Workshop Descriptions and Details

Students choose from one of the genre workshops listed below and participate in the same workshop all week. Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction are offered every July; special sections (such as fantasy, young adult, bookmaking, and creating erasure texts) are offered some years. Read workshop descriptions below. Find faculty biographies on Faculty & Guests page.

 Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Elevating Life Into Art 

Instructor: Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Description: Memoirs. Travelogues. Lyric Essays. Literary Journalism. Testimonios. No matter whether you are conducting an internal excavation or an external investigation, all forms of Creative Nonfiction are welcome in this workshop. Submit a manuscript of 10-15 pages, and together, we will strive to push it to the next level by taking risks both in content and in form. Questions we’ll be asking: Where is the essay’s pulse? How can it beat louder—or deeper? Should the story follow a classic rise-fall arc or be a fractured narrative with a scrambled chronology? In addition to critiquing each other’s work, we will also discuss ways of feeding ourselves as artists both figuratively and literally, by sharing our motivations and strategizing on sustainable ways of fueling our practice. So join us. Together, we will be pilgrims wandering the wilderness of memory. Arbiters of the dynamic Fourth Genre. We will elevate life into art. We will write words that matter.

Tiny Pieces, Vast Purpose 

Instructor: Lucy Corin

The pleasures of reading and writing very short stories, (flash fictions, microfictions, and even prose-poems and prose fragments), are abundant, but one overlooked use of the practice is that it can teach us about revising longer prose. Novels are made of chapters, episodes, sequences; stories are made of scenes that are made of paragraphs; paragraphs of sentences -- and all of them, every unit of narrative, has a logic that suggests its own tiny story. Thinking about longer forms through the practice of making and understanding such tiny magical things can help us develop a sophisticated and elastic sense of what story is, what story does, and that can help us develop a multitude of practical methods for moving a story from draft to draft toward each story’s largest purpose. 

The Personal Narrative 

Instructor: Parneshia Jones

Let’s talk about you! This will be a workshop focused on the idea of the personal narrative. We will explore what makes us unique and what makes us universal. Let’s talk about your grandmothers, the moments when you felt loved the most in your life, the scents that made you remember childhood…no matter how beautiful or painful. Have you ever experienced hate… I know I have! Both hate and love. So now what? We live in quite a world. And this…this space, that we will all equally occupy, will be the space where we can all be human and safe enough to recognize how fragile and resilient we all are. Thank you, in advance.

We’re going to do writing prompts, read poems, share and create a community. Looking forward to our collective light!