2025 WORKSHOPS
Chemistry Without Clichés (Ona Akinde)
Chemistry plays a significant part in writing romance, but how do we write chemistry that feels fresh and organic? This workshop will focus on building depth, authentic relationships between characters and finding ways to write romance without leaning heavily on tropes and clichés.
As part of this workshop, we will discuss pacing, scripting, and the different ways to create romantic tension throughout their stories that is believable and ensures readers are rooting for characters’ romantic endeavors. We will examine moments in literary text, films, and songs that embody chemistry in unusual ways but work well in building romance and highlight common mistakes to avoid in the genre. The workshop will include writing prompts, individual and group exercises, and collaborative feedback.
Trans-Creation: Translation As Poetic Creation (Camilo Roldán)
Translation is often imagined as a technical labor, the transportation of meaning from one side of the river to the other, but if, according to Heraclitus, we never step in the same river twice, why would we expect to find an exact copy on the other side of the river? Many great writers of the past were also translators, and the works they translated both informed their own writing, and inversely, their own concerns as writers shaped the works they translated. Another text, whether in a foreign language or our mother tongue, can provide us with a scaffold, a seed, a lump of clay, a whiff of incense or a ghost to talk to. Or we may find that poetry arises, rather than from within us, from the spaces between our words and those of another. In this class we will look at how translation practices, broadly defined (no second language necessary!), can give us tools for broadening our own writing and for generating new poems. Students will read translator/translated duos such as Stephen Rodefer/Francois Villon, Erin Moure/Fernando Pessoa, Chantal Wright/Yoko Tawada, Christian Hawkey/Georg Trakl and Lisa Robertson/Bernart de Ventadorn. These texts will provide us with models for wending our way through the curiosity, surprise and passion of reading and writing with others.
Writing the Body: Medical Humanities & Hybrid Memoir (Nick Almeida)
In 2022, researchers at Purdue University created the first-ever 3D map of the human heart’s nervous system, revealing what medical scientists call the heart’s “Little Brain.” This intricate network of neurons—cells typically associated with the brain and nervous system—hints at something profound: the heart contains something like brain cells, a unique intelligence, and a possible role as a seat of emotion and memory. An age-old question reemerges—where is the human consciousness located, in the brain, in the body, or somewhere else entirely?
This workshop will use science, trauma, and art as foundations to craft hybrid memoirs centered on the body. By engaging with the burgeoning field of Medical Humanities, we will explore how personal narratives can intersect with a variety of genre forms, inviting experimentation and new understandings of illness, pain, and corporeality. This workshop welcomes writers interested in creative nonfiction, lyric essays, and hybrid forms. Through readings and exercises, we’ll seek inspiration from authors such as Eula Biss, David Eagleman, Audre Lorde, and Lia Purpura, whose works illuminate the complexities of the body, memory, and identity. Together, we’ll discover how the stories we carry in.
“a tiny, 300,000,000-volt thundercloud”: very small things: a generative workshop (Catherine Niu)
In his essay on concision, George Estreich writes, “It is a category error to say that a haiku is ‘concise.’ It is not like a bigger, wordier poem that has been boiled down to one image… It is more like a tiny, 300,000,000-volt thundercloud.” In this generative workshop, we will explore ways of making and recognizing the “tiny, 300,000,000-volt thundercloud.” We will read and write very small things, literary works that trade in economies of an Estreich-ian, alchemical, smallness. We will look at the ways very small literary things exist and how to make them. To do this, we will examine not only the recognized categories of flash fiction, haiku, aphorism, but also longer, book length works built from very small units of construction. We will read works from Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Celan, Lydia Davis, Sappho, Maggie Nelson, Renee Gladman, Herve Guibert, and Eduardo Galeano, and we will write our own collection of very small things. This workshop will be generative and hands on. We will engage with prompted writing exercises, generous and collaborative workshop, and reading discussions, as we search for moments of lightning.
Turning Writer’s Block into a Writer’s Blocks: Exercises in Metatextual Play” (Caleb Borg)
Writer’s block, or creative block, can arise from any number of things. In all cases, however, the block comes when we lose touch with our innate passion for writing, when writing stops being fun and becomes some kind of chore, something that must be “produced,” either for profit or to appease our own inner critic. In this generative workshop, open to artists of any background, we will fall back in love with writing by turning it into a game of pure creation motivated by play, our words and ideas transformed into a child’s blocks. The late great David Lynch said that “inside, we are ageless… and when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little.” To access our ageless centers, where creativity bounds and leaps, we will explore the art of Janet Sobel, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Miró, Raymond Queneau, Henry Darger, Clarice Lispector, David Lynch, Leonora Carrington, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Julio Cortázar, and more. We will discuss strategies for warding off writer’s block and incorporate objects like pastels, toys, and typewriters to use as talismans in the art of creation. We will finish the week with an exhibition of our work.
What’s Eating You?: Food Poems (Karen Zeng)
Can you eat a poem? Sometimes, I feel like a poem could eat me. This workshop explores the tactile sensations and the emotional stakes of food and consumption. Through the works of Jane Wong, Danez Smith, Chen Chen, Nikki Giovanni, and Kemi Alabi, we will find ways to engage with food through different emotional registers from anger and despair to tenderness and love. Each class will have an overarching emotional theme, and writing prompts will be given based on poems discussed, and we will have time to write and share together.