Responsive Writing

This is a workshop designed to arm participants with writing exercises to help tackle the old "writers block". Through words and sounds, objects and pictures, participants will be encouraged to respond poetically and prosetically to the various writing prompts introduced throughout the session.

The Same Six Questions: Making Stories Work

Who, What, Where, When, Why, and especially How:
In this session we explore the basic building blocks of narrative, and confront the simplest but also the most fundamental challenges of storytelling mechanics. No two fictions are exactly alike, and not every story needs to answer every one of these questions, but as our friends in journalism constantly remind us, those five W's are very important.

• Who is this story about? Who gets to tell it? Who has been purposefully left out?
• What is happening? What does it mean? What is at stake for these people or for the reader?
• Where does this story happen? Will physical, social, or cultural geography play a role in its plot? Will the setting be a character? Where will the key events take place?
• When should this story start and when will it end? When does it happen (is "history" going to matter)? When do you need to tell the reader what they need to know?
• Why does this character do the crazy things she does? Why should a reader care? Why are we even writing this story?
• In the end, though — and this is something every writer eventually must face — it always comes back to HOW, and every aesthetic challenge eventually becomes a practical concern.
  
  How are you going to do this? How will it go? How can you bring all the narrative elements together to make this story work?

Enforming Ideas: Editing for Style

Where do ideas come from? How do we best generate and explore them? On the other hand, once the idea has arrived and taken a material shape, how do we edit and refine what we have written in order to best represent the idea that we wanted to convey?

Beginning with a selection of writing exercises inspired by Jack Spicer and other Language poets, we will turn our attention to the editing process.

The aim of this workshop is for each participant — after careful consideration and ruthless re-visioning of the material generated by the writing exercises — to complete the session with a short, polished piece of writing.

Words & Rhythms

This is a workshop designed to celebrate the rhythm and musicality that comes when words are spoken, create a platform for discussion around poetry and spoken word performance, and challenge participants to express ourselves through the written and spoken word. Through performance, activities, and group discussion, you will explore your own stories and experiences within a literary and spoken word paradigm.

Respecting the Reader:
What Fiction Writers Can (and should) Learn from Poets

How and where do poetry and prose intersect? And what lessons might fiction writers learn from some of our master poets? In this workshop, we focus on some traditional poetic elements — such as image and sound and rhythm — and we try to gain a better understanding of the various ways these components function in literary fiction.

What does your story sound like? How does the language of the narrative perform at the level of the clause, the sentence, and the paragraph? If a person wandering through a bookstore read only a paragraph of your prose, what would that tell them about your book?

Poets, more than other writers, usually understand the value of the well-constructed phrase, and the importance of putting the right word in the right place at the right time. By bringing some of that poetic care into our narrative fiction, and by learning to trust the reader's ability to actively participate in the process, we can craft better stories that do more than simply unfold their plots.

Coming Round Again to the Starting-Point

Regardless of the ideas, images, or emotions we wish to explore, the purpose to which we wish to explore them, or the genre or style in which we choose to express them, we have only one thing to work with as writers: language.

Inspired by Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, this workshop will consider the question of how best to "charge language with meaning." We will complete a series of short exercises that will challenge us to sharpen and intensify our descriptive language skills so as to best convey our intentions, making effective—as well as compelling—use of the words that we choose.