It’s been called the “holy grail” of personal essay publications: the Modern Love column in the New York Times. Your best story. 1500 words. A potentially career-changing publication. We’ll talk about what it takes and how to get noticed.

Join writer Tommy Dean for a two-hour generative writing session focused on creating one full flash draft from opening to ending to everything in-between. We’ll look at model texts and use prompts for each element of a successful flash including openings, escalation, backstory, metaphor, middles, endings, and titles. Instead of 5-6 separate starts, we’ll concentrate on crafting one full story with inspiring prompts for each craft element. Come create a complete and urgent story with me and your fellow writers!

Moving from point A to point B isn’t always the best way to tell a story. Sometimes we find ourselves beginning at the end, hopping back and forth in time, or circling around events until our understanding of them changes. Non-linear narratives can make for fascinating reading, but writing them poses particular challenges. How do we maintain continuity, clarity, and suspense when our stories don't follow a straight line? How do we decide which episodes of a timeline to visit? How do we make forays into the past that illuminate, rather than bog down, the present? How do we keep the reader oriented in where and when they are in the story? In this class, we’ll discuss how authors time-hop successfully and why a non-linear structure serves the stories they tell. We’ll also dive into how we can craft our own “disorderly” narratives, and do writing exercises to support this.

In this class, writers will come in with nothing, and leave with five short essays ready to show the world. The discipline of writing every week will strengthen your writerly muscles, while the energy in the class will be supportive and enthusiastic. You can and will write better, sharper essays than you did before, and while that work won’t always be easy, it will be rewarding. You don’t want to waste your reader’s time, and this class won’t waste yours!

Ever wonder if your numerous short stories are a collection, and what to do with them if you think they could be with a little (or a lot of) effort? In this two-hour seminar, I’ll walk you through the experience of conceptualizing and completing a short story collection that’s ready for agents and editors. We’ll discuss basics like how many stories make a collection, if you really need to publish in literary magazines before you get an agent, and not-so-basics like discovering and strengthening thematic connections between stories, and the uncomfortable question of whether or not story collections sell.

Recently, in a workshop of his own, author Peter Orner said, "We should all read more paragraphs out loud to each other." That -- combined with anecdotes from other established writers whose own personal writing groups involve reading pages as the ink dries -- is the inspiration behind this casual, intimate non-class class. Perhaps you're not up for lengthy comprehensive feedback on your work-in-progress, but you would like a quick temperature check from others who are also in the deep, generative stage. Students will gather weekly to read out loud short excerpts from their WIP to glean spontaneous and encouraging gut reactions, and to funnel that fresh energy back into their work. No weekly prep is required, only your openness and attention.

This craft talk will look at numerous ways that writers can authentically talk about and market their work online; whether it be finding the right beats to pitch to editors for essay and article ideas, applying to residencies with more ease, creating content for newsletters or videos about the writing life, and how to be attractive to literary agents. By the time writers leave this talk, they will have a set number of resources to effectively market themselves authentically.

Diary Comics (a.k.a. comics-form diary entries) are a whole lot of fun to put together and share. But how do you fit a bit of your day into just four panels? This 1.5 hour hands-on writing/drawing session will start with a discussion of some other artists' diary comics, and then we'll get to work making our own.

The genre of speculative nonfiction provides space to investigate truths through fabulism, folklore, imagined lives, hauntedness, and other slanted lenses. By speculating, we can bend time and space to get at a truth closer to our own subjective experience. In this generative class, we’ll discuss the expansive possibilities and definitions of the genre, learn specific craft techniques, and play with the freedom it offers (particularly for those of us from marginalized communities) to challenge and renegotiate society’s definitions of reality.

What drives a great work of fiction? How do you create a story strong enough to sustain a novel? And how do you write 70, 80, or 90,000 words? This two-hour intensive class tackles the fundamentals of character and conflict; the elements of a satisfying narrative arc; and practical strategies for completing that first draft and beginning your second. You’ll leave with fresh ideas and concrete plans for your novel, as well as three worksheets to apply to this and future writing projects.

Does your taste as a reader and writer skew toward the dark, disturbing, or morally complex? If so, we are of like minds. The goal of this workshop is to write about distress, fear, and violence—both emotional and physical—in prose that is neither gratuitous nor melodramatic but rather, resonant and true to life. We’ll read and discuss works by selected authors depicting unsettling scenes involving people, nature, the subconscious, and the supernatural. Students will also be given writing assignments based on these discussions. This generative workshop will be particularly valuable for those seeking to articulate disturbing events or scenes—but writers at all levels of experience, both fiction and non-fiction, are welcome.

A generative workshop focusing on following intuition and playfulness to create work that surprises even the writer. In this class we will discuss the idea of writing from the uncomfortable place of “not-knowing,” writing fiction from nothing. The object of the class is to generate ideas, begin writing, and leave with new fragments or full story ideas to work with.

In this class, writers will come in with nothing, and leave with five short essays ready to show the world. The discipline of writing every week will strengthen your writerly muscles, while the energy in the class will be supportive and enthusiastic. You can and will write better, sharper essays than you did before, and while that work won’t always be easy, it will be rewarding. You don’t want to waste your reader’s time, and this class won’t waste yours!

Symbols and images deepen stories, allowing you to connect with readers in new ways and to uncover hidden possibilities for your plot and characters. In this generative workshop, we'll explore how writers past and present have used symbols, we'll look for the sources of symbols in our writing, and we'll do exercises designed to help you discover and build on the symbols already present in your work.

Horror movies can be a conduit for us to explore our fears, anxieties, and have a little fun while doing it. This makes them an ideal guide for nonfiction writers. This generative course explores how we can adopt the plots and characters of movies like Hereditary, The Shining, Doctor Sleep, and I Saw the TV Glow to tell our own stories. Through in-class prompts and discussion, we’ll create our personal definitions of horror, examine what we can learn about writing from horror movies, peek at the reasons horror movies fascinate us as well as examine how various writers have used horror movies to give voice to their queerness, mental health issues, and other parts of their identity through the characters in their favorite horror movie.

From novels and memoirs to poems and essays, family life is one of the main motives of literary writing. But it is perhaps a truism to say that writing about family is not easy. As Leo Tolstoy famously wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That is what I have learned since I decided to start writing about how my mother was sold into slavery by her adoptive sister five and a half decades ago. Join us in writing the family stories we all have to tell.

Whether you’re writing memoir, essays, narrative nonfiction, or hybrid work, you’ll run into research dead ends, gaps in memory, and unreliable narrators. How do we write convincingly and factually about what we can’t or don’t know? How do we establish authority for our readers? What role can research play in helping us write around and into voices that have been marginalized and silenced? Join me for this two-part class.

Our world is one that so often tends toward individualism and isolation. Whether in our personal lives or in our writing lives, it’s easy to feel disconnected from our deepest values, and from each other—no matter how much our digital lives might give the appearance of connectivity. In this workshop, we will read, study, and draft toward poems that interrogate connection across various forms of relationships, both personal and societal. We will look for ways to expand our definitions of connectedness in a rigorous—and supportive—writing environment.

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.

If you’ve ever felt like poetry is too hard for you—that it’s overcomplicated, inaccessible, or impossible to understand—then this class is for you. This 6-session workshop will cover the basics of poetry and craft: how lines work in poems, how to think about image and metaphor, how to read and write poems that avoid vagueness and abstractions, and more.

It’s the middle of the year, and that hits us all differently! Whether the past six months have been productive or challenging, the mid-year point provides an opportunity to turn inward, renew your writing goals, or start them over altogether—if you choose it. This open-genre workshop will offer you the opportunity to honor your own work with a group of like-minded writers. We’ll discuss why we write, what mentally and logistically keeps us from the page, and how we can work to abolish the judge in our heads.

What drives a great work of fiction? How do you create a story strong enough to sustain a novel? And how do you write 70, 80, or 90,000 words? This two-hour intensive class tackles the fundamentals of character and conflict; the elements of a satisfying narrative arc; and practical strategies for completing that first draft and beginning your second. You’ll leave with fresh ideas and concrete plans for your novel, as well as three worksheets to apply to this and future writing projects.

In this five session workshop, we will explore definitions of autofiction and look closely at a few short examples or one short novel depending on what the class would like and our reading desires. We will also write autofiction together in class and work on beginning or continuing our own autofiction short stories and novels. We will do some generative workshopping as well.

It’s been called the “holy grail” of personal essay publications: the Modern Love column in the New York Times. Your best story. 1500 words. A potentially career-changing publication. We’ll talk about what it takes and how to get noticed.

Join best-selling author and craft maven Steve Almond in this fast-paced class that focuses on how to step back from your sentences so that you can find your story. That only happens when you start thinking about the larger issues of Character, Plot, and Chronology. Discovering your character’s desires, and their inhibitions, is a direct link to plot. Finding the chain of consequence that drives the plot is the key to figuring out how to tell the story. Too often, classes focus on just one aspect of craft, without realizing that these elements are intimately linked, and can only be solved by thinking about them in relation to one another. Consider this the ultimate cheat code to story.

I love great, sprawling New Yorker stuff and literary magnum opuses, but often I crave something shorter, something that hits my heart but doesn’t take itself too preciously, something fun. I seek similar when writing: to enter a state of childlike wonder and discovery, to resist accepted rules, to make mistakes, to say what I’ve never said before or even known I needed to say, to play. In this five week generative class we’ll make space for play in our writing process, and we’ll examine short-ish creative nonfiction that embraces the unconventional. Our focus will be on trying new styles and techniques, and writing with excitement, verve, and a sense of adventure.