2023 WORKSHOPS
GENERATIVE FLASH FICTION WORKSHOP led by Layla Al-Bedawi
Flash fiction, due to its brevity, malleability, and potential for playfulness, makes for a perfect venue to experiment in your writing—to try out new styles, subject matters, and even genres. Each workshop session, we’ll read and discuss example pieces, then work through various creative strategies and generative exercises focusing on different aspects of craft, such as expressing time in such a condensed space and playing with experimental/hybrid forms. On the final day, each participant will edit and workshop a piece they’ve created in an earlier session; we’ll end with a discussion of venues that accept flash fiction submissions and might be a good fit for participants’ work.
NARRATIONAL MANAGEMENT: EXPOSITION, SCENE, & LYRICISM led by Nick Almeida
As an undergraduate, I remember on occasion sitting in a classroom with a visiting writer, feeling the pressure to come up with a good question. I never could; the question that nagged me most, which felt burningly important to my development as a writer, never escaped my lips, because I didn’t know how to ask it, the only phrasing I could think of being “How do you move from one sentence to the next?” Out of shame, or pride, I never asked—it sounded too immature, and I was too self-_conscious. Years later, I still think the questions has serious value; it glances at the ways a writer manages the telling of a story—information, detail, digression, meditation—and how to deploy these components within a narrational voice, from sentence to sentence, so that a story or chapter reaches its dramatic, poetic, and thematic aims. In this workshop, we will explore three distinct layers composing narration—Exposition, Scene, and Lyricism—in an attempt to understand how these modes can be managed with intention, to reach a particular piece of fiction’s highest aims. Our study will focus most primarily on the individual work of workshop participants as well as work by writers such as Raven Leilani, Jamel Brinkley, Denis Johnson, Elizabeth McCracken, and Michael Cunningham. If you, from time to time, feel stuck after a sentence, eager to depict on the page stories which roam free and vividly in your mind, this is the workshop for you.
CREATIVE PROSE: FROM FICTION TO POETRY AND BACK AGAIN led by Anna Barr
In this generative workshop, students will be asked to bring in a work of their own fiction
to transmute into a prose poem. This exercise will be done in the hope that the reimagining of form will provide greater access and new avenues into meaning in story. How can form be reimagined in fiction? What can prose poetry teach us about sentence structure, image, metaphor and organization in a short story? What is there to be discovered about plot and theme through this translatory act? We will first study the form of the prose poem using pieces from poets like Mark Von Schlegell, Harmony Holiday, Prageeta Sharma, Claudia Rankine and works of experimental short fiction from John Barth, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Daniil Kharms, George Saunders, Melanie Rae Thon to understand the relatedness of these forms. Then we will embark on a liberated creative process of better understanding our own
work by deconstructing form and questioning our formulaic impulses. Hopefully, this will lead to productive ideas for revision as well as new stand-alone pieces of prose poetry!
FREEDOM THROUGH CONSTRAINT: EXPERIMENTS IN POETRY & PROSE led by Caleb Berg
In this generative workshop that emphasizes the importance of play, we will useconstraints to maximize our untapped potential as well as the potential of literature itself.We will read the work (prose, poetry, and theory) of some of the most playful and paradigm-shifting authors in Literary history—Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec,Anne Garréta, Italo Calvino, to name a few—to generate writing outside traditional and ingrained modes of literary thought. Our goal will not necessarily be to make sense, but to excite the senses. Each day of the workshop will be dedicated to different exercises of constraint writing such as: Lipogram (the omission of specific letters, like Perec’snovel A Void, which avoids using the letter “e”), Cut Up Technique (the cutting out of individual words from any text and rearranging them both deliberately and randomly in order to create a new work), Stile (in which each new sentence in a paragraph begins with the last word/phrase of the previous sentence), and Exercises de Style (the rewriting of the same piece in at least 5 different styles (changing POV, genre, etc.)), the idea being that we would choose a piece written from one of the previous workshops to rewrite.
HYBRID PROSE: MINING THE FAMILY led by Rosa Boshier
What do we inherit from our loved ones? How do the experiences of our ancestors, though unlived by us, affect our lives? Students will create a portfolio of fiction and nonfiction writings inspired by images, stories, and myths from within their own family system, as well as the texts studied in class. Experimenting with a wide variety forms,
from personal essays and short stories to ekphrastic writing to literary and cultural criticism, students will mine both daily life and family history to write compelling personal narratives. Students will study and put into practice several textual strategies for writing about family, generational memory, and ancestral history. Other topics considered will include the responsibilities of documentation, the reliability of memory, and the creation,transmission, and preservation of family myth. In addition to textual material, studentswill explore fine art and visual media.
EXPERIMENTS IN “I” led by Josh English
Elisa Gabbert noted that one of the difficulties with writing autobiographically is you can never be sure if the problem is the writing or if the problem is you. When it comes to sharing our experiences, vulnerabilities, joys, struggles, knowledge etc. through poems, it can be challenging to realize that we are not the well-adjusted, self-aware speakers that we often feel our poems need. In this workshop we’re going to read, write, and talk about poems that work to honor the ways that a self can be fragmented, confused and confusing, plural, uncertain, reactive, and in a constant state of change. Through discussions and generative exercises, we will work to produce poems where the speaker is as complex and multifaceted as the things they have to say.
FALSE DOCUMENTS IN FICTION led by Reese Lopez
From epistolary novels to fake journals, the history of literature is rich with forgeries. Fake documents in fiction can assume many guises, such as newspaper articles, interviews, screenplays, or quizzes. This workshop will explore the various forms and uses of false documents in fiction writing. We’ll consider the expectations a false document sets up for readers, how to subvert those expectations, and how to advance narrative through unconventional means, such as a list or a review. We’ll examine several examples of fake documents, such as Gilbert Sorrentino’s fake art reviews in Lunar Follies, Alejandro Zambra’s fake exams in Multiple Choice, and Lydia Davis’s “Letter to a Frozen Peas Manufacturer”. We’ll also share and workshop our own attempts at literary forgery.
GENERAL POETRY WORKSHOP led by Matthew Weitman
“Form is never more than an extension of content,” Robert Creeley famously quipped. In this workshop we will spend the first half of our class time studying various poets, craft elements, and poetic forms to understand how best to extend the content of your own imagination. The second half of our class will be devoted to workshopping poems, engaging in writing exercises and prompts, and providing time to free write and/or revise your work in a collaborative and supportive setting.