Events, Classes, and Seminars

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this workshop, we’ll read the first pages of novels by writers like Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Celeste Ng, Julia Armfield and more. We’ll consider the craft of a novel’s beginning and ways this can fit into the process of writing the full manuscript. Students will workshop their own first pages with each other and receive instructor feedback on up to 25 pages that begin their novels.

In this 8-week, in-person class, we’ll focus on one of the hardest parts of writing: writing. If you’ve taken Get Writing before, in January 2026 we’ll use all new writing prompts and exercises. If you’ve never taken it, we encourage you to get writing! This class is open to all writers wanting to generate new work and learn more about the craft of writing.

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 class, we will look anew at our manuscripts or rough drafts. We’ll locate the symmetries that already exist and expand them, push them to their fullest potentials. We’ll find themes and ideas that are intuitively central to our stories and ask whether they’ve been examined enough.

Does what you write or how you write it change with the seasons? In these quarterly gatherings we’ll meet to be inspired by the turn of the world.

In this 3-hour course, we’ll learn how, where, and with what to begin our memoirs. We’ll discover that our first chapter is more than just the sturdy foundation to a life recorded, it’s a guide for you, the writer—both a map and its key.

This four-week poetry class will focus on the practice of keeping a commonplace book and how that practice can lead to a more generative poetic life.