APPS DUE: JAN 10: Creative Nonfiction (CNF) Studio | Jan 20 - Mar 24
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 9 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: Jan 10, 2022.
NOTE: This session of the CNF Studio is slated to run virtually, via Zoom. Should CDC recommendations significantly change prior to Jan 20, 2022, it may switch to in-person. When applying, please note whether you prefer to meet virtually or in person (if you're open to either, please indicate that).
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 submitted weekly by participants to explore how the use of tension can create a vivid, visceral narrative. | Maximum: 12 students
Nothing is more intriguing than the idea of telling your true-life story – until the moment you realize you have a terrible memory, there are some pesky facts that are both inconvenient and unavoidable, and your spouse (who has a terrific memory) promised to kill you in your sleep if you ever wrote about them. Enter the autobiographical novel, a timeless genre that is based on the truth but not bound by it. The AN can be a faithful recounting of an event in your life, or a loosely related tossed salad of facts seasoned with fantasy. There’s a reason why everyone from Charles Dickens to Maya Angelou has written one. Through in-class prompts and take-home assignments, this 8-week course will help students conceive, structure and begin an autobiographical novel. Participants will learn how to mingle truth and fiction, add new characters, recast conversations, alter outcomes, heighten drama, and more. | Maximum: 10 writers
Slowly, family and friends are starting to gather again, in backyards, front porches, in kitchens, and around tables. We are breaking bread again. In this five-week class we will be exploring some of the tastiest poems written about food & drink while also writing our own. Come join me and let's eat poetry together.
Flash nonfiction, simply put, is true-to-life writing defined by extreme compression. It's saying what you've got to say using as few words, and as much beauty, as possible. An endlessly accessible, playful, potent form, flash nonfiction is evermore popular; from Brevity to Barren, The Forge to The Sun, legions of journals are eager to publish great flash.
Meeting every other week for sixteen sessions, this ongoing and supportive writing community both studies aspects of craft and shares work for feedback in a multi-genre, generative approach. | Maximum: 12 writers
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.
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 
Description to come.
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.
It has to come to life!
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” ~ E. L. Doctorow
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 submitted weekly by participants to explore how the use of tension can create a vivid, visceral narrative. | Maximum: 12 students
Description to come.
This class will create a writing group for students who are currently working on a specific short writing project (fiction or non-fiction). The emphasis will be on peer feedback, with direction and guidance, tips, and resources from the instructor. At the end of the class, the students will present an online public reading of their work. The class will begin with a workshop on giving and receiving workshop feedback. After this, students in the class will meet each week and share their work and receive feedback from the students and teacher. | Maximum: 15 writers