Literary Arts Previous Workshops

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Visiting Writers Workshops

Two Day Writing Workshop with Emily Bernard
Writing the Self through Others: The Ethics of First-Person Narrative
Date: Tuesday & Wednesday August 2 & 3
Time: 4:00-5:30PM each day
Location: Art Barn Library
Fee: $150

What do your friends and family think about your writing? Is it possible to write about people you care about without offending or hurting them? How can I tell the stories I need to tell without sacrificing my relationships? In my experience, these questions represent the most common concerns of writers at the beginning of the personal essay journey. In this workshop, we will confront these questions head on, discussing various approaches employed by nonfiction writers. Ultimately, though, this workshop is designed so that participants have a chance to compose their own positions on these questions. As writers of first-person narrative, we must be certain of our project, and that includes its ethical dimensions. Short readings, prompts, and exercises will enable us to explore fully the moral heart of the work that we do. Above all, this workshop is a “judgment free zone” where openness, honesty, and a delight in creative wildness are the only requirements.

Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio and received the 2020 LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English and a 2022-2023 Social Sciences, Humanities, and Creative Arts University Scholar at the University of Vermont.

*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.

*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.

*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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