Events, Classes, and Seminars

Sometimes we become so focused on productivity or “doing it right” that we stifle our creativity. In this class we’ll focus on one of the hardest parts of writing: writing.

Each week we’ll use new prompts and guided activities to inspire new creation. We’ll look at the work of writers we admire and ask: how’d they do that? As they say, writing is a muscle, and no matter what your experience level, you have to continually exercise that muscle and practice new tools to keep your writing nimble and moving.

Through a variety of prompts, we’ll create new work every week and practice tools for expanding existing projects and unblocking writer’s block.

Explore a survey of long fiction pieces, and examine the many threads that hold them together. We will discuss the state of longform writing in today’s literary landscape, and use generative prompts and in-class writing time to liberate ourselves from word counts in order to write toward whatever length our stories need to be. Students will finish the course with the beginnings of at least one longer piece of prose.

This weekend course is for all levels of writers and readers.

We will read and discuss excerpts from contemporary authors who write the self (or write from the basis of personal experience) such as Annie Erneaux, Sarah Manguso, Leslie Jamison, Rachel Cusk, Edouard Louis, Garth Greenwell, Claudia Rankine and others, in addition to discussing the craft of writing on self.

As John Gardner remarks in The Art of Fiction, “What the beginning writer ordinarily wants is a set of rules on what to do and what not to do in writing fiction.” And while general rules do exist, Gardner observes that such “supposed aesthetic absolutes prove relative under pressure. They’re laws, but they slip,” he

Do you write poetry and wonder if you could turn your poems into picture books? Do you write picture books and want to make them more poetic? Explore the wavy grey line between poem and lyrical picture book.

In this collaborative workshop, we’ll study some masters of the lyrical picture book, look at some new picture books coming out by well-known poets, and explore the roles of language, perspective, page turns and “illustratable moments” in separating these two closely related crafts.

Participants will come away with tools to help their picture book texts read more lyrically, as well as tips to help an editor or agent see the visual potential in your poetry.

This course invites students to dig deep, observe the world around them, slow down, bask in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and discover how their own unique stories can spring from nature.
By reading great writing and engaging with the natural world from a personal standpoint, students will develop their understanding of ecology and our human connection to it as a species.

In flash fiction, the whole is a part and the part is a whole. The form forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste, and move a story by hints and implications. Flash stories are built through gaps as much as the connective tissue of words, so what’s left out of a story is often more important than what’s included.

In this two-part workshop, we’ll explore elegies, or poems of lament, through the lens of spirals. We can use these curved paths to structure poems, such as through recurring phrases or imagery, and to relax the brain while creating literary responses in conversation with death, loss, and transformation.