Travel and food writing can go beyond the commercial spheres—these stories are foundational ways for us to document our past journeys, our connection with languages, places, and memories; it also brings us a chance to learn how best to write about the things and environments that once nourished us. Each week, we’ll focus on reading 2-3 essays about travel or food that intersect with the theme of migration and home. If you have your writings to be workshopped, or are just looking for a place to kickstart your work, this is the workshop for you.

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!

Sexuality is a part of the human arrangement. We all have desires, kinks, hang-ups, and libidos. In this class, we’ll focus on the ways in which sexuality can be a pathway to truth, vulnerability, shame, and liberation. We’ll look at the work of masters such as Mary Gordon and Toni Morrison as a means of exploring the possibilities of the erotic.

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.

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’re writing a novel or short story with any sort of love or relationship plot, you know that a crucial part of making it work is convincing the reader of the attraction between the characters. But guess what? That’s really hard to do, or maybe I should say, really easy to get wrong. In this quick, fun, one-off class, we’ll go over a couple examples of fiction where this really, really works, and then I’ll share some tips and tricks for making your own writing simmer. We’ll do a couple exercises either based on characters you’re already working with or new ones created on the spot. Everyone will leave with a bit of new writing, and some ideas of how to make our readers feel what we want them to feel: convinced of our characters, and in love with what they’ve read.

We’ve all had moments where we turned to illicit substances as a way of managing our anxieties, cutting loose, retreating from pain, and even finding a path to greater enlightenment. We’ll look at the work of Denis Johnson and others to understand the ecstatic prose that can arise from bad trips.

Journals are one of the most helpful tools a writer can have, and yet many writers feel that journals are too tedious, difficult, or dangerous to employ. A journal can help you make sense of the formless stuff of life. It can be a low-stakes place to play with ideas, a format for experimenting with voice, a way to clear out the mind (a la Julia Cameron’s famous “morning pages”). The latter is maybe the most important — for me, anyway, if there’s something that’s happened to me that I want to write about, first I have to journal about it in the most unfiltered, unedited, artless, raw way possible, before I can even get close to making something like art from it.

This wide-ranging class dips our toes into some of the many hybrid, genre-blurring forms available to nonfiction writers today. We’ll investigate a variety of structures, experiment with incorporating visual imagery into our work (no art skills necessary!), and dive into the expansive possibilities of speculative nonfiction. We’ll ask: how can stepping outside the bounds create new radical possibilities for our work? What opportunities do such forms provide for those of us whose voices are traditionally marginalized? How can experimenting with form bring joy and curiosity back into our writing?

Looking to add more a little something extra to your memoir or essay? This class helps you create sensory experiences that will keep your reader engaged, specifically focusing on taking the reader into your unique world.  Tailored specifically towards essayists and memoirists but open to writers of all genres, this class is meant to help craft attention grabbing scenes while braiding with a pisces overall thesis. Great for memoirists and personal essays writers that blend the personal and the external. 

For better or worse, our lives have a soundtrack, particular albums and songs that bring us back to a charged moment or era in our lives. In this class, we’ll look at the work of John Darnielle, Don DeLillo, and other rock and roll writers, and use these examples as a way of exploring our own personal soundtracks. Turn it up to eleven.

Dialogue is a key element of compelling narrative in both fiction and non-fiction, energizing scenes, propelling conflict, and revealing character dynamics. In this one-session generative workshop, we’ll begin with a craft discussion addressing critical components of dialogue, followed by prompt-based writing, sharing (optional), and feedback.

For our final class, we’ll look at how acts of violence—both physical and emotional—can haunt us. By examining the work of James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, and others, we’ll discover how violent acts can give expression to psychic pain, and allow us to find the truth at the center of acts that can feel out-of-control and senseless.

All great fiction is about facing our fears. In this session, we’ll explore the history, strategies, and theories behind horror fiction to discover practical tools for writing scary stories, and powerful stories of all genres.

In this selective 8-week writing workshop, we’ll further explore the themes we looked at in Writing for Women on the Verge. (Having taken the generative Writing for Women on the Verge isn’t required, but it’s helpful.)  Like a traditional writing workshop, each week we’ll look at some published work and plumb it for craft wisdom, and each week we’ll discuss one student piece, with an eye towards helping the student writer hone and clarify their work. Unlike a traditional writing workshop, our discussions will be open and flowing (no “cone of silence” for the writer). You don’t have to write up feedback on each others’ work (something that can be incredibly time-consuming, keeping you from your own work). You can write in any genre that serves you, and our reading will be focused on the themes and topics of the class, spanning a diverse array of authors, styles, and genres.

When I write, I seek 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 — in short, 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.

In this two-hour seminar and generative workshop, students will learn how research and reporting can support and improve their personal essays. We will discuss why learning more about the world we live in (and talking to people in that world) helps us create a curiosity-driven writing practice that engages with contemporary culture, i.e. everything beyond our own personal bubble.

A strong sense of place can elevate a piece of good fiction into something transcendent. In this two-hour generative session, we’ll work on creating narratives where place and character intersect.

Are you a conflict-averse fiction writer? This class is for you! We will consider examples of triangular relationships in fiction as a fruitful source of tension and conflict and engine of story. How do characters’ competing loyalties and complicated relationships engage us on the page? How can we reflect on our own private experiences and observations as raw material to be transformed into powerful fiction? While love triangles will be covered, we will also consider familial triangles. We will discuss examples from Mavis Gallant, Anne Carson, Peter Mountford, Jamel Brinkley, and more. The course will include in-class writing exercises with an opportunity to share.

Looking to blend your pop culture obsessions with gut punching or hilarious stories from your life? Learn to mix criticism and the memoir in this in-depth class. Elizabeth Teets, editor of the film anthology Isn’t She Great: Writers on Women Led Comedies from 9 to 5 to Booksmart, will help you blend the pop culture that consumes your thoughts with the deeply personal. This class will teach you to blend the art you can’t stop talking about with the experiences you can’t stop thinking about!

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. 

The art of heightening is at the heart of nearly every strong humor piece, but many writers struggle to do it well. This one-session class breaks heightening down: what it is, techniques that make it work, and why it can help you generate a stronger comedic point of view, better jokes, and more complete pieces. Through lecture, in-class readings/joke dissections, and quick, low-stakes generative exercises, you’ll learn reliable methods for making each beat funnier than the last.

The practice of translation is also about close reading, embodying the emotions, understanding our relationship with the languages, and learning to express them. How do we talk about our creative works with the publishers and audiences? What else can we build, to decolonize the “standards”, the conventions, and what didn’t make sense before, through publishing our works?  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 workshop is for an experienced translator working in any language or genre.

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? How do you know if stories belong together, what might be missing to unify them, or how to order, talk about, and ultimately sell them as a cohesive book? 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.

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 session, we’ll explore how techniques from the visual medium of collage can reinvigorate our writing practice.

Stories come to us from many sources: a lived experience, a conversation, a niggling question—or an image. Some writers are naturally visual while others lean toward interiority, perhaps missing all the rich visual cues surrounding us. In this generative workshop, we’ll focus on the ways that images can provoke associations that in turn, become compelling narrative.

In this two-hour seminar and generative workshop, students will learn foundational elements of structure and style in a personal essay. We will study the anatomy of an essay in class—particularly the pros and cons of the so-called “braided essay”—and practice with writing tools that can shape our ideas into coherent narratives and lead to a first draft. 

Now more than ever we need you to write and share the story of your body, history, identity, family, and experiences. We need you to put yourself on the page. In this five week course we will read and discuss published personal essays, drawing out specific techniques and approaches to writing as well as inspiration for the bravery it requires to get real with a reader. Each week, students will receive prompts to spark their own work and have the opportunity to write and share a short essay with their peers, which we’ll discuss during class.

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.