Join screenwriter/teacher Lauren Veloski for a 2-hour writing “playdate” filled with all the upending possibilities of the speculative genre. The spooky season surrounding Halloween is of course primetime for ghouls and monsters and menace. We can ALSO consider this time of year a portal for ALL flavors of stretched and scrambled reality. This workshop is your invitation to peer more deeply through the looking glass towards Maximum Expansion in your writing. Together, we’ll try our hands at the speculative genre—moving your craft towards curious, irreverent, and fantastically unhinged ideas!

A one-hour generative class to give you guidance and inspiration. We’ll read a series of diverse pieces and use timed prompts to create fresh work. Not a minute will be wasted! You’ll leave with a variety of short pieces you can expand, along with a list of recommended resources. Looking for inspiration? This incredible class is for you.

This two-day intensive (taught over the course of two Saturdays) will introduce students to the fundamentals of travel journalism. By reading contemporary magazine articles (and some historical travelogues) and through generative exercises, students will leave the class with tools to begin trying out personal and professional travel writing. 

A generative writing class for women (or anyone who identifies as female / nonbinary / gender-nonconforming) who feel like they miiiiiight be losing it. Instead of running away from home... try this class first? Whether you're overwhelmed or stretched thin; wound up or worn out; blocked, stuck, or just feel like making some time to write each week, this class is a way to reconnect with your creative core. You can write in any genre you like—nonfiction, fiction, poetry, stream-of-consciousness, journaling, fragments, rants, letters, lists—whatever feels right each day. This class is about process, creativity, and making some space for your own voice. It's just an hour, and there's no homework. Sneak it in on your lunch break (or while the kids are watching a movie; they'll live). It'll be encouraging, regenerative, nourishing, and fun.

What are the pathways like, breaking into the world of literary translation? How do we go from finding a book that speaks to us in another language, and eventually publishing the work and interacting with English-speaking audiences?  In class, we’ll do weekly readings that include essays about translations and excerpts of books translated from various languages, and we’ll workshop short translation practices or translation-in-progress from each student. This is a non-language-specific workshop and there is no limit in the genres to submit. If you are just starting a project, or already have a project in-progress, this is the workshop for you.

Strange and surreal stories are deeply connected to narratives of migration, local folklore, belief systems, and emotional landscapes that reflect what each society  brings to our histories and storytelling. In this six-week generative writing workshop, we’ll explore such writing across genres, including novels, short stories, poetry, graphic novels, and more, and we’ll be reading from works brought into English from different languages, including writing from Iran, Taiwan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, and various countries in Latin America.

A one-hour generative class to give you guidance and inspiration. We’ll read a series of diverse pieces and use timed prompts to create fresh work. Not a minute will be wasted! You’ll leave with a variety of short pieces you can expand, along with a list of recommended resources. Looking for inspiration? This incredible class is for you.

This class centers playful interaction and collaboration as a way to shake up the creative process and find new ways into writing. Who says writing must always be solitary? We’ll play associative improv games, mine memory, and use artifacts to create prompts for each other and explore pursuing what stirs us to write.

In search of writing community? The Lab is an accountability and coaching program designed to spark your creativity, draw you to the page, and keep you writing. It doesn’t matter your genre or level of experience, The Lab is a place to experiment and play, form connections with other artists, and develop your ideas from inception to final draft, and it only costs $25 per monthly session. 

A generative writing class for women (or anyone who identifies as female / nonbinary / gender-nonconforming) who feel like they miiiiiight be losing it. Instead of running away from home... try this class first? Whether you're overwhelmed or stretched thin; wound up or worn out; blocked, stuck, or just feel like making some time to write each week, this class is a way to reconnect with your creative core. You can write in any genre you like—nonfiction, fiction, poetry, stream-of-consciousness, journaling, fragments, rants, letters, lists—whatever feels right each day. This class is about process, creativity, and making some space for your own voice. It's just an hour, and there's no homework. Sneak it in on your lunch break (or while the kids are watching a movie; they'll live). It'll be encouraging, regenerative, nourishing, and fun.

In search of writing community? The Lab is an accountability and coaching program designed to spark your creativity, draw you to the page, and keep you writing. It doesn’t matter your genre or level of experience, The Lab is a place to experiment and play, form connections with other artists, and develop your ideas from inception to final draft, and it only costs $25 per monthly session. 

In this more advanced workshop, we’ll discover what it looks like to write beyond: beyond genre/form conventions, beyond what other people have told us a writing life should look like, beyond our doubts. We’ll develop our writing through craft lectures (on topics like language, voice, style, speculation, and publishing), readings, discussion, and workshops. We’ll grow a supportive community, learn to apply feedback, and create a sustainable writing practice that fits with the realities of our lives. While our craft talks and texts will be from the realm of lyric, hybrid, experimental, and speculative nonfiction, students writing any form of creative nonfiction are welcome.

In this session, we'll consider the effect of time on perspective. How does when a story is told from shape the narrator and in turn, how the story is told—its language and tone, moment selection, and structure? We'll look closely at stories narrated from the near aftermath and long distance from significant events and then practice the tools they offer in our own work. 

We’ll explore the many facets of character development that help create vivid, memorable characters. These include discovering the quirks of your own writing process (what do YOU need to know about a character to get started) and common elements which inform character behavior, and therefore, plot. 

The best short stories end with a bang — or a twist, or a moment of ecstasy, poetic connection, or brilliant subversion. If there are as many ways to end a story as there are stories, whatever your project, and whatever mode you write in — whether comic or tragic, ironic or earnest, realist or absurdist — your best ending will be inextricable from the mechanics of your plot. In this class we will look under the hood of a couple of short stories to reverse-engineer their endings through analysis of their pacing, plots, and endings, and spend time workshopping brilliant new endings for our own works-in-progress.

A story must establish a world, a character, and a conflict–and grab the reader–in just a few sentences. Together, we’ll examine first sentences, paragraphs, and pages to discover the power of voice and the mechanics of tension, and open conversation about the foundational elements of a great short story. Bring a rough draft or excerpt for an in-class revision exercise.

What does a cozy winter getaway look like to someone in a disastrous marriage? What does someone harboring a secret notice at a wild party? Well-defined surroundings are a great way to clue our readers into the emotional depths of our characters. After analyzing fiction that uses place as an insight into its protagonists, we’ll spend this session setting the mood as we craft our own character-driven descriptions of place. 

Are you applying to 2027 MFA programs? Don’t go it alone! This cohort is a supportive, structured group focused on navigating the application process with as much confidence and as little stress as possible. Together, we'll walk through choosing programs, selecting samples, soliciting recommendations, writing a compelling personal statement, and staying on track through deadlines so that you have the best chance for admission this season. Whether you're applying in prose or poetry, for a full-time program or a low-residency one, working in cohort provides opportunity for accountability, commiseration, and motivation during what can be an overwhelming and lonely process.

Compelling fiction emerges from characters who act against expectation—morally, socially, or emotionally. But our impulse as writers is often to overprotect them, unconsciously intervening to justify their motives or force a premature redemption. This class resists those safety nets. Combining psychologically-informed craft discussion with close readings and generative exercises, we will be writing against our moral reflexes and actively engaging with discomfort to build and sustain unputdownable narrative tension.

Everyone loses sometimes, but at what point does a character become an undeniable loser? In this short course and workshop, we’ll explore how to write all varieties of losers, failures, flunk outs, and flops. Students will explore the craft questions behind writing losers, like what qualities are indelible to losers? What can writing losers and flops teach us about agency in fiction and beyond? How can losers enable writers to comment on larger cultural forces, such as economic alienation or the role technology plays in our lives? The class is open to writers of any experience level with an interest in fiction or prose writing.

In this short course and workshop, students will explore new ways to write about the illness, disability, or the body through experimental poetry and prose, moving beyond or subverting a medical perspective. Students will be given a variety of generative prompts, encouraging them to consider how a social, political, emotional, or personal lens interacts with narratives about the body. We’ll read work by writers doing innovative work around the body, illness, and disability, including Katie Farris, Elaine Scarry, Torrin A. Greathouse, Melissa Febos, Ilya Kaminsky, and Nicole Sealey, studying the craft behind them. Each student will have the opportunity to workshop at least one piece in a supportive environment.

This course is for poets working at any level in their poetry who are interested in learning about the form of the "Ghazal" including its history, elements, and adaptations into the English language. Students will leave with a portfolio of 5-6 ghazals of their own.   

Have you been interested in pursuing writing in a more dedicated way, but feel like you might need more practice honing your voice before you aim for publication? Or maybe your interests speak to a very niche audience, and you want more control over your words? This course will provide ways to get started writing for a small, curated audience—even if it’s an audience of one!

People are natural storytellers—so why are plot and pace so hard to figure out? In one session, we’ll break down the fundamentals of character and conflict to discover tools for creating powerful and satisfying stories of any length. A class for when you realize your project can no longer coast on vibes, or when you’re struggling to figure out what your draft is missing.

Read any online humor pub, and you’ll start to notice that a lot of published humor pieces start with a simple trick: take something familiar and map it onto something unexpected. In this two-hour craft session, we’ll break down the mechanics of mapping: pairing real-world situations with recognizable formats, templates, genres, or characters. We’ll study examples, experiment with mapping prompts, and generate premises that create instant comedic tension. Students will leave class with several map-based ideas and a repeatable technique they can use anytime they need to spark a new humor piece.

In this two-hour seminar and workshop, students will learn how to pitch essays (personal, narrative, reported) to magazine editors for publication. We will study why pitching is an important practice for working writers, as well as what makes a successful pitch, by reading essay excerpts and pitch examples, and trying out brainstorming exercises to write our own essay pitches.