Announcing our September and October 2023 classes! Join Talia Lakshmi Kolluri in a fiction craft class, Jennifer S. Cheng in a multi-genre craft class, and Kavita Das in a nonfiction craft class.
We’re excited to launch these new classes. More info is below, and you can browse the lineup of present and past classes here!
Tales that Travel: Storytelling Practices from a Global Perspective
Craft Class:
Saturday, 2:00 PM–5:00 PM ET
September 23rd
Open to all writers of color
While students of writing are often presented with a familiar list of works from a standardized academic canon that are held up as examples to learn from, the boundaries of storytelling expand far beyond these. In this generative workshop, students will review examples of global storytelling that offer alternative voices, structures, and styles that can be incorporated into their own writing practice. Assigned reading will include selections from Elaine Castillo, Amos Tutuola, Gogu Shyamala, Kuzhali Manickavel and others. Writers will have an opportunity to implement these techniques and discuss them in a small group setting. They will leave the workshop with usable craft techniques that will enable their work to be in conversation with pieces grounded in styles that have been historically underrepresented in American literature.
Craft Class:
Saturday, 2:00–5:00 PM ET
October 7th
Open to all AAPI writers
As Asian American writers we contend with various kinds of ghosts and hauntings—ancestral, archival, racial, familial, migrational, geographical, linguistic, social, etc. Some are gentle, some are violent, but these hauntings are related to that which we cannot name and yet for which we reach, that which is present only in its absence, or that which feels shadowy, faraway, obscured, yet profoundly potent. How might the epistolary form invoke new fields of language or ways of relating to our ghosts, our projects, and our writing practices? How does the intimacy of personal address allow us to cross distances while also inhabiting those distances? In this class we will look closely at epistolary poems by writers such as Oliver de la Paz, Solmaz Sharif, Victoria Chang, giving special consideration to how they function as ghostly communications and spaces of conjuring, collaboration, and wilderness. We will also participate in guided writing experiments where we will write letters to our ghosts by way of prose poetry or lyrical prose, altar-building, and envelope poems. Though our approach to language and the writing process is rooted in poetics, this class is open to writers of all genres who are curious about writing letters to ghosts and leaning into what is uncertain, unnameable, untameable.
Craft Class:
Sunday, 2:00–5:00 PM ET
October 22nd
Open to all writers of color
The current fraught socio-political climate is motivating nonfiction writers to engage with social issues on the page. The personal has become political, and the political has become personal. In truth, the writer has long played a role as a witness, conscience, and predictor of social change.
How do we write compellingly yet responsibly about social issues? How do we write about the world as we’d like it to be without coming across as Pollyanna or propaganda? We will investigate these questions through readings, discussion, and writing exercises.
All classes will take place on Zoom and the class times listed are in Eastern Time. There are scholarships available for each class and deadlines are listed on the individual course pages.
View our full selection of online classes on our Online Classes Page.
See you online!