Craft Intensives

Writing from a Place of Community

Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Wed, November 2, 2022 (EVENT ENDED)

This hybrid workshop will feature a lecture and generative writing exercises to help writers, poets, and playwrights access the source of their gift: their community. The workshop will discuss ways to oppose dominant racist and misogynist narratives and produce work (characters, stories, verses, etc.) that is complex and humane. Discussion will be had regarding craft, heritage, ancestry, and the obligations of writers.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of We Cast a Shadow, which was published by One World Random House. The novel was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. His next book The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You will be published in 2021. Ruffin is the winner of several literary prizes, including the Iowa Review Award in fiction. A New Orleans native, Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University, and the 2020-2021 John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.

Stand-Up Comedy Bootcamp, 2 Day Intensive

Zahra Noorbakhsh

Sat, October 8-9 2022 (EVENT ENDED)

Folks, let's write some jokes and laugh! Whether you're funny or not, let's get to work. Gain tools, techniques, and terminology. Write funny on-purpose - and without being a jerk, or be a jerk and find out how and why it works. Day 1, covers the basics with a decolonized approach. Day 2, builds on them and provides a career guide with sustainable practices to avoid burnout.

Zahra Noorbakhsh is a comedian, writer, and producer for PRX's Snap Judgement. Her award-winning podcast, #GoodMuslimBadMuslim was deemed a must-listen by O, the Oprah Magazine, and invited to the Obama Whitehouse to record an episode. She’s a Senior Fellow on Comedy for Social Change with the Pop Culture Collaborative and an Innovations Fellow with The Opportunity Agenda. Her one-woman show, “All Atheists are Muslim” originally directed by W. Kamau Bell, was dubbed a highlight of the International New York City Fringe Theater Festival by the New Yorker. For more visit ZahraComedy.com.

Self Care while writing trauma

Natalia Sylvester

Tue, September 20, 2022 (EVENT ENDED)

Writing trauma, especially when it's rooted in lived experience, can be healing but also incredibly difficult. In this workshop we'll come together to discuss how to write through hardship without re-hurting ourselves, how to be vulnerable while setting boundaries, and how to create awareness for how and why we choose to write what we do. Through in-class exercises and discussion we'll explore what it means to write without causing further harm—to ourselves, to our characters, and to readers. 

Natalia Sylvester is the award-winning author of several novels for adults and young adults. CHASING THE SUN was named the Best Debut Book of 2014 by Latinidad and EVERYONE KNOWS YOU GO HOME won an International Latino Book Award and the 2018 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best WorkNatalia's debut YA novel, RUNNING, was a 2020 Junior Library Guild Selection, and her next novel for young adults, BREATHE AND COUNT BACK FROM TEN, was published by Clarion Books/HarperCollins in May 2022. A MALETA FULL OF TREASURES, Natalia's first picture book (illustrated by Juana Medina), will be published by Dial Books in 2024. Natalia's non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Bustle, Catapult, Electric Literature, Latina magazine, and McSweeney's Publishing. Her essays have been anthologized in collections such as A MAP IS ONLY ONE STORY and A MEASURE OF BELONGING: WRITERS OF COLOR ON THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH. Born in Lima, Peru, Natalia came to the US at age four and grew up in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. She received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami, was a 2021 Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and was formerly a faculty member at the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.

An Intuitive Discovery Toward Story Shape

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Sat, May 14, 2022 (EVENT ENDED)

Story architecture is one of those book elements that, being reliant on so many other aesthetic and artistic decisions, comes last and only after much laboring. In this intensive workshop, we will go over known story shapes for long-form storytelling, take inspiration from nature, and follow a number of craft exercises designed to help you arrive at an intuitive discovery of your own story shape.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is a Visiting Writer at Saint Mary’s College. Her forthcoming book is a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds (available 7/12/2022).

Mining Poetry Techniques to Make Vivid Prose/Poems

Devi Laskar

Sat, May 21, 2022 (EVENT ENDED)

This is a generative workshop. We will look at specific passages from each of Devi Laskar's novels and create your own work, prose and prose poems based on poetry techniques and forms such as anaphora and pantoum. We will explore literary compression and create killer dialogue!

Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Her second novel, CIRCA, was published May 3, 2022 by Mariner Books. Her third novel, MIDNIGHT, AT THE WAR will be published in early 2024. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family.

Writing the Self through Others: The Ethics of First-Person Narrative

Emily Bernard

Friday, July 22, 2022 (EVENT ENDED)

What do your friends and family think about your writing? Is it possible to write about people you care about without offending or hurting them? How can I tell the stories I need to tell without sacrificing my relationships? In my experience, these questions represent the most common concerns of writers at the beginning of the personal essay journey. As writers of first-person narrative, we must be certain of our project, and that includes its ethical dimensions. Short readings and exercises will enable us to explore fully the moral heart of the work that we do. Above all, this workshop is a “judgment free zone” where openness, honesty, and a delight in creative wildness are the only requirements.

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in TLS, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Harper’s, O the Oprah Magazine, the Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxford American, and Ploughshares. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book, Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, won the 2020 LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. She has received fellowships and grants from Yale University, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, and The MacDowell Colony. A contributing editor at The American Scholar, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, she lives in South Burlington, Vermont with her husband John Gennari and their twin daughters.