Event Category Archives: Writing Workshop

This is the event type for writing workshops.

Poetry is (Not) Like a Prayer

This workshop will examine prayers and poems, exploring form, desire and address, and employ these explorations in daily creative writing prompts. The outcome will depend on the writer: poems, prayers, liturgies, spells, anti-liturgies, curses, blessings, invictives and invitations.

Writing in an Age of Anxiety, a workshop with Sara Billups

With a focus on essays, memoir, and other narrative forms, this program is designed to energize writers and welcome creative thinking in this cultural moment. Short readings, generative prompts and workshops will be matched with spacious time for work and rest. Alongside peers, you will consider if anxiety can be a companion—not to work despite, but rather in the midst of—to surface more human, honest, and meaningful work.

Out of the depths: writing prayer: a poetry workshop with Marie Howe

In this workshop, guided by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marie Howe, we will read and write prayer poems. Each day we’ll read poems written by poets from the past as well as contemporary poets. Looking closely at the poems – at tone and diction and image, and line and syntax and rhythm etc. ) – we will broaden the possibilities for our own voices. We will practice radical receptivity. We take time to generate our own prayer poems each day and have the opportunity to share with each other.

Reading and Writing with Joan Didion (a workshop led by Alissa Wilkinson)

Joan Didion often said that the way a writer says things is even more revealing than what they say. What can we learn about the work of writing from her? In this workshop, we’ll devote a week to Didion’s work, particularly concentrating on her essays, discovering the ways she approached specific craft challenges. We’ll practice close reading of Didion’s work. We’ll write.  And we’ll workshop our work. (The work we’ll workshop will be work we generate during our time together — participants will not circulate already-written work ahead of time.) Long-standing devotees of Didion and those new to her work are warmly welcome!

Fifty Pairs of Eyes: Creating Characters in Fiction, Non-Fiction and PoetryFifty Pairs of Eyes: Creating Characters in Fiction, Non-Fiction and Poetry with Stephanie Paulsell

This workshop will focus on cultivating practices that help us see further around the people about whom we write: learning from both visual and literary arts about how to bring the humanity of our characters closer to the reader, how to navigate the visible and the invisible, and how to shape portraits in words that reverence human dignity.