2024 WORKSHOPS
Small, intimate in-person 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 in person.
July 10-14, 2024 workshop sessions consist of 5 morning workshops meetings over 5 days.
Workshop Schedule:
Day 1 - 2 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 afternoon and evening programming. This includes all lectures, readings and panels with our guests and faculty.
Matthew Klam - Moving Past Doubt - A Workshop for Creative Writers (fiction/nonfiction): Doris Lessing said, “Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
The right workshop will help you start, and persevere, and reignite the spark when you’ve lost your way. A good workshop is affirming and stimulating. For five days we’ll gather together to write and read and discuss essays, chapters of memoirs, long and short fiction, and whatever else inspires us. We’ll explore writing that is confessional, disruptive, funny, intimate, and intense. We’ll spend the rest of our time carefully reading and examining your writing in a helpful, constructive manner. Your creative side demands time and energy to develop a story, and that creative part is somewhat mysterious and powerful, and in our discussions we’ll debunk some of the mystery, as we engage the part that creates, that fills the page with words, that doesn't look back or edit or second guess.
Julia Phillips - Structuring Your Story: This workshop focuses on structuring a novel around a propulsive plot that is truly satisfying for the reader. It's an opportunity to learn about shape and structure, not only of the particular narratives discussed in class but of fictional narratives in general. The goal for this workshop is for participants to gain clarity on both their own story and storytelling as a whole.
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.
Matthew Klam - Moving Past Doubt - A Workshop for Creative Writers (fiction/nonfiction): Doris Lessing said, “Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
The right workshop will help you start, and persevere, and reignite the spark when you’ve lost your way. A good workshop is affirming and stimulating. For five days we’ll gather together to write and read and discuss essays, chapters of memoirs, long and short fiction, and whatever else inspires us. We’ll explore writing that is confessional, disruptive, funny, intimate, and intense. We’ll spend the rest of our time carefully reading and examining your writing in a helpful, constructive manner. Your creative side demands time and energy to develop a story, and that creative part is somewhat mysterious and powerful, and in our discussions we’ll debunk some of the mystery, as we engage the part that creates, that fills the page with words, that doesn't look back or edit or second guess.
Nadia Owusu -Writing as Reclamation: As nonfiction writers, we often write to make sense of the world and to wrestle with questions about our histories and the places we come from. We write to process trauma, grief, isolation, dislocation, and disconnection. But what if we discover that so many of the stories we’ve been given don’t serve us? What if we discover that some of those stories were created to harm us? What sources might we draw from when the archive and media fail? How can we interrogate, complicate, and challenge dominant narratives? In this workshop, we’ll consider work by writers such as Yiyun Li, Teju Cole, Terese Marie Mailhot, Jamaica Kincaid, Christina Sharpe, and others. And we’ll experiment with practices and techniques for writing as reclamation, weaving together threads of memoir, reportage, and criticism.
Billy Collins - Poetry: Our gathering will be focused largely on the poems you bring to the table for discussion. I have found that a truly fine poem is apt to leave us speechless, so to encourage lively discussion, it’s best to bring in poems that you find problematic, unsatisfying, and, maybe for those reasons and others, unfinished. Poems, of course, may be approached from many angles. One angle I am fond of involves dusting off the ancient distinction between form and content so that we see content as the poem’s interest in the world (i.e. its subject) and form as the poem’s interest in itself. In most successful poems, a happy balance exists between the two; in most unsatisfying poems, one (usually content) is grossly favored over the other. My overall hope is that you will discover in our meetings ways to make your poems more interesting and have a good time while you’re at it.
Diana Khoi Nguyen -Excavation and Reconstructions: In this generative workshop, we’ll approach the “workshop” like a laboratory in which we will be literary artists with the minds of engineer-scientists: we'll take apart the components of a poem, which will also entail encountering the diverse manifestations and definitions of what a poem is and can be, paying particular attention to how the act of writing can also be a way of addressing and engaging with history and time. From these excavations, writers will engage in prompts assembled from our discoveries and discussion, exploring their complex and shifting understanding of a poem with respect to their own work and the workshop texts. Our gatherings will be of two minds: (1) a close reading and generative writing laboratory, where we will uncover the elements of creative writing (and thinking) via curated texts and (2) a reconstructive approach to "workshop" which I call Open Studios, where the writer retains agency as they share their work, and where all writers in the room collaboratively work with together in a spirit of wonder to discover potential and possibility in poetic craft.
Diana Khoi Nguyen -Excavation and Reconstructions: In this generative workshop, we’ll approach the “workshop” like a laboratory in which we will be literary artists with the minds of engineer-scientists: we'll take apart the components of a poem, which will also entail encountering the diverse manifestations and definitions of what a poem is and can be, paying particular attention to how the act of writing can also be a way of addressing and engaging with history and time. From these excavations, writers will engage in prompts assembled from our discoveries and discussion, exploring their complex and shifting understanding of a poem with respect to their own work and the workshop texts. Our gatherings will be of two minds: (1) a close reading and generative writing laboratory, where we will uncover the elements of creative writing (and thinking) via curated texts and (2) a reconstructive approach to "workshop" which I call Open Studios, where the writer retains agency as they share their work, and where all writers in the room collaboratively work with together in a spirit of wonder to discover potential and possibility in poetic craft.
Heidi E. Y. Stemple - Writing, Reading & Revising Picture Books
Picture books can shed light in the darkness and help chase away fear and loneliness and monsters, real and metaphorical. They can make kids laugh and find meaning in small private spaces. They can open up conversations and minds. They help shape the building blocks for the future. They can introduce new people and concepts and foreign lands and allow kids to see how similar we all are even where there are differences. They sew seeds of empathy and kindness. And, to quote the internet, they are the one thing that can change the trajectory of a child’s intellectual outcome. That is a LOT to ask of 32 pages. In this workshop, we will learn to write and revise effectively to create picture books that will be both marketable and loved by child readers.
Middle Grade/YA - TBA
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