Take your essays to the next level. This workshop is for writers who have a good understanding of what a personal essay is, are open to exploring further the many forms a personal essay can take, and are already working seriously in the genre. The focus will be participants’ writing, supplemented with assigned readings. Participants […]
Investigate your family trees! Historian/biographer Ken Ackerman shows the nuts and bolts of investigating our family trees, going back generations. He will describe how to use archives, interviews, internet sources, family records, and memories and piece together a multigenerational story. The class is perfect for memoirists, biographers, or people interested to learn where they came […]
Learn to write from diverse cultural perspectives in ways that appeal to a variety of readers. Personal stories can be told from a variety of cultural perspectives including those that engage race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and,or another identity. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use your voice and experiences to inform […]
Inspiration, accountability, and the tools you need to get your essays out into the world! Join us for five months of craft lessons, workshops, editor visits, and personal editorial feedback! This small and inclusive class meets weekly, alternating between live Zoom sessions and asynchronous lessons, with the goal of creating an intimate, writer-based community of […]
Tone up your writing muscles so you can go the distance. Classes begin with a short warm up exercise followed by a prompt for a longer piece. Participants will then focus on specifics like effective beginnings, creative prose, and strong conclusions. Participants will also learn how to avoid common grammatical and usage errors that can […]
Write about your experience with mental illness in a safe space. Whether you have experienced mental illness personally or have a loved one with mental illness, writing about it can help you process the challenges and inner conflicts while creating powerful narratives that reduce stigma and stereotypes. In the spirit of healing through storytelling, participants […]
Write your life story as you lived it, one moment at a time. This interactive workshop teaches writers to distill a moment of change, conflict, contradiction, or mystery to its essence, so that the impact on the writer resonates profoundly with the reader. We will examine inspiring published examples to learn exactly how the writer […]
Personal reported essays are journalism with a personal twist. Interested in journalism but with a personal touch? A personal reported essay allows you to use storytelling to help readers connect emotionally with a topic that is important to you. Your essay will include your own story, a thesis addressing a complicated issue, interviews, and research […]
Learn ten generative lessons to help you imagine your memoir or provide needed structure for your memoir-in-progress. Join us for a burst of ten generative lessons to help you imagine your memoir or provide needed structure to your book-in-progress. Each class will focus on a different element of writing your memoir and provide time for […]
From honing sentences to sharpening scenes to restructuring the entire book, this lecture based workshop for all fiction writers will look at some of the ways that writers from the canon of American literature and theater, (Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Adrienne Kennedy) tackled the task of revising—and how we can use their tools […]
