APPS DUE: JAN 10: Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Studio | Jan 21 - Apr 1
The Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Studio is based on the idea that inspiration, accountability, and community are essential to every writer’s growth. The CNF Studio meets weekly for multi-month sessions, and its curriculum is designed to help you deepen your writing through a keener understanding of both literary craft and your own voice. The CNF Studio is open to applications from all writers, and members often return for multiple sessions. This creates the Studio’s special experience: a consistent, deep, and supportive study of your writing in the company of other writers. Each weekly session includes a close-reading and discussion of a selected work of creative nonfiction, a roundtable reading of take-home prompts, and in-depth critique of several works-in-progress. Over the course of their time in the CNF Studio, writers can expect to read widely and gain deep insight into their own writing, all the while exploring questions of structure, form, narration, truth, memory, influence, and voice. | Maximum 10 students
Learn more about applying to the CNF Studio
To Apply: To apply to join the next Creative Nonfiction Studio, please send a writing sample of up to 3,500 words and a 250-word statement of purpose.
APPLICATIONS DUE: January 10, 2021.
In this two-day workshop, we will explore the practice of creating and sustaining a writer's notebook. On the first day, we will begin to use a notebook to catch the wisps of our days and uncover the musings of the deep imagination. Two weeks later, we will come together to discover how the raw material in the notebook can be transformed into finished pieces of writing. This workshop will have frequent breaks to ease the strain of working online for so many hours, as well as timed writings by hand (again, to ease the time on the computer), and breakout sessions to work one-on-one or small groups.
In Tobias Wolff’s very short “Bullet in the Brain,” a second blooms into years. Generational wounds carry great influence in Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “The Future Looks Good,” and Alice Munro guides us through memory in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” How does a single decision echo across lifetimes? How do time and mortality connect strangers? In this workshop, we will expand and dilute moments in our fiction, learning from those who do it best.
You have a story to tell, but you’re not sure how to get started. The Writer’s Toolkit is the class for you. In this workshop, you will discover how to transform your ideas from imagination to a cohesive and compelling story that engages readers and keeps them turning the pages for more. You will learn some of the basic conventions for good writing that successful writers use: how to develop plot, how to create compelling characters, how to build dynamic scenes, and how to show rather than tell. You will learn by doing and will take away a wealth of writing tools and resources to keep honing your craft after the workshop is over. Whether you’ve never written anything or you’ve got reams of pages that you’re not sure what to do with, this workshop will be valuable for you. Sign up for A Writer’s Toolkit and learn the strategies you need to get you started as a writer and keep you going. | Maximum 15 students
Personal Essays and memoir represent some of the most adventurous writing today. Pushing narrative boundaries, utilizing traditional and nontraditional forms, this type of writing explores individuality and the minutiae of life unlike any other form. This workshop will help students explore the world of memoir and personal essay writing and understand both traditional and nontraditional narrative strategies available to them. Though the class will be run as a classic workshop, where students will submit their work to be reviewed in class, it will also combine craft lectures, outside reading, and in-class exercises. Students are expected to workshop twice. This will include their original essay submitted to class plus a revision. | Maximum: 12 writers 
Stories have component parts, and they interact. Starting with the basic building block of scene we’ll start with character and move step by step through the micro-levels of sentences, concrete detail, cause and effect, narration, and structure. Each week includes a close read of an excerpt of a published work and a discussion of specific craft elements. Participants will be invited to turn in work each week and can expect to develop a language of non-judgmental critique that will lead to a supportive, in-depth conversation about each other’s work. We’ll look deeply into what it takes to build a prose narrative, real or imagined, long or short. | Maximum: 12 writers
I have found that the core structure of many a poetry workshop is based on distrust. That the poems are being shared because there is something wrong with them, that they need to be fixed and made "better". But what if we had a workshop where we believed in the poems right away? Where exploration and wonderment replaced "cut and slash" editorial impulses? Is there a different, more creatively sustainable way, to talk about one another's poems? Let's find out!
When is a poem truly finished? In this class we are going to decide ahead of time! We will follow the "Life" of a single poem. We will write our first draft on day one and develop, explore, and revise it on subsequent days until the last day when we put our pens down and reveal our final draft. 
In this class, we’ll approach writing as an emergent process, using Gertrude Stein’s famous line, “And then there is using everything” as our guide and north star. Each session, we’ll work to connect with the inherent and subtle creativity of the body through exercises designed to help us cross the threshold to what is unknown. In the spirit of shared experiment, we’ll push our poetic inquiries further through selected readings from contemporary poetry and assignments geared toward exploring this new new territory of the interior. Through sustained experimentation, interaction and collaboration, you’ll find new fluidity in your work and open the potential for grace in the process. 
Alice Munro says, "A short story is not like a road...it's more like a house." Do you want to write a short story, but you're not sure where to start? Or how to finish? In this craft-focused course we will write a short story from start to finish by studying the architectures of great short stories by authors like Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, Frederick Busch, Lesley Arimah, and others. We will read short stories and dissect how they are constructed to determine how writers make their careful choices, and to what effect. Each week, we will focus on specific craft elements centered around form: plot, scene, and story shape. Along the way, targeted writing exercises will aid us in our efforts, as we share and critique one another's writing. By the fifth week, we will have a first draft to critique and revise. 
Did you try to bake something ambitious at the start of the pandemic and fail? Great. I did, too. That’s sort of what this class is about: what can our food stories tell us about ourselves? Food is an incredible vehicle to speak about pleasure, pain, history, family, nostalgia, place, race, gender, class, sexuality, colonialism—you name it. In this course, we will read examples of powerful, first person food essays, as well as write our own food stories. Each class will feature a mixture of generative exercises and workshop. We will also hear from a guest speaker about how to write a recipe.
We will explore the role of the letter in literature--letters from writers; letters between writers; letters as poems and novels and essays. We will investigate how a letter can clarify and distill both voice and audience and how writing a letter might break open a project at just the right point or kickstart writing that has stalled. This is a generative workshop across genres.
Snow White. The Round Table. Persephone and Hades. From hybrid prose to web comics and blockbusters, fairy tales and legends are constantly retold across mediums. Why do we continue to relate? How do they help us find meaning in uncertain times? What can we borrow from these forms to examine the past and future in light of climate change, migration, and capitalism? In this course, we will study writers like Helen Oyeyemi, Carmen Maria Machado, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Joy Williams. Then we will begin our own stories, inspired by existing lore. If you are drawn to cross-cultural myths, obscure tales, or the idea of Rapunzel on Mars, this is the class for you.
In this class we will be exploring Ekphrastic Poetry and looking to painting, photography and music as our inspiration. Can ekphrastic poetry be more than a reflection or comment on a piece of art? Can it be more than a beautiful description of another piece of art? We will find out together through looking at the paintings, photographs, and music that has inspired great poems-- as well as writing our own. 
What happens when we expand our creative focus and let go of our expectations? In this workshop, we'll use writing practices and generative techniques, explore poems and strategies, all with the goal of completing the workshop with a handful of new poems. Can we find liberation from the pressures we place on ourselves and our work? Join the experiment and let's find out! 