This class looks at the unconventional yet rich sources of poetic inspiration found in our digital era and beyond, including news and newspapers. We’ll explore whether it’s possible to turn the seemingly mundane—from social media posts to the mishaps of autocorrect to the language we find around us—into meaningful poetry. This session will also consider how to uncover how everyday interactions, both online and offline, can be inspiration. We will look at poems by poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara, Eugenia Leigh, Amorak Huey, Joan Kwan Glass, and others who have transformed everyday experiences into compelling poetry. The class will conclude with a short writing exercise designed to help you find the poems already happening on the interwebs and typos around you.

A lot of my writer and artist friends are significantly distressed by the current state of the world. When we talk, the conversation inevitably turns to some version of these two contentions: What value does my work have in a world so fraught with so many crises? And: I don’t even know where to begin. During these talks, the most helpful approach for me has been to discuss what other writers have done, what projects they’ve attempted, and, most importantly, what techniques they have deployed to express their dissatisfaction. In this flash class, we will look at craft elements in political nonfiction writing and poetry. We will attend to the distinction between what the poet Thomas McGrath calls “tactical writing” versus “strategic writing” and focus on a political writing that feels scaled for where we are in our writing lives. And most importantly, we will reinvigorate the importance of how we see our writing in a distressing world and leave with craft approaches to find our creative place in it.

Judith Kitchen had an extraordinary gift for discovering profound meaning in family photographs and inherited objects. In Half in Shade, Kitchen demonstrated how to transform intimate visual memories into short prose that resonated beyond the personal. This craft-focused class will explore Kitchen’s specific techniques for moving from image to insight. Through close readings from Half in Shade, we’ll examine Kitchen’s methods for balancing razor-sharp specificity with universal insight, structuring fragmented memories into cohesive pieces, and using photographs as portals to larger truths about family, identity, and loss. Participants will practice Kitchen’s methods of close attention and careful examination, applying her approach to their own family narratives and learning

Lately I’ve been drawn to stories and novels that make use of the tools of general nonfiction—research-based history, biography, journalism. There’s a unique kind of authority a fiction writer can achieve when the reader believes they are encountering something “factual” or essayistic before immersing into the imagined or invented. In this class we’ll examine three stories that seemingly begin as essay before opening into fiction—Raymond Carver’s “Errand,” Dana Johnson’s “The Story of Biddy Mason,” and Benjamin Labatut’s “Schwarzschild’s Singularity”—and then we’ll experiment with combining conventions from these different genres of storytelling to see what unique experiences we can create for our readers.

Writing is serious work. But play is often necessary to shake us out of stuck spaces. This two-part flash class seeks to inspire by inviting disruption of our habitual practices. Together, we will apply experimental methods to our poem making including systematic chance operations and poems of inventory. The first class will focus on systematic chance operations: exercises that are primarily aleatoric (reliant on chance) while also incorporating elements of serial technique or random procedures. The second class will focus on the listing as a generative technique that can lead to non-hierarchical, non-linear accumulation and surprise. During each session, we will close read model poems, kickstart writing, and offer take-home writing exercises. This class is specifically designed to be a mid-year pick-me-up of playful, generative experiments based in poetics but applicable for writers of all genres.

We humans have been creating maps for a long time: Micronesian stick-and-shell navigation charts are many thousands of years old. Those maps—whether they are 3D sculptures that show ocean currents or a Google map showing where the traffic jams are—tell stories. In his book The Power of Maps, designer Denis Wood notes that maps are “embedded in a history they help construct.” That is to say, they make and remake history. They highlight, or obscure, or erase facts on the ground. Wood asserts, “It is not that the map is right or wrong...but that it takes a stand while pretending to be neutral on an issue over which people are divided.” In this workshop, we will look at a range of maps and discern the stories that they tell and the positions that they assert. Participants will be encouraged to gather maps related to a place they are writing about. We’ll tease out their stories together. We will also create our own maps, to inspire our writing. This workshop is designed for creative nonfiction writers, but also will be productive for writers working on poetry or fiction that is place-based in some way.

A 100-word story is a full story in exactly 100 words (not including the title). It has a distinct POV, characters, a setting, a conflict, and a story arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end. In each 100-word story an author builds a complete world. Most importantly, stories should be specific. This specificity allows readers to connect to the world of the story. Join Kim to explore the magic of these small, bright things and learn how they can amplify the work you’re already doing with your narrative writing. In this workshop, she will share generative and revising tips from her book 100-word Stories: A Short Form for Expansive Writing (Heinemann 2023) to help you unlock the transformative magic of adding these stories to your writing practice.

While we’re all likely familiar with the idea of a protagonist working their way through dramatic acts or climbing Freytag’s pyramid (or enter your favorite model for visualizing story), not all stories privilege this journey in a straightforward fashion—no 1st or 3rd person point of view throughout, no singular voice that we become accustomed to as our guide. Instead, some stories choose to explore the dynamics of several voices weaving together or snapshots of a life portrayed in vignettes and textual artifacts—letters, receipts, shopping lists, emails, instant messages, social media posts etc. In this session, we’ll look at models of stories that push against traditional narrative and how time, tension, worldbuilding, and character development work in distinct but connected increments, as well as how the negative spaces between sections and what is elided can contribute just as much richness to a story.

Marilyn Hacker has described the sonnet as “a form that invites close engagement, and that engagement often becomes a kind of dialogue with its past and present uses and connotations.” Indeed, with more new books turning toward the sonnet (some of them exclusively so), it would seem that this form still has so much to say and teach us about the forces binding and separating us. With this in mind, we will study a range of older and newer sonnets (as well as some invented forms that borrow heavily from the sonnet’s instincts) in order to better appreciate and approach the sonnet as a form of continued possibility. Participants will also be invited to lay some inventive groundwork for a form that might accommodate their own search for connection.