Small, intimate virtual workshops at the writers conference are designed for talented writers looking to take their writing to the next level. Our workshop faculty   are some of the best in the industry. These workshops will be hosted via Zoom. 

July 14-18, 2021 workshop sessions consist of 5 workshops meetings over 5 days.

Workshop Schedule:

Day 1 - 3 hours

Day 2 - 3 hours

Day 3 - 3 hours

Day 4 - 3 hours

Day 5 - 3 hours.  

Of course, with your workshop you also have access to all morning and evening programming. This includes all lectures, readings and panels with our guests and faculty. 

• Fiction

  Julia Phillips - Structuring the Story:  Our workshop focuses on structuring your novel or short story around a propulsive plot that is truly satisfying for your reader. During discussions, we'll identify techniques for understanding, developing, and deepening your writing, including distilling your plot down to its essential conflict and outlining your entire story in brief in order to strengthen its internal logic. This workshop is perfect for writers at the early stages of embarking on a project, as well as for writers who are already deep into drafting but are running into structural, pacing, or plotting challenges. Our goal is for you to gain clarity on your own work.

  Paul Tremblay -  Oh the Horror…in Your Fiction: Horror is an emotion. No, horror is one of the oldest genres with hard and fast rules. Wait a minute, there are no rules in horror. Wait another minute, it’s a diffuse mist leaking out into other genres and it’s now taking over your work just as it takes over your town!

  We will discuss how and when horror works and when it doesn’t. More than just constructing a better monster, we’ll explore character development as it relates to protagonists and antagonists, building atmosphere (or anti-atmosphere), when and how to employ ambiguity, and using postmodern narrative techniques to stir it all up. We will also discuss ways one can adapt the structure and techniques of the horror story to your work, even if it isn’t horror. But, be honest, if you’ve read this far, you know you want to write a horror story. Join us.  

  Frederic Tuten - The Short Story: I love fiction of all kinds. I have no belief in the hierarchy of fiction. For me, there is only good or poor writing, interesting or uninteresting work. Every writer has, because they want to be writers, a genuine spark. The point is how to bring that spark into a flame I will read and edit your work carefully and as constructively as possible and try to bring to fruition the intent of your writing. I expect you to treat your fellow-writers’ work with the same consideration. Of course, I know that we will have lively, passionate and helpful discussions and that we will all come out the better writers for it. So much for procedure, the rest is the unknown, mysterious chemistry of the workshop. In particular, our workshop will concentrate on short stories—flash or long exposure. I shall be sending you a reading list of a variety of stories, some of which we shall consider in class. But the focus is, finally, and always your work. 

   

• Nonfiction/Memoir

  Melissa Bank   - Write Your Head Off :   In this workshop, you’ll actually be writing in class, and, however impossible or scary that may sound, it will be great—hard work, but really fun. In as much as you’ll be writing about your own life, this is a memoir workshop, but we’re not going to concern ourselves with the rules or rigors of that genre.  In fact, we’re going to behave as if there aren’t any rules at all.  As such, the class should be just as useful for writers of fiction. Basically, it'll go like this: I’ll give you a prompt, a suggestion meant to spark something or get you started; you’ll write for a short time; and you’ll share your work with the class (or not).  Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to help you identify what’s unique and exciting in your work, as well as what may be getting in your way. If everything works the way it’s supposed to be, you’ll leave Southampton with a fistful of stories started, and the will and inspiration to do the writing you’re meant to do. 

  Melissa Febos  -  Short and Not Always Sweet: The Art of Miniature Personal Essays: In this generative workshop we will study and practice the art of the very short personal essay or micro-memoir. Works of 500 to 1,500 words are among the easiest to publish and the hardest to write. To reach true emotional depth in few pages requires skillful economy of language, masterful deployment of both lyric and narrative modes, and strength of heart; you have to get to the core of your experience, and swiftly. We will examine published works that succeed at this (by Annie Dillard, Ross Gay, Mary Reufle, Patricia Smith, Jo Ann Beard, and others), sharpen our tools of craft—especially story structure, pacing, poetic devices, and the art of both showing and telling—and produce our own original works. Participants will leave the workshop with multiple drafts to develop. 

  Matthew Klam - Creative Nonfiction:  Most writers need multiple drafts, and when the work succeeds it does so because the author is entangled, involved, a little obsessed. Creative writing, both fiction and nonfiction, uses all sorts of techniques and tools, uses the intimacy and intensity of great memoir, the confessional power of a first person essay, the disruptive surprise of humor. It uses lists, stretches of pure dialogue, and plenty of straight up reportage through experience, inheritance, and/or hard won observation. The best writing can and should come right at us, should defy our expectations. It can be structured in a classical or experimental way, or a mix of approaches to fit the subject.

   We'll look at examples of the form by fiction writers and non fiction writers like Mary Karr, Adam Haslett, Jhumpa Lahiri, Jon Krakauer, Mary Gaitskill and John Jeremiah Sullivan, among others. We'll examine their structure in the way a carpenter might study a beautiful house. We'll look at short stories, half page essays, longform journalism, chapters of books, comics by Allison Bechdel, sections of plays, and whatever else inspires us. How is it that some writers are able to create real character development and tension in a few lines or pages? We'll talk about that too. In this class we'll write, read and discuss, while also workshopping your pieces-in-progress in a helpful, constructive manner.  

  Roger Rosenblatt - Memoir: Good memoirs are usually made up of five components - description, emotion, information, thought, and fantasy, or dreams. In this workshop you will write pieces from prompts engaging each of these components. And I’ll take advantage of the days between classes to ask you to write a few things without prompts, as well. In class we’ll talk about all your pieces, and how they might fit in the larger scheme of your memoir. 

• Poetry

  Billy Collins - The Progress of a Poem: Simple as it may sound, this workshop will focus on the poem’s transit from its beginning, through its middle to its end.  It’s my way of making sure we don’t leave anything out.  We will observe how the poem launches itself, how it finds a reason to continue, and how it finally discovers a place to settle.  We will always keep the reader in mind making sure that the opening doesn’t ask too much, that the middle includes guidance, and that the end is ideally where the reader doesn’t need to hear anymore and you don’t need to say anymore.  We will look at models of poetic maneuvers including how a poem can liberate itself by changing directions, and other tactics that can brighten a poem and maintain a reader’s interest as well as your own.

  Major Jackson - Poetry of Elation and the Ecstatic: Save for Plato's imagined republic, without forgoing a moral sense of incisive political and social critique, poets have longed served as a source of levity and delight, especially during challenging times. This workshop is an exploration of lyric poems of praise, celebration, and joy. We will read poems that highlight the resilience of spirit, that celebrate human love, and that promote a sensuous relationship to the world around us. This workshop is about sacred soul-building, how a poem can be a testament of wonderment, bliss, revelation and surprise.

• Children's Literature

  Emma Walton Hamilton - Picture Book: From bus-driving pigeons to soul-searching spoons, there’s never a dull moment in picture books… if there is, you’ll lose your audience. The best authors in the genre are masters of economy and action. This workshop will explore the specific craft elements it takes to write for this fun and formative format, including thinking visually, showing versus telling, beginning in media res, read aloud-ability and more.

  Maryrose Wood- Middle Grade & Young Adult: This five-day workshop offers writers of middle grade and young adult fiction an advanced course in the principles of storytelling and the tools of the writer’s craft. From  Charlotte’s Web to the Harry Potter series, enduring works of fiction for young readers embody the twin virtues that all good novels share: a great story, beautifully told. In this workshop we’ll explore what makes a story great, and learn practical tools for troubleshooting the structures of our own novels-in-progress. We’ll also dig deeply into writing craft and learn the “pro tips” of prose writing and revision that lift student work into the realm of the professional and publishable. There will be craft exercises, reading and discussion, writing prompts, and workshopping and revision of the students’ own work. 

   

   

• Generative

  Melissa Bank   - Write Your Head Off :In this workshop, you’ll actually be writing in class, and, however impossible or scary that may sound, it will be great—hard work, but really fun. In as much as you’ll be writing about your own life, this is a memoir workshop, but we’re not going to concern ourselves with the rules or rigors of that genre.  In fact, we’re going to behave as if there aren’t any rules at all.  As such, the class should be just as useful for writers of fiction. Basically, it'll go like this: I’ll give you a prompt, a suggestion meant to spark something or get you started; you’ll write for a short time; and you’ll share your work with the class (or not).  Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to help you identify what’s unique and exciting in your work, as well as what may be getting in your way. If everything works the way it’s supposed to be, you’ll leave Southampton with a fistful of stories started, and the will and inspiration to do the writing you’re meant to do. 

  Melissa Febos  -  Short and Not Always Sweet: The Art of Miniature Personal Essays:  In this generative workshop we will study and practice the art of the very short personal essay. Works of 500 to 1,500 words are among the easiest to publish and the hardest to write. To reach true emotional depth in few pages requires skillful economy of language, masterful deployment of both lyric and narrative modes, and strength of heart; you have to get to the core of your experience, and swiftly. We will examine published works that succeed at this (by Annie Dillard, Ross Gay, Mary Reufle, Patricia Smith, Jo Ann Beard, and others), sharpen our tools of craft—especially story structure, pacing, poetic devices, and the art of both showing and telling—and produce our own original essays. Participants will leave the workshop with multiple drafts to develop. 

   

 

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