Workshop Details

The desire to write rises from the urge to say something. In this workshop, we’ll go where the heat is and trust that impulse, locating and exploring the stories you most urgently have to tell. Your story may be fictional or factual, autobiographical or fantastical. It may be tragic, hilarious, bizarre, contemplative, or all of the above. It may be an essay, a short story, a prose poem, a letter, a manifesto, a series of vignettes, or a section of a longer work. We’ll experiment with form in various writing exercises, but our focus will be on how to most effectively tap into the stories that you most urgently want to get onto the page. We’ll talk craft and we’ll also delve into the less definable elements of successful prose writing—things like the role of intuition, obsession, disclosure, emotional risk-taking, humor, and the inter-weaving of seemingly unrelated elements. We’ll write together, read out loud to each other, and discuss the art of written storytelling in a nurturing environment that’s flexible enough to engage and challenge writers of all levels—from the novice to the advanced.