FREE: Consult about Your Writing
Call us. Let us help you with your writing.
You're invited to schedule a free 15-minute conference call consult to describe your writing situation and focus. During the call, we listen to your writing situation and help you out -- sometimes writers will register for an upcoming workshop. Other times, after a consult, writers will initiate a formal Introductory Consult through our Individual Consult Group to find a writing coach selected specifically for your project.
To initiate a Free Consult, e-mail us -- and when you do, please let us know specifically what you're working on and want to discuss. Then we'll get back in touch and begin to talk together about your writing.
Teacher:
Time:
By appointment only.
Location:
Telephone Conference Call
Total Fee:
Free.
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.
Perhaps yours was a childhood of portals. Perhaps the doors to Elsewhere closed early. Either way, portals are not simple tools. Literary escape is layered with the realities of privilege, accessibility, and colonialism. Escape can be solace and also its opposite. One character discovers a road out of a dark world, only to run into a dragon. Another finds that there is no portal out of reality and must create their own interior door. In this class, students will begin writing escapes through weekly generative prompts. They will read short fiction from writers like Ursula LeGuin, Kelly Link, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Charles Yu, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Then they will develop and workshop one short story of their own.
Three-hour workshop where we give a special poem a deep reading and conversation, then generate our own poem. 
Reading a great short story can feel like travelling through time. We might meet our characters as babies in their cribs, and in the span of fifteen pages we’re sitting beside their deathbeds. In this generative workshop we will write a short story from beginning to end, masters of our own time machine. Works by Lucia Berlin, Alice Munro, Bryan Washington, Kristen Valdez Quade, and others will teach us craft elements that will guide us through our mission. We will also cover the art of revision and submitting to literary journals. 
You know your story—whether a memoir, biography, essay collection, or nature writing—but how to begin? Where to begin? In this workshop, we will read, write and talk about beginnings. What engages the reader? What makes the reader turn the page, or feel the excitement you feel for your subject? What makes a non-fiction work feel as inventive as a novel? There are many ways to begin a non-fiction work: an anecdote, a statement, a line of dialog, a line of poetry. You will be asked to write short, first chapter pieces using something that you are currently working on, or maybe something new. This workshop could be the beginning of your beginning. 
THE LUMINOUS DARK - EXPERIMENTS IN POETIC REVISION
We live in a time when it is more important than ever for us to tell the stories of our lives. All of us have been affected. Some on the front lines; others stuck at home, working, minding kids, and wondering what’s next. And for many, stories have begun to emerge. Stories we’ve lived. Stories we’ve created. Stories that teach. Stories that question. This workshop is for the one who wants to discover how to identify a compelling story from the pandemic experience (as it has been and as it continues to unfold). You will work on a single life sketch - a short slice of your life experience - with the goal of producing a completed draft by the end of the workshop. You can bring something you’ve already started to work on or just bring an empty page and a willing, eager imagination. The workshop will help you explore what story you have to tell, why your story is important for others to hear, and how to use some of the techniques of the writing craft to create and shape that story idea. You will walk away from the workshop with tools and resources to help you create your pandemic life sketch and polish it into a final piece that’s ready for readers. Telling our story is an invitation to make connections: story to story, one human to another. Sign up if you have a story you want to tell. | Maximum 12 students
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 practice successful methods and habits of writing that all writers eventually adopt. The approach demands a fresh unworking of your current practice for a day, so that you allow yourself a new, fresh approach to thining, imagining, noticing, and writing. 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.]
Tension – it’s not just for thrillers! Tension draws writer and reader into any story and evokes more deeply human experience. The constant adjusting of tension affects pacing and drives story in countless ways: interactions among characters, sentence structure, and even word choice. We’ll use excerpts from published works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry as well as work written by participants to explore how the use of tension can create a vivid, visceral narrative.