Events, Classes, and Seminars

Every story emerges from a prompt: a memory, an image, an historical incident, a song, a family tale. Experimenting with a wide array of such prompts can be a great way of discovering and developing stories, especially the ones that you didn’t know you wanted to tell.

Scenes are the heartbeat of storytelling. This class explores how to craft vivid, purposeful scenes that immerse readers and move your story forward. Through examples, exercises, and feedback, you’ll learn to build tension, reveal character, and balance showing and telling across fiction and nonfiction.

While this course will predominantly take the form of a workshop, it will also feature discussions of published works to explore the “absolutes” that govern the art of fiction and creative nonfiction, as well as to equip students to appreciate how they might bend if not break these rules in service of the stories that they hope to tell.

In this course, we’ll respond to writing prompts that engage the memory and summon the events of our past. By the end of week 8, all students will have a clear and succinct vision for their memoir, a revised outline, and the knowledge of both stories it is telling.

This six-week course is designed to help students finish a draft of a manuscript. We'll read craft essays about drafting a book, set aside time each week to discuss problems we're having with manuscripts, and design a schedule for each student to ensure everyone addresses the issues specific to their draft.

What makes a funny story more than just an elbow jabbing good time? In this class, we’ll read several humorous short stories and figure out what makes them impactful, lasting and literature.
In this six-week, workshop-meets-craft class, we’ll dissect five different short stories and figure out: How did the writer do that? We’ll then apply some of those same literary tools to your own stories. Each writer will have the opportunity to have one short story workshopped in this class, with written and verbal feedback from both instructor and peers.

In this workshop, we will ask: what can writing teach us about the ways we move through the world? How can we use our words to dismantle our own biases and the systems that live within us? Through exploration of gender and sexuality in creative texts across genres by TLGBQ+ and gender non-conforming writers, we will cultivate our own texts of interrogation and self-discovery.

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.

Feeling stuck or scattered in your writing project? This class helps you find direction, reconnect
to your creative purpose, and create a sustainable plan for momentum and flow in your work.

In this short story-specific workshop we will read, discuss, and critique each other’s complete short stories in a supportive environment. We will also read published stories, and practice craft and editing techniques. We will close with an emphasis on radical revision practices so that you may continue polishing your work.