Writers Retreat

Please bring materials to take notes and work on writing assignments. In workshops, you will usually use journals and pens, but a laptop can be handy during the week. A USB Flash Drive (memory stick) is also recommended. Printers and Wi-Fi will be available.

John Mauk: Story and Subtext: Writing for Wonder

Great stories are a silent scream. They are brimming with subtext—the quiet knowledge beneath events themselves. Simply put, subtext is the unstated stuff in every story. It is made from the murmurs of life: shared understanding, assumed history, emerging suspicions, hopes, fears, needs, all the strange and unspeakable notions that haunt our waking moments. Fiction, and plenty of creative nonfiction, relies on subtext to create intimacy. In other words, subtext allows the reader to enter the story, to grapple with it, to make meaning within it, to wonder about it. This may sound theoretical, like some ultra-advanced dimension of fiction, but it’s fundamental. It’s crucial. And here’s the good news: it’s easy to manage once we get into the right gear. We can make our stories work better if we tune our narrative attention to the quietest frequencies. This workshop will focus on the tricky but wildly energizing world of subtext. We’ll help one another to tap into the muted layers of story lurking beneath the language itself and behind the scenes. Our sessions will be highly interactive. We’ll write, share passages, offer support, and indulge in one another’s efforts. All week, we’ll hold fast to a basic principle: we can all do this.

Anne-Marie Oomen: Literary Cross Training

In this generative workshop, we will play on many fields.  We will explore models in which writers have crossed genres, blurred the lines between journalism and lyric, poetry and drama, historical documents (including letters) and poetry or memoir. We will investigate ekphrasis (writing from art) and other strategies for playing with forms that don’t fit the norms.  Though I am not sure what your drafts will say, your writings just might become a little more adventurous—and they might not fit a single genre, might exercise in several arenas.  There will be some research involved, a field trip, and some speculative prompts.  This class is for those who find multi-genre or cross-genre inspiring on its own merit and for enriching their chosen genre. Please do be prepared to look at pictures and take walks. 

Christine Maul Rice: Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Best First Beginnings & Beyond

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote: All life is an experiment. With that sentiment in mind, what's the experiment (idea, thought, glimmer) you haven't tried? What's the idea you've tucked away in your grey matter but haven't quite gotten around to putting on the page? An idea for a short story, novel, memoir, or hybrid work? Perhaps you are struggling with on-going material or a revision, but are stuck in the same old, same old. Is it because you aren't sure how to begin? Are you filled with self-doubt? Do you need a push off the cliff to learn how to fly on the way down? In this workshop, you'll take chances, mix genres, experiment with different forms (poetry, letters, lists, how-tos, among others). We'll also discuss and experiment with the universal elements of scene—character, setting, plot, and structure—to get your story on the page.

Lesley Alicia Tye: Bring the Drama

For writers interested in learning more about or furthering their dramatic writing, this class will focus on elements that connect to writing for both the stage and screen but still apply to other genres. We’ll take deep dives into dialogue work and examine what makes a good scene, grapple with how to create compelling conflict and explore character development, and focus on the power of the concrete image. But we will also explore how different genres might approach the same content using the tools of their respective medium. How does a stage play handle metaphor vs a screenplay, and how do we know the story we want to tell is right for each form? Generative prompts will allow writers to experiment in a variety of genres, and we’ll even do some work with adaptations. We will also allow some freedom to delve into topics that might be of particular interest to participants in the areas of playwriting and screenwriting.