Workshop Name: From the Mixtape to the Remix: The Hybrid Text

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Thursdays @ 5:30-7:30pm ET

Course Dates: June 20, 2024 - August 8, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/20, 6/27, 7/4 [will be rescheduled!], 7/11, 7/18, 7/25, 8/1, 8/8

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

“I have long struggled to link individual stories to larger histories, to make tangible with words those points of connection between self and the world that often seem so difficult to grasp.”

— Alisse Waterston, My Father’s Wars

What’s the border between the critical and creative? And why?

Where are you in the stories you read (or watch, or listen to)?

The prescriptions of writing (both “critical” and “creative”) often demand stringent parameters of structure, method, and voice according to its traditions, its disciplines, and its genres. Yet, increasingly, the labor and means by which authors express their ideas take on alternative forms through the integration of multiple genres, and the usage of multimodal techniques and multimedia technology.

In this course, creative writing will become an adventure in discovering what voices lie within us, and how we navigate the complex negotiations of self-expression, identity, and collective exchange. We will evaluate what we’ve been told about writing, what audiences we want to reach with our writing, and how to compose as a DJ, an architect, a chef (a poetics of preparation!), a videographer, a curator and archivist, as anything other than *just* a writer. In the process, we will gain an understanding of contemporary and long-established techniques relevant across genres—CNF, poetry, fiction, personal accountings such as correspondences and notebook annotations—and especially, the cross-genre/hybrid text.

You will be writing new material through generative prompts in class, such as a “Mixtape,” which encourages students to narrate their sensory experiences with media, conditions that enable them to bring in cultural aspects of their everyday life, as well as to transport themselves to specific moments of their past; “The Text as Caption,” in which writers are encouraged to look at the gaps in representations as an entry point for narrative; and the “Text as Object,” which invites writers to re-imagine the pre-histories (and distant futures), as well as the secret interiors of their most cherished objects, and the spaces they have traversed. Best of all, you will be collaborating with your peers on feedback and revision through periodic workshops, while learning how to integrate characteristics of other genres and artistic modes of production into your work.

Workshop Name: Good Listening: The Art of Writing Voice

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Tuesdays @ 5-7 PM ET

Course Dates: July 9, 2024 - August 27, 2024

Meeting Dates: 7/9, 7/16, 7/23, 7/30, 8/6, 8/13, 8/20, 8/27

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

Good gossip is urgent. Good gossip leaves nothing out. Good gossip is spellbinding. In this workshop, we will follow gossip’s lead and focus on voice. Good gossip heavily relies on how it is told—the words used, the placement of pauses, momentum/build up, tension, tangents, the bending of time, emotion, etc. A good gossiper is someone you want to hear more from because you know that regardless of the subject, it will be a heck of a ride.

Over the course of eight weeks, we will work on sharpening our voices on the page. We will do so by reading a mixture of nonfiction and fiction to study how others use elements of voice, as well as turning to podcasts to consider how oral storytelling can influence our essays. Weekly flash memoir prompts will be assigned as practice, and students will be workshopped a minimum of two times. We’ll always focus on each individual voice—your voice will always be the star! After all, on the other end of good gossip is good listening—we want to polish voices we can’t help but keep listening to.

Workshop Name: In Limited Space: Family, Culture, and Gathering

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Mondays @ 5:30-7:30pm ET

Course Dates: July 1, 2024 - August 19, 2024

Meeting Dates: 7/1, 7/8, 7/15, 7/22, 7/29 8/5, 8/12, 8/19

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

This Ellipsis Summer 2024 Workshop connects us across cities, states, and perhaps even countries and territories—and just like the places we call home, the cultures we celebrate, our family and friends, we bring different stories to this workshop.

What connects us the most is the irrefutable need to tell our stories. Imagine scrolling through your phone’s photos, through your Instagram account, through the videos you post or watch on Snapchat and TikTok… What stories would they tell? How we tell them, our stories and the stories of others, may vary, but why we tell them is the same: storytelling is our culture, is what brings us all together.

The goal of this workshop is to bend what it means to write real life or to write fiction, but to do it in a way that celebrates our commonalities, celebrates our cultural spaces: who we are—our ethnicities, our histories, our identities, what we eat—abuela’s flan, nonna’s pasta fagiolo, nana’s collards, how we talk—Philly’s jawn, Boston’s wicked, and where we gather—the kitchen table, a quinceañra, a Snapchat group chat, a place in our imaginations. We will gather for an eight-week writing workshop to understand how space transforms us, how we transform spaces—and how we transform culture.

Workshop Name: On Secrets: What We Keep & What We Write

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Mondays & Wednesdays @ 5-7pm ET

Course Dates: July 22, 2024 - August 14, 2024

Meeting Dates: 7/22, 7/24, 7/29, 7/31, 8/5, 8/7, 8/12, 8/14

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

When we think of poetry and creative nonfiction, the first question that may pop up is, “What do I have to say about myself?” This is what can make these genres feel daunting. In this class, we will dispel the notion that poetry is difficult. We will instead learn not only how to read through seemingly ‘difficult’ poems but also write our own poems that hold our secrets close—whether to reveal the secrets or not, that’s up to you. Through narrative or lyric or formal experiments, we will study how poems tell us everything we need to know and work through the supposed paradox of clarity and secrets. As Mary Ruefle writes in Madness, Rack, and Honey, “The words secret and sacred are siblings.”

Then in the second half of class, we will delve into the stories we want to tell about our lives using creative nonfiction and the poetic skills we’ve learned. Ultimately, we will learn how to craft personal stories—you’ll have to use this skill often, regardless of what profession you want to enter. Our class will be structured around creative workshops and reading contemporary writers who are actively writing today. We will create a body of work that will sketch out the imaginative and realistic worlds we want our creative minds to live. Together, we will actively contribute to what people consider American literature today.

Workshop Name: Hybrid Forms

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Sundays @ 3:30-5:30pm ET

Course Dates: June 30, 2024 - August 18, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/30, 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28, 8/4, 8/11, 8/18

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

In this generative workshop, we will consider writing that, in form and in content, refuses the traditional confines of genre. The writing we will examine will include memoir, lyric essays, text-based art objects, and other cross-genre projects. You can expect to read, discuss, and respond to works by Claudia Rankine, Fred Moten, Kimiko Hahn, Etel Adnan, and Anne Carson, among others.

We will carefully consider the craft choices that render these works unclassifiable and transcendent, and ultimately, successful. Every week we will investigate a different technique used in writing that can be characterized as hybrid, including fragmentation, collage, digression, disjunction, and more. We will also be generating and workshopping original, formally inventive texts. You will emerge from this workshop with a portfolio of at least five new pieces—and even more drafts!

Workshop Name: Magic and the Craft of the Fantastic

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Wednesdays @ 4-6pm ET

Course Dates: July 10, 2024 - August 28, 2024

Meeting Dates: 7/10, 7/17, 7/24, 7/31, 8/7, 8/14, 8/21, 8/28

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

If you like fantasy or science fiction, this is the class for you! We begin our workshop by reading a fantasy novel (The Stars Too Fondly by Emily Hamilton; read a starred review here!).

Then, through a combination of craft talks, short film viewings, class discussion, and creative writing prompts, we will add a fleet of fantasy craft tools to our writing arsenal. This includes worldbuilding (remember the Hall of Faces in Game of Thrones?), how to manipulate time (Interstellar, anyone?) and baking magic into real geographies (A Darker Shade of Magic makes London especially, well, magical).

The next phase of our class will be Workshop Days: each of you will submit up to 2,000 words of a story or novel excerpt. Each class will be dedicated to giving two or three writers feedback on the work they submit. The published novel and the craft conversations we begin with will give us a framework to read each other's works with the thought and care we deserve. I will then meet each of you 1:1 to help you turn the feedback you get into a revision plan.

We will close our workshop with a celebration of writing and the vital conversation on publishing: I want you to know that your stories can have a life beyond our class!

Workshop Name: The Dark Side: Crafting Supernatural and Realistic Fiction that Haunts

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Thursdays @ 4-6pm ET

Course Dates: June 6, 2024 - July 25, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/6, 6/13, 6/20, 6/27, 7/04, 7/11, 7/18, 7/25

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

If the Greeks invoked the muses for inspiration, we will call upon psychological, metaphorical, or perhaps even literal demons for our writing this summer. Everything from dark rooms, Calculus, and spiders to the wraiths in Witcher will be fair game. 'The ‘demon’ that haunts your narrator may be supernatural or realistic.

We will begin the course with a combination of assigned readings, writing prompts, and short talks to learn how to: build a setting that evokes an atmosphere, create distinct characters with clear character arcs, and end stories effectively. How many times has a great story or show excited us, only to give us an underwhelming ending? Let's avoid that!

The next phase of our class will be Workshop Days: each class will be dedicated to giving two or three writers feedback on the work they submit*. I will then meet each of you 1:1 to help you turn the feedback you got into a revision plan. Further, we will come up with a database of literary magazines you can submit your work to. I want you to know that your stories can have a life beyond our class!

*The story you submit to our class can be a short story or a novel excerpt (up to 3,000 words) or up to two works of flash (up to 2, 000 words).

Workshop Name: Writing Girlhood

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Tuesdays @ 6-8pm ET

Course Dates: June 11, 2024 - July 30, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/11, 6/18, 6/25, 7/2, 7/9, 7/16, 7/23, 7/30

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

“We was girls together.” Sula and Nel in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula are “daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers… they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.” How do writers stage girlhood in the very form of a story (thinking about the novel’s “loss of innocence” trope?) How do we see race, gender, and class intervene in the process of girlhood through the site of the domestic?

In this discussion and workshop-based class, we will examine how girlhood is portrayed in literature, from the joyous, to the bratty, to the traumatic. We’ll read from Tiffany McDaniel, Jamaica Kincaid, Jenny Zhang, and others. We’ll consider how writers use narrative techniques like point-of-view, setting, and tone to explore girlhood through the intimate and interior. Students will be assigned readings and short creative exercises each week, and will workshop their writing twice throughout the course. You’ll emerge from this course with a deeper appreciation for literature that engages with the implicit intersectionality within girlhood, as well as with two polished stories ready for submission.

Workshop Name: Become Ungovernable: Experiments in Surrealist Expression

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Wednesdays @ 5-7pm ET

Course Dates: June 26, 2024 - August 14, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/26, 7/3, 7/10, 7/17, 7/24, 7/31, 8/7, 8/14

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

This course focuses on what we can learn about stories when the rules are all our own, when we let go of trying to imitate reality and begin the strange process of evoking it. “Make up a story,” Toni Morrison once said, “For our sake and yours, forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light.” What happens when we write a story in the dark?

Over the course of eight weeks, we’ll experiment with the very notion of what a story can or should do. You will learn the rules of storytelling and find your ways of ignoring them. Our experiments will be informed by a wide array of contemporary writers, including Tommy Orange, Sabrina Orah Mark, and Helen Oyeyemi, alongside their literary ancestors, Octavia Butler, Franz Kafka, and Donald Barthelmé. This is a workshop informed as much by the strange as it is by play. Be ready to discover more about your imagination. Expect to leave with surrealist craft techniques, a small portfolio of written work, and significant experience experimenting with what your stories can do.

Workshop Name: Suspense, Tension, & Story

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Tuesdays @ 6-8pm ET

Course Dates: June 11, 2024 - July 30, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/11, 6/18, 6/25, 7/2, 7/9, 7/16, 7/23, 7/30

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

What does a whodunnit-mystery-thriller have in common with a quiet work of literary fiction? In both instances, the writer wants their reader to keep reading, and for that to happen, readers need to feel compelled to turn the page. So how do we, as writers, get our readers to keep reading? What makes a page-turner a page-turner?

This course will study the craft of creating suspense and tension in fiction. Over eight two-hour classes and a one-on-one meeting, we will examine various elements of suspense and tension in our own work and the writing of published authors. We will explore where tension comes from, the fine line between delighting and frustrating readers, and the incredible value in revision. Each student will have the opportunity to workshop original works of short fiction.

Whether the scope of a story is spectacular (war, espionage, natural disaster!) or wonderfully mundane (an interaction at a grocery store, a walk to the train), writers make important use of tension and suspense in compelling stories. Through close readings and discussions of works by authors such as Jonathan Escoffery, Roxane Gay, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Sabina Murray and Maggie Sheffer, and accompanying craft essays, students will examine how writers use identifiable techniques to keep their reader engaged. Students will also learn how to honor the writing process from vomit draft to finished piece, how to approach the serious work of writing with playfulness, and how to participate in a contemporary writers workshop.

This course is anti-racist, LGBTQ+ friendly, SES conscious, and (hopefully) fun!

Workshop Name: Writing the Page-Turner

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Saturdays @ 11am-1pm ET

Course Dates: June 22, 2024 - August 10, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/22, 6/29, 7/6, 7/13, 7/20, 7/27, 8/3, 8/10

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

Most works of fiction whittle away your time, but great fiction stops time altogether. It holds your breath, or takes it away. It makes the simple act of turning the page feel like an intolerable, terrible, interruption. You will finish reading and not be done, for it will pervade your own world long after you put it down- and you will wonder, what, how, why?

This Advanced Fiction Workshop will reveal some of the inner workings of great works of fiction and how to apply them to your own writing; how to hook and hold your reader’s attention by using various dramatic techniques, and how to use your literary tools, place, character, plot, perspective, dialogue, and voice, to craft an unforgettable page-turner.

Sessions will involve reading and responding to selected texts, writing prompts, and workshopping your original work. The reading list will include works by Colum McCann, Anne Carson, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Strout, Jane Gardam, Ottessa Moshfegh, Kaveh Akbar, Julie Otsuka, James Baldwin, among others. You will emerge from this workshop with a portfolio of two polished stories– and of course hopefully life-long literary friends!

Workshop Name: One Sentence at a Time: Writing the Novel

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Fridays @ 6-8pm ET

Course Dates: June 21, 2024 - August 16, 2024 [no class 7/5!]

Meeting Dates: 6/21, 6/28, 7/12, 7/19, 7/26, 8/2, 8/9, 8/16

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

Whether you’re just starting your sci-fi saga or writing the next great literary novel, each book starts the same way: one sentence at a time.

In this exploratory, organic, and playful generative class, we’ll break down ‘writing a novel’ into practical and manageable parts. We’ll embrace the mess-making process by building outlines, setting writing goals, writing the islands, feeding your imagination, conducting generative research, and following your excitement in your novel’s first draft.

Most importantly, we’ll build a community of fellow novelists who you will collaborate with in our weekly workshops. Whether you’re entering this class with a blank page in front of you or with a partial draft underway, you’ll discover the book you’re writing by actually writing the book.

The class will be organized in two distinct parts: the first hour will focus on craft, technique, writing exercises, and discussing the assigned readings. The second hour of class will be reserved for workshopping students’ novel excerpts. Every student will have the opportunity to be workshopped once.

Workshop Name: Who’s the “You”?: The Art of Poetic Address

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Wednesdays @ 10am-12pm ET

Course Dates: June 23, 2024 - August 11, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/23, 6/30, 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28, 8/4, 8/11

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

In what ways can a poem be “more” than just a poem—a love letter, a manifesto, a protest, a prayer? Toward whom—or what—exactly does the “lyric gesture” stretch? Poets like Jorie Graham, Kaveh Akbar, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Carl Phillips, Anne Carson, Jericho Brown, Adélia Prado, Louise Glück, and Lucie Brock-Broido all depend on a dialogic, intercessory mode that addresses, challenges, and/or interrogates a series of beloved, celestial, or difficult “you’s.” In this course, we’ll explore the various machineries of verse—pattern and syntax, the image, poetic form—which will lead us into a study of poetics and craft as they relate to desire, apostrophe, and address. Over the course of the summer, we’ll think about the ways your poetic “you” can be variable, multiple, and even nonhuman, thinking deeply about how, as well as to whom, your poems are speaking.

In conjunction with our own efforts in form, voice and style, we’ll survey a selection of poetry in English. We’ll begin each class by discussing a collection by a contemporary poet before diving into “workshop”—what it is, how to do it, and the best ways to navigate its push/pull critical procedure. In workshop, we’ll learn about the revision process and the (serious) guts and grind it takes to 1) meaningfully revise your work and 2) give and receive gracious, helpful critique. For workshop, we will split the class into three groups of four students; each group will have two workshop opportunities. By the end of this course, you’ll have a portfolio of poems you’ve spent the summer working closely with us to refine.

Workshop Name: Strangeness as Survival

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Sundays @ 12-2pm ET

Course Dates: June 23, 2024 - August 11, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/23, 6/30, 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28, 8/4, 8/11

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

The Kurdish poet Abdulla Pashew writes “If a word / can’t become ... winged bread / to fly from trench to trench, / then it might as well / become a brush to polish the invader’s boots.” In this workshop, we will make winged bread of our words—bread that (with time) feeds the speaker, the poet, the reader, the language. We will lean into strangeness as a necessary part of the drafting process and discuss how it might better serve our survival and the survival of others. By giving ourselves permission to be strange, we give our speakers permission to persist.

We will read widely among contemporary (living and breathing!) lyric and narrative voices, including Kaveh Akbar, Victoria Chang, Natalie Diaz, Terrance Hayes, Ilya Kaminsky, W. Todd Kaneko, Paige Lewis, José Olivarez, Richard Siken, Danez Smith, Jenny Xie, and many others. After brushing up on some poetics/craft basics, we will focus primarily on incorporating strangeness and survival into aspects of imagery, syntax, and line. You should expect to emerge from the workshop with a better understanding of these concepts, experience creating and revising in a collaborative space, and a portfolio of polished work.

Workshop Name: Close to Home: Writing about Friends and Family

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Thursdays & Sundays @ 4-6pm ET

Course Dates: July 25, 2024 - August 18, 2024

Meeting Dates: 7/25, 7/28, 8/1, 8/4, 8/8, 8/11, 8/15, 8/18

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

The Kurdish poet Abdulla Pashew writes “If a word / can’t become ... winged bread / to fly from trench to trench, / then it might as well / become a brush to polish the invader’s boots.” In this workshop, we will make winged bread of our words—bread that (with time) feeds the speaker, the poet, the reader, the language. We will lean into strangeness as a necessary part of the drafting process and discuss how it might better serve our survival and the survival of others. By giving ourselves permission to be strange, we give our speakers permission to persist.

We will read widely among contemporary (living and breathing!) lyric and narrative voices, including Kaveh Akbar, Victoria Chang, Natalie Diaz, Terrance Hayes, Ilya Kaminsky, W. Todd Kaneko, Paige Lewis, José Olivarez, Richard Siken, Danez Smith, Jenny Xie, and many others. After brushing up on some poetics/craft basics, we will focus primarily on incorporating strangeness and survival into aspects of imagery, syntax, and line. You should expect to emerge from the workshop with a better understanding of these concepts, experience creating and revising in a collaborative space, and a portfolio of polished work.

Workshop Name: The Poet’s Self-Portrait

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Sundays @ 1-3pm ET

Course Dates: June 30, 2024 - August 18, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/30, 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28, 8/4, 8/11, 8/18

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

In The Poet’s Self-Portrait, we will consider how poets hold up mirrors to the self as they create poems that can be described as “self-portraits.” You can expect to read, discuss, and respond to poems by Alejandra Pizarnik, Oliver de la Paz, Sarina Romero, Terrance Hayes, Leila Chatti, Kimiko Hahn, Ada Limón, and more. We will closely consider craft elements in these works, while also generating and workshopping original poems. You will emerge from the workshop with a portfolio of at least five new poems, and various more drafts.

Because the self-portrait is a practice with roots in visual art (Rembrandt, Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, and Jean-Michel Basquiat have all indulged in self-portraiture!), we will borrow visual art terminology to frame our discussion of the poet's self-portrait. The questions we will consider include the following: How do poets use light, dark, and shadow as they write self-portraits? How do we enact texture, abstraction, and symbolism on the page? How do poets place themes into bas relief? How do we approach composition as we represent our subject(s)? If the visual artist, brush in hand, peers into a mirror to depict herself, where is the poet looking? And finally, what intimacies and obsessions motivate the poem-portrait, and how do they reveal broader social and historical concerns?

Workshop Name: Passion & Precision

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Tuesdays & Thursdays 5-7pm ET

Course Dates: July 23, 2024 - August 15, 2024

Meeting Dates: 7/23, 7/25, 7/30, 8/1, 8/6, 8/8, 8/13, 8/15

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

This advanced poetry writing workshop will consider the writhing tension in great poems between passionate expression and precise articulation. How does an exacting and well-rendered sensuous world give shape to our deepest and most powerful feelings—love and sorrow, desire and dejection? How does an openness to express ourselves, to be vulnerable, imbue our images with force and mystery? What role does poetic form play in making our innermost emotions graspable, and even absorbing, for a reader?

Together we’ll read and study the craft of master poets from ancient Greece (such as Sappho), seventeenth-century Japan (such as Bashō), and the present (such as Jorie Graham), paying attention to elements of craft and language (image, lineation, rhythm, and rhyme). We’ll also draft and workshop at least four original poems, focusing on descriptive criticism and strategies for revision and reimagining. Additionally, I’ll meet individually with every poet to discuss their drafts and ideas.

Workshop Name: Poetry as Memory

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Thursdays @ 3-5pm ET

Course Dates: June 20, 2024 - August 8, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/20, 6/27, 7/4 [will be rescheduled!], 7/11, 7/18, 7/25, 8/1, 8/8

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
—Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

Writers may draw from past experiences in order to preserve, to revisit, to disclose, or to metabolize memories into meaning. And because our relationship to the past is constantly shifting, these recollections provide a wellspring of material—one might write hundreds of poems about the same memory, given the fluid and inexhaustible nature of hindsight.

In this course, we will consider the ways different poets make use of craft elements such as image, form, and figurative language in order to write about the past. We will explore the nebulous space between remembering and forgetting, examining ways in which poets navigate the slipperiness of memory and reckon with time. Reading materials will include work from poets such as Lyn Hejinian, Frank Bidart, Bhanu Kapil, Louise Glück, Kaveh Akbar, and Marilyn Hacker.

Using these works as a loose template, we will delve into the rich territory of the past to generate our own memory-induced drafts. Students will respond to weekly prompts and contribute to collaborative assignments, such as a shared playlist. By the end of this course, students will have a portfolio of new poems, a packet of generative prompts, and several strategies for how we might transform our lives into art.

Workshop Name: The Poetry of Place

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Tuesdays @ 3-5pm ET

Course Dates: June 18, 2024 - August 6, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/18, 6/25, 7/2, 7/9, 7/16, 7/23, 7/30, 8/6

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

Place induces poetry—we often internalize a landscape, which can become a psychological overlay for how we see and experience the world. In this workshop, we will look at poems that are anchored in a specific place, poems that move through multiple spaces, and poems of displacement. We will consider the ways that place can function as a poem’s backdrop or as its sole focus, and we’ll discuss the role of place as it relates to feeling, atmosphere, and narrative.

By examining craft elements such as image, form, and figurative language, we will gain an understanding of various techniques that we might use to depict location on the page. Reading materials will include work from poets such as Ada Limón, Frank O’Hara, Linda Gregg, Sandra Lim, and Terrance Hayes, and we will use their works as a springboard to create our own place-oriented poems. Students will respond to weekly prompts and contribute to collaborative assignments, such as a shared Google doc “field guide,” and will leave the course with a portfolio of new poems and a variety of strategies for how to put location and landscape into words.

Workshop Name: On Wounds & Literary Ancestry

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Sundays @ 1-3pm ET

Course Dates: June 30, 2024 - August 18, 2024

Meeting Dates: 6/30, 7/7, 7/14, 7/21, 7/28, 8/4, 8/11, 8/18

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

Rumi referred to the wound as “the place where the Light enters you.” Lorca famously said “…in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work.” And in The Beauty of The Husband, Anne Carson writes: “A wound gives off its own light / surgeons say. / If all the lamps in the house were turned out / you could dress this wound / by what shines from it.”

Over the course of eight Sundays, we will draft new poems, begin to trace our literary lineage, and attempt to answer the following questions: From where do I bleed? Who is my poetic blood? What trails do I want to leave? The aim of this workshop is to provide you and your work with detailed structural and conceptual feedback, safety, permission, and the tools to identify where on the edge your writing rests.

In each session, students will respond to generative writing prompts, discuss assigned readings, and workshop each other’s writing with a specific focus on structural and developmental edits. You’ll emerge with a small portfolio of polished poems and a personalized list of reading (and submission!) recommendations.

Workshop Name: (Re)Writing Memory: Narrative, Imagery, and the Lyric “I”

Student Cap: 12 students

Course Meetings: Wednesdays @ 5-7pm ET

Course Dates: July 3, 2024 - August 28, 2024 [no class 7/10!]

Meeting Dates: 7/3, 7/17, 7/24, 7/31, 8/7, 8/14, 8/21, 8/28

1:1 meetings to be scheduled individually

“I don’t remember how I hurt myself,” writes Jericho Brown in “Colosseum.” Memory—with its strange omissions, its painterly vividness, and its desire—is full of poems waiting to be written, but it requires a special kind of attention, a poetic attention, to capture it in language.

In this workshop, we will each work to cultivate our own poetic practice, to see, think, and remember poetically. Through the study of lyric poems across cultures and time periods, from Sappho to Ocean Vuong, we will hone our command of narrative and imagery to write poems that excite and challenge us. Our workshop will be a safe, collaborative space for you to give and receive detailed feedback, draft new poems, learn effective revision techniques, and ultimately assemble a portfolio of polished poems. On top of our weekly workshops, I look forward to conducting one-on-one consultations with each of you about your work and giving you a personalized list of reading recommendations.