Sundays, 3PM - 5PM Eastern on Zoom

Description:
The sentence is an infinitely elastic instrument containing thousands of microdecisions. So which decisions make your sentences become your sentences? This class will examine virtuosic sentences—from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison—exploring what these sentences might have been in the hands of another writer, exposing what makes them unique. We will look at syntax, diction, and sonic elements, as well as attitude and subtext. We’ll read theories of the sentence as well, applying them to our own sentences to push them deeper into singularity, sharing our discoveries and revisions. Part bootcamp, part yoga—all on the page, of course—this workshop will focus on strength and flexibility in the prose line, building confidence in composition and revision. Homework will be light reading and small-scale writing.

A Public Space is having me back for a Sunday afternoon workshop! This one will be four weeks, September 10-October 8, 2023, 3PM-5PM Eastern time. Course description below:

In “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,” Jack Kerouac lists thirty enigmatic bits of advice for the creative process; among them: “Something that you feel will find its own form.” But how do we get from feeling to form? 

This workshop will explore that question, looking for areas of heat or feeling in the openings of stories and memoirs, then considering the possibilities for wholistic structure suggested by that feeling. We’ll consider narrative structure as a combination of framework, the outer architecture holding a piece together, and movement, the inner structure pulling readers through the framework. We’ll look at excerpts from participants’ works-in-progress as well as published works, and we’ll try in-class exercises and experiments designed to bring structure to the surface. Conversation likely to cover works by Jo Ann Beard, Michael Torres, Stephanie Vaughn, Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty, Han Kang, David Sedaris, and Bryan Washington. Light reading and writing homework. Participants will read their work aloud in class.

Happy to announce I’ll be teaching a seven-week intensive course in narrative technique for Harvard Summer School. The course is open enrollment, designed to be the gate into the grad writing program of Harvard Extension. (Harvard Extension is cool. Anyone can sign up for the beginning classes, and good performance in those classes qualifies you to be in a degree program, so admission is based on your work, not on your resume.) Syllabus will be posted soon. Class takes place on Zoom and Canvas.

This is a for-credit course with a lot of reading and essay-writing. If you’re looking for a fiction workshop with me, be patient, there will be more! But if you are thinking of starting a degree program, check this one out.

The Manuscript Academy is having me back for another 3-day intensive! The dates are set, and watch this space for registration info.

The format is three recorded lectures to watch at your leisure, plus two live sessions, one for Q&A and one for quick critique. Plus, they are the happiest place in publishing! Here’s the course description:

Making and Breaking Status Quo

What makes this day different from all other days? This course will explore that  question from several angles. A break in status quo is often the occasion for story—or the vital climax. How and why do we establish the ordinary for our characters, and how can the ordinary be broken open to reveal new depths of personality, relationships, motivations, and worlds? Through concrete and unpacked examples and exercises, we will add a few key tools to the craft toolbox.

Session One: Habit
This session will explore habitual action vs. action in scene. Establishing what normal looks like might be essential, but how can it be done efficiently without sacrificing the details that give fiction its vividness? How much normal is enough? We’ll look at transitions between habitual action (“She used to always…”) and story action (“And then one day…”), paying attention to the balance of scene, summary, and character interiority. 

Session Two: Uprisings
Our social training might encourage us not to rock the boat, but we all know that doesn’t quite work in stories. When characters stand up for themselves, it is an opportunity to show new facets of personality or hidden reserves of emotion. A character might have a troubling life where she doesn’t dare speak up; she might also have a boring life where the only danger is lack of change. What stimulus would cause your character to end that silence? We’ll look at examples where characters break long silences and change the world in which they live—or try to—creating story consequences that are electric for the reader.

Session Three: Sanctuary
Our fiction training would have us create danger on the page, in order to pressure characters to make plot-moving decisions. But what if danger is the status quo for a person or her community? For a character who is watchful or guarded, letting down that guard might be an important narrative moment. What if the catalyst for risk, intimacy, creativity, decision-making, etc. is not danger, but sanctuary? This session defines sanctuary on the page, and looks into its power to move narrative forward and transform characters.

A Public Space Academy is having me back to teach The Revision Laboratory this spring.

Sundays 3PM - 5PM Eastern
March 19 - April 23
Zoom Seminar

Description:

The Revision Laboratory
For some of us, an unblank page is scarier than a blank one. Many writing workshops encourage us to improve a composition through revision, which only characterizes a draft as a mess of problems to be solved. But what if revision were a playful experiment, not a search for solutions? What if our motivation were curiosity, not fear of failure? In this workshop, perfectionism is banned. Results are secondary: what matters is process. Participants will approach a single text with multiple modes of revision to release the hidden story inside the story, sharpen the story’s friction and energy, discover metaphor, and make the language more singular and alive. Light reading and writing homework. Experiments will be shared aloud in class.

The Revision Laboratory will incorporate the ideas and texts of Robert Boswell, Mitchell S. Jackson, Matthew Salesses, Susan Bell, Jane Alison, Philip Metres, Rebecca Gummere, R.O. Kwon, George Saunders, and Brian Eno.

The Manuscript Academy is having me back, this time to do a series of three recorded lectures (with writing activities), a Q&A, and a manuscript critique with the Academy founders. Details below.

Every writer wants to make something that their reader cannot put down. We might even want readers to go through an emotional change, as if experiencing the shifting world of the story themselves. But what makes us keep turning those pages? What makes us feel the impact of time along with fictional characters? What is the force pulling us from the beginning to the end of a story? This course will explore several theories and approaches to creating time and momentum on the page, with concrete and unpacked examples and exercises.

Session One: Off-Kiltering and Crossing Lines 
This session will explore the possibility that narrative movement originates in the shifting balance and friction of opposing forces. What is the border between two opposites? When borders are breached, we cannot move backwards—the essence of the causal plot. How does the writer create or discover borders between ideas, places, people, or states of being? How do we harness those borders to shape a narrative, allowing power to shift or balance to topple?

Session Two: The Perception of Time
One of the gifts of the page is that we can slow down or speed up the perception of time, jump into the past and future, or nest moments within other moments. This session will explore three components of time in fiction: chronology, pacing, and urgency. We’ll unpack story excerpts that manipulate time, slowing it down, speeding it up, mixing up the past and the present, or creating a sense of imminence, and consider where and why these techniques might be desirable.

Session Three: The Torque of Prose Itself
Some writers manage to pull readers through a text with urgency, even though nothing might be “happening” in scene. How exactly do they invoke that sorcery? We’ll look at examples of how sentences themselves—and their sequencing—can be manipulated to create forward movement and a feeling of change in the prose itself.

Online, Zoom • Sundays, October 16–November 6, 2022

Offered by A Public Space

THIS CLASS IS SOLD OUT. KEEP AN EYE ON THIS SPACE FOR THE NEXT ONE!

The sentence is an infinitely elastic instrument containing thousands of microdecisions. So which decisions make your sentences become your sentences? This class will examine virtuosic sentences—from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison—exploring what these sentences might have been in the hands of another writer, exposing what makes them unique. We will look at syntax, diction, and sonic elements, as well as attitude and subtext. We’ll read theories of the sentence as well, applying them to our own sentences to push them deeper into singularity, sharing our discoveries and revisions. Part bootcamp, part yoga—all on the page, of course—this workshop will focus on strength and flexibility in the prose line, building confidence in composition and revision. Homework will be light reading and small-scale writing.

Course Schedule
Sundays, October 16-November 6, 2022
3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. ET
4 sessions

The Maine Writers and Publisher’s Alliance has invited me to teach the fiction workshop at this year’s Harvest Writer’s Retreat. Mornings are spent in workshop, afternoons are meetings with faculty and evenings are readings. The setting is lovely, too! The poetry faculty will be Stuart Kestenbaum, so this weekend should be a treat.

My workshop’s theme will be FRICTION AND RESISTANCE. Description is in the link below.

The 2022 Harvest Writers Retreat is a weekend of workshops, seminars, readings, and writing at the stunning seaside Sebasco Harbor Resort in Phippsburg, one hour from Portland and just over two hours from Bangor. With rocky coast to wander and a workshop faculty of acclaimed authors, the retreat is designed to inspire.

In addition to the intensive morning workshops in a variety of writing genres, the weekend will include two craft and business of writing seminars, as well as faculty and participant readings and one-on-one sessions between faculty and students.

Workshops meet for three-hour sessions on both Saturday and Sunday morning. In our workshops, instructors use a variety of teaching techniques, including: guiding group critiques of works-in-progress; leading exercises for generating new material; and offering strategies and suggestions for revision.

I’ll be leading a session on October 9 for the Write on the Sound conference, which is virtual this year. The sessions look great and the conference is affordable. They are also recording the sessions so you don’t have to miss anything!

My session is on sentencemaking. My favorite subject! Or one of them. Brief craft talk followed by conversation.

Founded in 1985, Write on the Sound writers’ conference (WOTS) is a small, affordable conference focused on the craft of writing. A variety of sessions, workshops and panel discussions are available for all levels and interests, including valuable information regarding today’s writing and publishing industry. 

October 7-8-9, 2022 (Online, Pacific time)

REGISTRATION OPENS AUG 15

Happy to announce I’ll be teaching a seven-week intensive course in narrative technique for Harvard Summer School. The course is open enrollment, designed to be the gate into the grad writing program of Harvard Extension. (Harvard Extension is cool. Anyone can sign up for the beginning classes, and good performance in those classes qualifies you to be in a degree program, so admission is based on your work, not on your resume.) Syllabus will be posted soon. Class takes place on Zoom and Canvas.

This is a for-credit course with a lot of reading and essay-writing. If you’re looking for a fiction workshop with me, be patient, there will be more! But if you are thinking of starting a degree program, check this one out.

NOTE: THIS CLASS IS NOW FULL. KEEP CHECKING BACK HERE FOR THE NEXT ONE!

I am beyond grateful to be invited back to A Public Space for another Sunday afternoon course. Details below.

The standard advice in a fiction workshop is that stories are made from conflict. The word conflict conjures Western-style showdowns and Shakespearean sword fights. But do all stories need to involve battle? Maybe the word is wrong, but the idea is right—and what stories really need is friction, the coming together of opposites to generate electricity and heat.

In this workshop, we will look at examples of friction in stories—friction between people, between ideas, between institutions, and even the friction between the page and the reader, considering the way that a story might participate in a larger discourse of resistance. And, in the spirit of risk-taking, we will also discuss the resistance we might encounter as a normal part of the creative process, exploring ways to find the courage to push into difficult scenes, language, or subject matter.

We will investigate both published stories and the unfinished drafts of participants. Reading likely to include works by Elizabeth Bowen, Carmen Maria Machado, Mitchell S. Jackson, Margaret Atwood, Rion Amilcar Scott, and Amy Hempel. Light reading and writing homework; student work to be read aloud.

Course Schedule
Sundays, March 13–April 3, 2022
3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. ET
4 sessions
Online on Zoom

**This course is full. Click link for information on waitlisting.

Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance will have me in to teach a two-session class on experimental revision for fiction writers.

Mondays, Feb 21 and 28, 2022, 6-9 PM Eastern

Description here:

For many of us, a full page is scarier than a blank one. A draft becomes a mess of problems to be solved, triggering insecurity and perfectionism. Workshop critiques echo in our brains, drowning out our own thoughts. Or, revision turns into minor tweaking for fear of upsetting a house of cards. Inertia becomes a normal state of being. But what if revisions were done in the spirit of playful curiosity, not problem-solving? What if text, by its nature, is alive—meaning never finished? In the words of Ellen Bryant Voigt, "It's all a draft until you die." What if the point of revision is not to “fix” the story, but to learn from it?  

In this workshop, perfectionism is banned. Results are secondary: what matters is process. Participants will approach a single text with multiple modes of revision to release the hidden story inside the story, sharpen the story’s friction and energy, discover metaphor, and make the language more singular and alive. We will take inspiration from the methodologies of Robert Boswell, Lynda Barry, Natalie Goldberg, Philip Metres, Brian Eno, and others. Exercises will encourage lateral thinking and happy accidents. Participants are invited to bring a short passage (500 words) to revise, or to use a new passage generated in the first session. Work will be shared aloud.

A Public Space is having me back for another workshop. This one is generative. Sundays, 3-5PM Eastern. Details:

Ekphrasis—the literary response to visual art—often takes the form of poetry, but this class will be geared toward generating narrative. Participants will receive prompts in the form of specific artworks (to be viewed online) and methods for translating the art into fiction, memoir, or other narrative forms. These exercises will be followed by analysis of published texts created in response to the same artworks. Techniques will include imagining an instance of seeing the work, imagining the life of the work’s subject or artist, letting the work trigger associations and memories, acknowledging the work’s historical context, or facing the abstract with the concrete. Visual artists used likely to include Jennifer Bartlett, Gerhard Richter, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Jacob Lawrence, Yves Klein, Frida Kahlo, Liu Xiaodong, Kerry James Marshall, or Helen Frankenthaler. Writers studied likely to include Deborah Eisenberg, Don DeLillo, John Keene, A. S. Byatt, Tyehimba Jess, John Yau, or Ali Smith.

All levels of experience are welcome. The goal is to think like a beginner, take risks, and discover new veins of subject matter or approaches to the page. New work will be shared aloud. Light reading and writing homework.