Workshop Descriptions

Abby Frucht

Forms and Contents: A Series of Generative Exercises in Novel-Writing

This will be a generative workshop fueled by five to ten pages from each participant's novel-in-progress.

We will examine those pages for clues as to style, diction, form, content, delivery, voice, character, and the barest beginnings of "what's at stake." By applying a variety of reading and writing exercises and brainstorming sessions designed to explore the above, the workshop will attempt to project a novel-to-be from each writer's text, sending the writer home with a store of ideas, a graph of the novel's prospective shape and structure, an imagined cast of characters, a story synopsis, a notion of place and setting, and assorted bits and passages of dialogue and dramatic moment.

Additionally, knowing that our creative work is subject to change, frustration, expansion, and digression, I hope to prepare my workshop members for the good, hard work ahead of them, encouraging them to engage with their work in a playful, experimental, and always rigorous way.

Required Reading

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

Suggested Reading

Non Fiction

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster.
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco.

Novels

Being Dead, by Jim Crace.
A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry.
The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields.
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith.

Chris Cokinos

Itself and More than: The Essay and the Essay as Departure

This workshop will ask participants to provide a stand-alone essay (personal, place, traditionally narrative, literary journalistic, science writing, aggressively lyric and/or experimental--whatever most enthralls you) that is approximately 10 pages in length (a little shorter or a little longer is fine).

We’ll examine each piece unto itself, offering advice and engaging in exercises that will move you toward a version in which structure, voice, imagery, metaphor, rhythm, sound and what poet Richard Hugo calls the “real subject” are pitched toward final coherence and polish. We’ll aim to have you leave with a piece that knows what must be done to make it potentially publishable in a good literary magazine or a national slick.

At the same time, we’ll look at the essay as a departure toward a book-length project. Many memoirs, works of literary journalism and hybrids of memoir/research-based books have arisen from a single essay or article, and you’ll be asked to read some short models that can help us think about larger questions of book structure, the “so-what” question and market interest. We will be especially interested in how research can move a personal narrative into a wider context; this seems especially fruitful given the current climate in which first-time memoirists are up against a negative market caused in some measure by the James Frey debacle.

Reading list to follow.

 

Rick Walton

Writing for Children

What makes a good or bad picture book?

This course will examine quick and easy ways to come up with ideas, how to sell your manuscript, and anything else you want to discuss. 

Bring your questions. We'll also workshop your manuscripts.
 

No Required reading for this workshop.

 

Mark Conway

"Petals on a wet, black bough": The Image

The title of this workshop comes from the famous two-line poem by Ezra Pound. The poem, in its entirety, is this:

 "In a Station of the Metro"
 
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

This workshop will concentrate on the image; we'll be working to make sure the world around you -- what you know -- is also in your poems.  ("No ideas/but in things") as William Carlos Williams said. The image slows the world, makes us see again, the way a dream does. "It's like being alive twice," said one of Tu Fu's followers.  We'll write poems of pure observation and poems of ideas -- and then mix all of this up.  We'll be reading and writing poems filled with images, poems that, like the phrase from Yves Bonnefoy, are "more beautiful than the lightning, when it stains the windowpanes of your blood." 
 
No required reading, but it would be good if you could get acquainted with some of the poets we'll be looking at. If you can, read "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams (you can Google it) -- and try to find at least one poem by Basho, Li Po, Tu Fu, or Issa -- any haiku, really; one poem by Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickenson, or Federico Garcia Lorca; and one poem by Luise Gluck, Marie Howe, or James Wright.

 

 

David Kranes

Writing the Scene

The “scene” is the critical dramatic unit of all creative writing.  Just as sentences are built from an arranged sequence of words, a story--or novel or play or screenplay--is built from an arranged sequence of scenes.  This workshop will explore the various dramatic, character and plot elements of any scene and look at various strategies of connecting and building scenes.  Much of this will be done through mutual “problems” and in-class exercises.  Each meeting will, in part, draw exercises from a different related/stimulating book. 

Suggested Reading:

Workshop members needn’t buy these “outside texts,” but they are:

The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard
The Conversations, Michael Ondatje
Understanding Comics, Scot McLeod
The Unsayable, Annie Rogers
Story, Robert McKee

The instructor will hold at least one one-on-one consultation with each workshop member.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Where It, the Precursor's Poem, Is, Let My Poem Be

[Note: Critic Harold Bloom has argued that poets suffer from an "anxiety of influence" that hinders their creativity. This anxiety arises from their awareness of their predecessors, the great poets who make up the literary cannon, and of the influence that the work of these predecessors inescapably has on those who come after them.]

This is an anxiety of influence-based workshop. I would like each participant to perform in advance a “complex act of strong misreading” of a poem by a non-contemporary poet and respond to that misreading with a poem (which may be an imitation, cover, version, reply, or any combination) of his or her own.

A strong misreading is further defined by Bloom as “ a profound act of reading that is a kind of falling in love”. It "is likely to be idiosyncratic, and it is almost certain to be ambivalent, though the ambivalence may be veiled.”

By "noncontemporary," I mean dead for at least [insert your age here] years. Please bring the original poem, your own poem, and your anxiety and your ambition with
you.

Suggested reading:

The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom
Tradition and the Individual Talent - T.S.Eliot

Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Donne’s Holy Sonnets
Hopkin’s Terrible Sonnets
Keats’ Letters
Dickinson’s Letters

Dale Ray Phillips

Write Toward Revelation

My theory of writing is a simple one:  write to make the hair on the back of a reader's neck stand up.  This can be accomplished with either plot or revelation.  I am one of those writers who should probably write and not talk about his work:  my kind of story requires revelation.  The task of writing toward revelation is tough, but possible.  And that's exactly what we'll do in this workshop--write toward revelation. 

Everyone should bring a draft of a short story or a novel chapter. 

Suggested Reading:

Read Flannery O'Connor's Revelation, and everything else you can get your hands on by that writer.  

Be ready to sweat.

 

Carol Lynch Williams

Writing the Middle Grade and Young Adult Novel

In our workshop, we will spend time looking at strong beginnings, grabbing a reader, and working toward writing a successful  mid grade or young adult novel. We'll talk about the marketplace, critique manuscripts like crazy and do plenty of in-the-classroom writing.

Bring your questions and your manuscripts and we'll work on getting those manuscripts in shape for possible publication. As well, bring your favorite two published children's novels and we'll talk about why those books succeed in the children's marketplace.

Be prepared to write and rewrite--at home and in the classroom.

Our goals? We'll work together so you can have the tools to go home and get your own novel into shape and into the marketplace with an appropriate editor.

Suggested Reading:

Start reading middle grade and young adult books right
now. A few to get you going are:

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
Holes by Louis Sachar
Any one of the Blossom books by Betsy Byars
Thirsty by MT Anderson
A Dance for Three by Louise Plummer
Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt
Mississippi Trial, 1955 by Chris Crowe

Note: You do not have to have a completed manuscript to participate.