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Visiting Writers Workshops

Previous 2021

REGISTRATION CLOSED

*ONLINE*
One Day Writing Workshop with Michael Piekny
Fundamentals of Scene Structure - How to Tell a Story
Date: Saturday, June 12th
Time: 5:00-8:00PM ET
Location: online via Zoom
Fee: $100

This class will introduce you to the fundamentals of scene structure and examine how the right structure improves the power of your story. Scenes are perhaps the most important unit of storytelling for how they advance the plot and build the global narrative. All good scenes have a common set of underlying principles that make them work, and abiding by these principles helps guide readers through the crescendo of action in your scene and adds to the reader’s overall engagement with the story. This class will introduce the six elements that a scene must have in order for that scene to be effective and for that proper structural arc to be in place. The first half of the seminar will define and explore each element of scene structure, and the second half will look at how these elements operate successfully in a story, using examples from literature and film. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of what makes a scene work and how to apply these principles in their own writing.

Michael Piekny is the founder of Hub Edits, a professional editorial agency. He works with clients on various projects including editing, ghostwriting, and craft development. His traditionally published and self-published clients have been featured on numerous book lists and bestseller lists. In addition to Hub Edits, Michael is an Editor at Encircle Publications, an independent press publishing a wide variety of titles. At Encircle, Michael is primarily responsible for acquiring, editing, and promoting the press’s titles. Michael also serves in an advisory capacity to InkWell Publishing, an independent press, where he provides editorial consulting. Michael is on the Board of Directors of the Independent Publishers of New England and on the Editorial Board of the online literary journal, The Fictional Café. He can be found at hubedits.com.

*ONLINE*
One Day Writing Workshop with Mya Spalter
The Deal: A Workshop on the Mechanics of Book Publishing
Date: Saturday, May 15th
Time: 1:00-4:00PM EST
Location: online via Zoom
Fee: $100

The process of transforming a finished draft into a published book can be long and too often cloaked in mystery. In this workshop we’ll discuss the process of querying agents, what an agent does/can do for you, how publishing deals and auctions work, what an advance is and how it’s structured, what royalties are, and under what circumstances they are paid and what your copyrights entail, and some strategies for how one may want to conduct their business as an author. We’ll also discuss the lifecycle of a book as it undergoes the editorial process with a publisher and how this process may differ depending on both the book and publisher. In short, this workshop will aim to address any questions about the mechanics of book publishing that most writing programs can’t or don’t provide.

Participants will be encouraged to submit in advance any questions or suggested areas of the book publishing process that they would like to discuss or demystify. The facilitator will do their best to provide competent answers to these questions.

Mya Spalter is an author of editorial experience. She has worked for many years as one of the 1% of editors in the publishing industry who are Black, and is now among the 5% of published authors who are Black. She is realizing how terrifically small a group of people that is and how relevant her experience might be to others. Her nonfiction book Enchantments: A Modern Witch’s Guide to Self Possession was published by Random House/Lenny Books in 2018. She’s mostly a poet. She’s writing a novel anyway.

SOLD OUT

*ONLINE COURSE*
Fiction Workshop with K-Ming Chang
Writing Family Stories
Dates: Monday, May 17 - Friday, May 21
Location: online via Zoom
Times: 6:00-7:30PM ET
Fee: $250

This workshop will explore the process of writing family narratives, whether fiction or nonfiction, examining the "family" (which can be defined many ways) as a framework for survival, history, agency, and reclamation. This is a generative class for those who want to carve out time to write and experiment. Through prompts and exercises, we will explore how family stories can function as microcosms of collective histories, as the fabric of folklore, myths, and oral stories, and as spaces for personal and collective exploration. We will rewrite or interact with family narratives to create spaces of subversion, resistance, and storytelling that expand beyond the self. Participants will generate short pieces of new writing in any genre, and they will leave the workshop with innovative strategies to approach stories about family (of all definitions).

K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her micro-chapbook BONE HOUSE, a queer retelling of Wuthering Heights, is forthcoming from Bull City Press’ INCH series in 2021.

SOLD OUT

*ONLINE COURSE*
Writing Workshop with Justen Ahren
Devotion to Writing: Cultivate a Daily Writing Practice
Dates: Tuesday evenings April 13 - May 11
Time: 7:00-8:30PM ET
Location: online via Zoom
Fee: $250

This is a unique generative writing workshop to get you writing and keep you writing. Creative Energy is our natural gift. It is the essence of who we are, the very expression of Being itself. When we cultivate a daily writing practice, we bring ourselves into communion with this part of ourselves. By expressing and exercising our writing on daily basis, we build into our lives a channel of creative magic, abundance, and flow, and our lives become expressions of the life force continuously blooming and opening through us.

This 6-week workshop will help you release the writing within you, develop your imaginative skills, and learn how to sustain yourself as a creative writer. Each week we will explore how a rituals, gratitude, surrender, even doubt and play, can aid our practice and enable us to express more deeply and more freely than ever before.

Justen Ahren is Founder of Devotion to Writing, Noepe Center at Featherstone, and the Italy Writing Retreat. The former Martha's Vineyard Poet Laureate, and author of two poetry collections, A Strange Catechism, and A Machine for Remembering, he received an MFA from Emerson College. His work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Justen has taught for many years at the Green Mountain Writers Conference, 1455 Literary Festival, San Miguel Literary Festival, and Italy Writing Retreat. He finds it inspiring and fulfilling to help people cultivate a life in writing.

Scholarships Available for Emerging Underrepresented Poets!
Two full scholarships are now available to attend “Elegies are Odes, Odes are Elegies Too” - a poetry workshop with Angel Nafis. This workshop will take place online Monday, April 5th - Friday, April 9th from 7 pm - 8:30 pm ET.
Open to emerging poets from underrepresented groups, the recipients will be chosen by poet, author, and Literary Arts at Featherstone Advisory Board member Jennifer Smith-Turner.
Please submit one poem pasted into the body of an email to Mathea by March 26th

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

SOLD OUT

*ONLINE COURSE*
Poetry Workshop with Angel Nafis
Elegies Are Odes, Odes Are Elegies Too
Dates: Monday, April 5 - Friday, April 9
Time: 7:00-8:30PM ET
Location: online via Zoom
Fee: $250

Whether you find yourself swept up in the awe of glorious celebration or debilitating mourning, the corresponding poetry you may turn to might carry some of the same ingredients. Exactly what makes an elegy or an ode anyhow? What is the difference between something elevated in delight or distress? And what about that murky area where we feel both joy and sadness? This workshop will focus on the components and potential of both the ode and the elegy. How they each bend to encompass the mundane and extraordinary elements of our earth. Participants will explore both structures in each of their traditional gestures of praise and grief - but too they will be asked to look at the possibilities of the "un-odable" things and the "immortal" things in their lives through the scrutinizing of the unconventional, the ordinary and the downright detestable. Relevant authors utilized in the workshop will include but are not limited to: Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rainer Maria Rilke, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds, Toi Derricotte, Shira Erlichman, Ross Gay, and Aracelis Girmay.

Angel Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The BreakBeat Poets Anthology, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of a Millay Colony residency, an Urban Word NYC mentor, and the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. In 2011 she represented NYC at both the Women of the World Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam. She is half of the ODES FOR YOU TOUR with poet, musician and visual artist Shira Erlichman and with poet Morgan Parker, she runs The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. Facilitating writing workshops and reading poems globally, she lives in Brooklyn. In 2016, Nafis was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and in 2017 she was awarded a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts

Photo by Hieu Minh Nguyen

*ONLINE COURSE*
Poetry Workshop with Shira Erlichman
Nothing for Granted
Dates: Monday, February 15 - Friday, February 19
Time: 4:30-6:00PM EST
Location: online via Zoom
Fee: $250

In his brief poem “Watermelons” Charles Simic writes, “Green Buddhas / On the fruit stand. / We eat the smile / And spit out the teeth.” And just like that, an ordinary watermelon is transformed into a Buddha; a slice into a smile; the seeds, fittingly, into teeth we’ll spit. In this workshop, we’ll follow Simic’s example by inviting the familiar to arrive with unprecedented freshness. Through ostranenie, or defamiliarization, we’ll take nothing for granted. Whether a watermelon, a partner, illness, grief, or the (seemingly) mundane details of our lives, we’ll train our perspective toward openness and possibility, asking of the ordinary objects and people in our lives: who is this alien before me? Guided by the work of Aracelis Girmay, Angel Nafis, Sharon Olds and Kaveh Akbar (among others), we’ll use tools such as ode, surrealism, haiku, and landscape to become fiercely intimate with the ordinary. After all, it’s our job as poets to electrify the dulled, honor the overlooked, and destabilize assumption. Together, we’ll enter worlds of epiphanic confrontation, where a simple green fruit has the presence of a Buddha, and to eat a slice is to eat a smile.

Shira Erlichman is an author, visual artist, and musician. She recently released her debut poetry book Odes to Lithium and children's book Be/Hold. She's received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Millay Residency, and AIR Serenbe. Her work has been featured in The Rumpus, PBS NewsHour's Poetry Series, The Huffington Post, The Seattle Times, and The New York Times, among others. Learn more at www.shiraerlichman.com.

“Through her nonlinear narrative of hospitalization, treatment and everyday life, Erlichman turns a confessional self-portrait of crisis into a chemical, chimerical joyride toward self-acceptance" - The New York Times
More reviews: www.officialshira.com/books

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