hopefully deepen into their own hybrid memoir drafts. This class will provide time, space, and inspiration for writers in early and middle stages of a nontraditional memoir.