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Morning Workshops:
Alexandra Teague
Mornings 10:am- Noon
Monday July 13th to Saturday July 18th
No class Thursday
“Realm of Musics”: Expanding Your Poetic Sound
This workshop will help you more deeply consider and practice the ways sound can work in poems: from sounds of individual words (and their etymologies or resonances) to larger-scale sound patterns, including rhyme, other types of repetition/insistence, and syntax. Through reading poems by Tyehimba Jess, Mark Doty, Evie Shockley, Joy Harjo, and many others—and through writing exercises, and workshops—you’ll explore ways to expand your use of sound, and consider what Ilya Kaminsky means when he says, “The lyric poem is always in existence between the realm of silences and the realm of musics.” We’ll also consider ways poetry diverges from and overlaps with music by reading and writing some poems that take music as their subject, and considering a few musical settings of poems.
Robert Lopez
Mornings 10:am- Noon
Monday July 13th to Saturday July 18th
No class Tuesday
The Intriguing Beginning pulled through to the Effective Ending
How stories begin is always a critical element of a short fiction, perhaps the most critical. How they end is always as important, as well. In this class we’ll examine various entry points into a story, finding the unexpected way in, through a back or side door and how this sets us on the path toward the end. The beginning of a story makes certain promises and sets expectations. We’ll discuss various beginnings and find strategies to fulfill these expectations and confound them by what we’ve established in the opening. Let’s pay attention to how these writers arrest our attention and create conflict right from the opening line and how they find their way out of a story from that starting point. We’ll use these as models to write our own short pieces that move from the beginning to an impactful ending and then we’ll workshop these pieces. We’ll look at a few shorts – Shelly Oria “That Night” from New York 1 Tel Aviv 0, Dana Kooperman, “get off here” Sleepingfish 0.875, Justin Torres, “Little Plastic Flags” Sleepingfish 0.875.
Debra Gwartney
Mornings 10:am- Noon
Monday July 13th to Friday July 17th
No midweek break
Writing Scenes
Scenes are the building blocks for personal narrative, and it turns out that writing a sharp, smart scene is a significant challenge. Scenes are far more intricate than we sometimes allow ourselves to think through as writers, so in this course, we’re going to think through the intricacies. First, what gets elevated to scene, and why? How does a scene earn its keep? What are the ways that a scene can pay off? We’ll address issues of space, time, movement, characterization, action, and oh yes, dialogue.
Arrive to our zoom workshop with two scenes of several pages each, and be prepared to revise those scenes over the course of the week.
Afternoon Workshops:
Paisley Rekdal
Afternoons 1:pm- 3:pm
Monday July 13th to Saturday July 18th
No class Wednesday
JUST PRODUCE.
This course will be focusing on a few craft-based exercises with writing prompts to keep you creative during distracting times. Come with poems already written to workshop, and leave with at least six new poem drafts that you will have produced.
Sam Ligon
Afternoons 1:pm- 3:pm
Monday July 13th to Saturday July 18th
No class Tuesday
The List Story
List stories often feel like collages—fragmented and accumulating power as they unfold, using their lists as organizing principals and sometimes as tumbling drivers. They often seem to exist outside the clock or unfold across a broader sweep of time than more traditional narratives. Susan Minot’s “Lust” is more fragmented and less concerned with a traditional fictional clock than Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” but both stories rely on their lists, and to some degree, take refuge in them. On Monday we’ll read and discuss three stories shaped by lists and unhinged in time: Jamaica Kinkaid’s “Girl,” a list in the imperative mood of a mother instructing her daughter; Blake Butler’s “Hair Loop,” a numbered list of a narrator’s observations on hair, the object around which meaning is created; and Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings,” a playful meditation on plot, cliché, story shape, and death. Immediately after class we’ll start writing, and we’ll continue writing all through the night, burning candle after candle, smoking countless cigarettes, drinking whiskey and coffee and melted butter, taking Tuesday off to keep writing, so that we can workshop our list stories Wednesday through Saturday. These will be shorts—tight and polished—ideally under 1,000 words, not to exceed 1,500, which means we’ll also be examining and discussing properties, strengths, and limitations of the short-short story.
Rebecca Brown
Afternoons 1:pm- 3:pm
Monday July 13th to Friday July 17th
No midweek break
This is Not Just About You
Do you want to write about yourself but not be self-indulgent? Or tell personal stories that don’t come across as whiny and “me me me” and TMI? In this workshop we will look at how writers contextualize personal material within broader concerns (politics, history, social and material environments), to help craft personal vignettes, prose poems and essays with weight and heft. To inspire our own new work, we will take guidance from published writers (links to work available online will be provided). This is not a workshop designed to critique work you have already written but to generate new work. And while the instructor will not be reading student manuscripts outside of class meetings, all writers will share their work with one another by reading aloud in class.