Summer
Workshop
Session 2
July 2-8,2023
Virtual Workshops on Zoom
The pandemic lockdown allowed us to cultivate a new form of the VONA workshop, the Virtual Workshop for BIPOC writers. In these sessions, participants from around the globe will come together for a week-long workshop with faculty teaching in a variety of spaces and places. Join us as we continue to develop our global writing community.
The Art of Revision with
M. Evelina Galang
A workshop
This five-day workshop invites writers who have completed a first or second draft of a novel, story collection or memoir. Together, we will interrogate the work’s structure, its protagonists, and their motivations. Come ready to mark your manuscripts up, to identify your book’s obsessions and narrative trajectories. We’ll consider strategies for revision to support your vision.
M. Evelina Galang is the author of a previous story collection, Her Wild American Self (1996), two novels, One Tribe(2006) and Angel De La Luna and the Fifth Glorious Mystery (2013), and the nonfiction book Lola’s House: Filipino Women Living with War (2017). Her short story collection When the Hibiscus Falls (6/2023) has been featured in The Today’s Show, Oprah Daily and MS. Magazine’s most anticipated books of 2023. She edited the anthology Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (2003). Galang directed the Creative Writing Program at the University of Miami from 2009-2019 and served as VONA Board President from 2018-2023. She lives in Miami.
Screenwriting with
Nijla Mu’min
A workshop
In this workshop, we will cover the key components of a strong screenplay, including character, structure/plot, conflict, world, and resolution. How can we write movies that are entertaining, but also explore a deeper purpose? We will also focus on world-building and how we can capture the distinct details of life that build a cinematic world. Part generative, part workshop, we will read excerpts from screenplays, discuss their strengths and techniques, discuss outline strategies, write and workshop scenes, and craft character biographies. We will aim to complete the first 5-10 pages of the first act of a feature script, or an outline of a script, or a portion of a script.
Nijla Mu'min is a writer and filmmaker from the East Bay Area. Her work is informed by poetry, photography, music, fiction, and dance. In 2014, she was selected for the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Intensive, and was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at the 2014 Urbanworld Film Festival, for her script Noor. Her debut feature film, Jinn, premiered at the 2018 South By Southwest Film Festival and won the Special Jury Recognition Award for Screenwriting. Mu’min received the Shadow & Act Rising Award, the MPAC Media Award for Courage and Conscience, and was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She’s directed episodes of Queen Sugar, Insecure, Swagger, Wu-Tang: An American Saga, All Rise, and East New York. She is a graduate of CalArts MFA Film Directing and Creative Writing Programs, and UC Berkeley, where studied in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People Program.
Young Adult with
Natalia Sylvester
A workshop
Writing YA, especially in a time when books for marginalized young adults are threatened, can be revolutionary in and of itself. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the why’s of writing stories for young adults who are in the process of becoming. We’ll study work that explores the seeming contradictions of adolescence—its fearlessness and vulnerability, fragility and strength, independence and powerlessness. Through workshop, craft talks and generative exercises, we’ll create a supportive, empowering environment to help us venture into the heart of our own stories, which are often not only written for teens, but for the teenage selves still within us.
Natalia Sylvester is the award-winning author of several novels. Among her works are Chasing the Sun, named the Best Debut Book of 2014 by Latinidad, Everyone Knows You go Home, an International Latino Book Award winner and the 2018 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work Natalia's debut YA novel, RUNNING, a 2020 Junior Library Guild Selection. Breathe and Count Back from Ten, was published by Clarion Books/HarperCollins in May 2022. Natalia's non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Bustle, Catapult, Electric Literature, Latina Magazine, and McSweeney's Publishing.
The Puzzle of Point of View with Gina Apostol
A workshop
In this workshop writers play with point of view. Each writer will put a narrative together where multiple voices weave a single story. We’ll reflect on the choices we make with each varying lens and consider how perspective drives details, foreground, afterthought, and gaps; shapes plot; structures action; or foresees and enriches, maybe even resolves, a story’s dilemma. We’ll workshop each voice and share how we think point of view creates difference thus story. Each writer will end with a draft of a work in three voices. Let’s see how the puzzle of voices scrambles and/or sculpts a work’s design.
Gina Apostol has written five novels. She won the 2022 Rome Prize to work on a novel-in-progress, The Treatment of Paz. Her forthcoming book, La Tercera, is out in May 2023. Publishers' Weekly named her last book, Insurrecto, one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Gun Dealers' Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Her first two books, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Philippine National Book Award. She grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines and lives in New York City and western Massachusetts. She teaches at the Fieldston School in NYC.
Prose Residency with
Jamie Figueroa
A residency
This prose residency is primarily comprised of individual conferences where the instructor gives specific, focused attention to one’s fiction or non-fiction. Conferences will provide direction for pages in progress (via supportive comments, questions, exercises, readings) to be engaged during the week. Daily check-ins as a group will encompass sharing about our writing process/writing practice and discussing key techniques critical to both genres. Regardless of a student’s focus, content or form, we will center our engagement around identity, place, ancestry and the necessity of being relational with our work on and off the page. Preliminary reading and writing will be required.
Jamie Figueroa is the author of the novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and shortlisted for Reading The West Debut Fiction. Figueroa is Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio and is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Boston Review, Elle, McSweeney’s and Kweli Journal among others. She received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf/Rona Jaffe Scholar. A VONA alum, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts where she is now faculty. Figueroa’s memoir in essays, Mother Island, is due out Spring 2024 by Pantheon Books.
Creative NonFiction with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
A workshop
In this workshop, we will discuss and examine the act of curation in memoir—that is, picking the moments that contribute to a meaningful narrative and examining possibilities of arrangement. We will spend time examining narratives that demonstrate different ways this curation occurs and how then these moments are structured into a story. These works, by the way, are essays, are series of poems, are a combination of fiction and nonfiction and some defy categorization. Memoir can be anything. We will then examine each other’s work through the lens of craft and structure to support your manuscript’s development. Oh, and there will be diagrams of your works in progress. :)
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is a writer and the author of a memoir published by Ecco / HarperCollins, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, which was featured in Self Magazine, Time, The New York Times, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Her short stories and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, BuzzFeed, Guernica, and The New York Times. She is a VONA Alum. Christine's pronouns are they/she.
Experimental Forms with Paisley Rekdal
A workshop
Many of us are interested in experimental literary forms. Such forms may include cross-genre work, or texts that push the limit of how writing is experienced. This is a workshop in which participants from all genres will play. Tear up a book and make, from its remnants, a new one. Knit a poem. Create a field guide of imaginary animals. Collage together oral testimony to tell your own short podcast story. Workshops will be open to questions of problem-solving as we work across media, though we will also do close reads of work by participants. The goal is to inspire new writing through generative assignments and to share our literary experiments.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, including Nightingale, Appropriate: A Provocation, and the forthcoming West: A Translation. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she is a distinguished professor.