APPS DUE Aug 31: Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Studio | Sep 17 - Dec 10
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. The Studio culminates in a celebration at a nearby watering hole. | 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: Aug 31.
The smallest moment can profoundly change your life, a smell briefly caught on a walk can send you back in time, objects hold whole multi-histories and as the writer Jay Ponteri says "memories nest inside other memories". In this 5 week class we will be exploring memory and the tools of the memoir genre to write our own "Micro-Memoirs". These will be 1-5 page prose pieces. We will also be reading a lot of outside examples of this and writing together in class. This class is open to all writers, whether you identify as a poet, fiction, or creative non-fiction writer. Whoever you are let's all explore together! | Maximum: 12 writers
Apps due July 8
Learn ways to build a story of any length by looking at the timeless elements of myth and the structure of the archetypal journey as they appear in literature and film. Open to writers at any stage of their writing. We’ll look at ways to develop characters with consequence and stories with shape. There will be assignments that can reflect work in progress or brand new writing done just for the workshop. | Maximum: 12 writers | No class Sep 5
If you did a scan of my brain, food would probably occupy at least 70% of my thoughts. And for good reason: food is an incredible vehicle to speak about pleasure, pain, history, family, nostalgia, place, race, gender, class, sexuality, colonialism—you name it. In this generative class, students will be asked to think about a dish that they love. It could be savory or sweet. They will then write the opening of an essay about this dish as well as the recipe for this very dish. We will then conclude the class by discussing ways to get this piece published.
In this class we will be exploring how writers such as Kevin Young, Yiyun Li, Ai, Roland Barthes, Maggie Nelson, and others write and respond to three of the great fires of human experience: Adult Romantic Love, Violence, and Loss. This class is not a classic writing workshop but instead will be an explorative and generative gathering. We will be reading, talking, writing, and sharing! | Maximum: 10 writers
Think of a label on a fine wine. If it is well written, it should describe the wine and invoke mood, emotion, and place. Great nonfiction, I believe, aspires to do this. It speaks about a narrow thing and also a much bigger thing. In this five-week course, we will study the various forms of nonfiction writing, with an emphasis on personal essay writing. Students will learn craft tips and get a chance to workshop their writing. My goal is to encourage students to try something new, be it satire or reportage or memoir. At the end of class, we will discuss the ins and outs of publishing and how to pitch stories to editors.
The opening of a novel is like meeting someone for the first time. In that same way that there is something that makes you want to know more about that person, there is something that makes you want to turn the page. Some first pages are action-packed, others are poetic, or open with a line of dialog, or an idea—there is no single way to engage the reader. That first impression is the difference between engaging the reader (or the agent or the editor), or having your book languish on a nightstand. In this workshop, we will talk about how to get and hold the reader’s attention through various readings of the beginnings of first chapters. You will also asked to write short, first chapter pieces, in various genres, or you can refine something that you are currently working on. This workshop could be the beginning of your beginning.
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. 
Three-hour workshop where we give a special poem a deep reading and conversation, then generate our own poem. 
This workshop, led by Attic Institute founder David Biespiel, is the kind of study every writer needs, from beginners to the most advanced. It's an opportunity to write from studying your own self-portrait via photos, drawings, snapshots, b&ws, candids, distortions, &c. The workshop approach empahsizes the concept of obseravtional writing as a direct route to achieve new imaginative possibilities, whether you're writng fiction, memoir, or poems. The approach demands careful observation and the translation of those observations into clear and precise notes, jottings, and studies. Self-portrait writing is one of the foundational skill sets that all writers should practice. It hones your concentration on details and the language that comes from those details, and it releases you into new zones for your memories and projections to emerge. Our focus will be almost entirely on making new pieces of writing with hardly any time dedicated to critique or revision. Included in your tuition is a signed copy of the tenth anniversary edition of David's book, Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces, with a Foreword by Chuck Palahniuk, which we will use as a "textbook" for the workshop. [Because this workshop is seven hours, there will be frequent, scheduled breaks to step away from the computer screen and rest.]
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.