2024 WORKSHOPS
POETRY AND POP CULTURE WORKSHOP led by Adele Williams
Whether it is a poem about Rambo and self-loathing, about constellating evangelical road signs
and the grieving of past lovers, or about the female divided-consciousness and America’s Got
Talent, pairing pop culture with lyrical introspection could be the poetic approach you need in
your writing life right now!
This workshop explores how pop culture in poetry can work to situate meaning making in
seemingly incongruent ways. It also argues that pop culture is a site of complex social
commentary. We will read poems by Lucille Clifton, Hanif Abdurraqib, Paul Guest, Karyna
McGlynn, Shaina Phenix, and Leah Umansky as well as generating our own lyric with a reliance
on, or simply a nod to, pop cultural icons and establishments.
FLASH MEMOIR WORKSHOP led by Anna Barr
Micheal Todd Cohen defines flash creative nonfiction as “somewhere between the
lyricism of poetry and the narrative potential of prose..” Brevity founder, Dinty W. Moore, says
the form is like “the moment you see a figure illuminated across the street during a brief
middle-of-the-night flash of lighting.. defined by a single image.”
In this workshop, we will read and write flash memoir. We will approach this form with a
respect for the tension between narrative and lyric impulse and an openness to the creative
possibilities this push-and-pull can afford us in writing about our own lives. We will read both
flash memoir pieces and nonfiction craft essays by writers such as Nicole Breit, Ocean Wei,
Atlas Desmond, Eric Dean Wilson, Kris Malcolm Belc among others. We will view memory and
memoir as a construction of the present as well as a reckoning with the past. This workshop will
be generative with a focus on prompted writing, group sharing, experimentation and
collaborative discussion surrounding works in progress.
LITERARY HAUNTINGS: ON WRITING THE PARANORMAL led by Daniel Kennedy
Author Jenny Irish says, “In my writing, haunting is the byproduct of unfinished business: the unacknowledged or the unspoken.” How do we define ghosts? In this workshop, we will expand our conceptions of what constitutes the otherworldly. We will read authors such as Stephen King, Selena Anderson, Ling Ma, Brian Evenson, Muna Fadhil, Julia Elliot, Brandon Hobson, and others to contemplate the multitudinous forms the paranormal might assume in fiction. We will pay particular attention to craft elements like subtext, slippage, and setting as metaphor. How can these tools help us imbue a story’s atmosphere with a preternatural aura? Students will be assigned generative writing exercises and will have the opportunity to workshop their drafts. All participants will leave the class with new work and broader ideas about this rich literary subgenre.
THE FLOOR IS LAVA led by KT Herr
What happens to our composition and revision process when we decide to implement things like formal
constraints or time limits? This poetry workshop is designed to be part generative, part regenerative, part experiment, part juggernaut, part balancing act, part feat of imagination, part party trick, and part party, period. We’ll take a tour through some composition games involving specific prompts and constraints (nine-syllable lines! no using the letter “b”! no prepositions! collaborative composition! anagrams! received persona!) and then experiment with introducing radical revision practices (reverse! half-life! scramble!) to encourage a more limber, experimental writing posture. The week will conclude with peer feedback strategies designed to upend and unsettle traditional workshop critique.
A LOVER’S DISCOURSE: EROS & OTHERWISE led by Maha Abdelwahab
To what do we owe the romantics? Beyond the importance of our inner worlds, our ecological
impulses, and the need to expose the industrial revolution for all its ills, the romantics reminded us
why we bother to opt into life: love. This workshop will ask, what does it mean to write through and
about love? Why have writers penetrated the theme of love since time immemorial? How can we
uncover the depths of our love that feel inaccessible or heavily masked? What work can the literary
do to help us discern the kinds of love/heartbreak we cannot seem to name? This class will operate
within the openness of a literary hybridity, offering readings and prompts from multiple genres
including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. Using the readings as a foundation, we will write work
of unexacting devotion, heartache, and perseverance. The love we investigate and write through will
be love of all kinds including familial, ancestral, devotional, romantic, platonic, and political. We will
explore different expressions of that love and how we may begin to define them and use them as
inspiration for our own work.
from personal essays and short stories to ekphrastic writing to literary and cultural criticism, students will mine both daily life and family history to write compelling personal narratives. Students will study and put into practice several textual strategies for writing about family, generational memory, and ancestral history. Other topics considered will include the responsibilities of documentation, the reliability of memory
The breadth of texts are as follows and may include:
- The love of a mother in Toni Morisson’s Beloved and Kiese Laymon’s Heavy
- Devotional love of Sufi poets such as Rumi and Hafez
- Seductive love of friendship in Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark’s correspondences
- John Keats’ love letters to Fanny Brawne (and the movie Bright Star)
- Excerpts from Jacques Derrida’s “On Friendship”
- Excerpts from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes
- Short stories by Kelly Link, Annie Proulx, James Baldwin, and Jhumpa Lahiri
- Breakup / Love Poetry by Sharon Olds, Matthew Olzmann, Monica Youn, Jennifer Grotz,
Robin Coste Lewis, Hala Alyan, and Ross Gay.
SPECULATIVE FICTION AND THE SUBTERRANEAN led by Rosa Boshier González
Equal parts character and world-building, speculative fiction occupies a unique position
in today’s literary landscape. In this fiction course, we will read and write towards the
possibilities just beyond the reach of our known world. We’ll write using prompts that
fuse real life concerns with near-future worlds. By examining the work of writers such as
Carmen Mario Machado, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Alexandra
Kleman, and Brenda Peynado, we’ll look at how contemporary writers, particularly
writers of color, are using speculative fiction as a way to shed light on the atrocities and
insights of our present moment in history. We’ll discuss the social implications just under
the surface of ghost stories and the feminist subtext of monsters, among other things.