Writers Retreat

Making it Write: Four Practical Fixes for your First Draft with Desiree Cooper

For many prose writers, revision is a four-letter word. But why? Revision is merely the process of making the words paint an accurate picture of the story in your head. In this workshop, participants will generate work that will serve as a playground for revision throughout the week. As a group, they will also conduct “story autopsies” of selected readings to learn to diagnose trouble spots in early drafts and how to fix them. This workshop is for fiction and nonfiction writers.

Getting Somewhere: Movement in Fiction, Memoir, and Poetry with Andy Mozina

You’ve got an idea for a story, memoir/personal essay, or poem. Now what?

Readers like the feeling that a piece of writing has taken them somewhere—to a “point,” an insight, a resolution. We’ll explore two major ways of creating this movement in a piece of writing: Using opposing forces (characters, images, actions, themes) to go back and forth between different possible outcomes. Or burrowing deeper and deeper into a situation to reveal a fundamental insight or to see more clearly what’s really going on. One method focuses on continuous linear action to create conventional suspense. The other keeps turning a problem to look at it from many different angles until it is grasped more fully. We’ll read brief model texts to see how different writers structure movement in their work and use prompts to create and develop scenarios of our own. All genres and levels of writing experience welcome.

Inside the Nest: Writing Wonder with Anne-Marie Oomen.

What would happen if, in these times when the worlds of science, nature, and the very idea of facts are threatened, we reclaimed those elements to heighten wonder in our writing?  How might we nest our own stories in the metaphorical and figurative qualities of science and nature? Let’s explore ways to enrich narrative and celebrate connections between the natural world and creative writing? And then let’s discover our personal wonder to generate pieces that will both notice the world and nest in our stories. For fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers.

The Art of Attention: Writing the Lyric Essay with Christine Maul Rice

 “They are investigative forms, revolutionary forms. They nourish what is strange in us.” —Katie Farris

Have you ever felt that one genre can’t contain your truth? If so, this workshop might be for you. What is the lyric essay? Does it play with form? Absolutely. Is it prose or poetry or fiction? Yes. Does it do something wholly new? Most definitely. 

The lyric essay lives in the space where poetry, essay, and memoir merge. It asks us to patiently notice what most writing rushes past. In this workshop we will cultivate that noticing as a craft practice. We'll touch on what memoir owes to fact, what various forms make possible, how research earns its place inside personal narrative. And we will write. Participants will experiment with a range of lyric forms that will act as a lens for discovering what your own attention is drawn to, and how to render that on the page with precision and surprise. For writers ready to loosen their relationship to conventional narrative and discover what emerges when image, research, and reflection are allowed in the same room.

The Body Intervenes: Writing and The Body with Megan Stielstra

“Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1926. “On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night, the body intervenes.” This workshop examines how memory lives in the body, using our own stories and experiences as a contribution to a wider cultural and political dialogue that centers human beings. Pulling from both literary and oral storytelling traditions, we'll engage in activities that will take our writing out of the head and into the body, whether generating new work or digging deeper into material you're already exploring. Writers and storytellers at all levels are welcome. While the workshop centers the personal essay/memoirs, writers of all genres may find it useful in the development of story, image, and character.