Literary Arts Workshops

Open Writing Hours
Day: Sundays
Dates: February 4, 11, 18, 25 / March 3, 10, 17, 24, 31 / April 7, 14, 21, 28 / May 5, 12, 19, 26 / June 2, (no 9), 16, 23, 30 / July 7, 14, 21, 28 / August 4, (no 11 or 18), 25 / September 8, 15, 22, 29 / October 6, (no 13), 20, 27 / November 3, 10, 17, 24 / December (no 1), 8, 15
Time: 1:00-3:00PM
Location: Art Barn Library
Fee: FREE

Looking for a quiet place to write? Come to Featherstone on Sunday afternoons to work quietly among other writers and poets in the Art Barn's library.

Poetry Workshop with Billy Collins - CANCELED
Date: Thursday, September 12
Time: 9:00AM - 12:00PM
Location: Art Barn Painting Studio
Fee: $150
Maximum 10 people

UPDATE: Unfortunately Billy Collins has had to cancel his trip to the Vineyard, and the September reading is cancelled. We hope to welcome Billy to Martha's Vineyard in 2025!

Join us for a special morning of poetry and discussion with former U.S. Poet Laureate Bill Collins at Featherstone on Thursday, September 12th. Each participant will submit one poem in advance which will be read during the workshop for critique.

Short Screenplay & Creative DNA Workshop with Natasha Maidoff
Dates: Tuesday - Thursday, July 16-18
Time: 3:30PM - 5:00PM
Location: Art Barn Library
Fee: $225 for 3 day workshop

In this three-day workshop, each participant will write a short screenplay (3 -5 pages) using the process of ideation - a series of creative exercises designed to help you locate and identify your creative DNA. Ideation helps to pinpoint your original voice, aesthetic, and personal image system. Participants will learn to build stories by using striking images and character rants to deepen the work. You will also learn basic structure and the standard rules of screenplay formatting. These skills can be applied to writing long-form screenplays such as features and pilots. We will aim to create short screenplays for films that you can make, drawing on locations available to you.

Natasha Maidoff’s work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in the Brooklyn Museum. Her award-winning films have toured internationally, including screenings at the Guggenheim and Pecci Museums. She has received artist residencies to the Yaddo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A long-time resident of Venice, California. Maidoff currently teaches screenwriting and directing at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She also runs a practice as a Creative Coach. Maidoff believes that visual storytelling is a way to transform insight and contemplation into a meaningful and abstracted dialogue about life.

You Are Alive: Collaborating with Existing Text with Jennifer Tseng
Date: Friday, July 12
Time: 1:00PM - 3:00PM
Location: Art Barn Library
Fee: $75

You are alive & so is every text you encounter. In this workshop, I’ll tell you a story about my father’s journey to America, the letters he wrote to me over a period of twenty-odd years, and the book of poems I made with them, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive. Like a posthumous valentine, the book functions as a morbid factory of love. It makes letters out of letters; it enacts what it means to simultaneously lose someone and commune with them―the paradox of grief and all it gives us. You’ll be welcome to ask me questions about the making of THANKS during the workshop. Following our Q&A, I’ll invite you to collaborate with a piece of text that holds intense meaning for you. We’ll share some of our favorite stories, experiment with various modes of working with existing texts to make new ones, and look at examples of other collaborative texts. Whether it’s a letter written to us by a loved one, a public document written by a stranger or a medical bill written in a language we can hardly understand, we’ll have conversations with our texts and in so doing, we’ll discover new ways of reading (and writing) every text we encounter.

Important: Please bring three paper copies of a page of text that holds intense meaning for you. The text may be as personal as a letter from a father, as public as a letter to the editor, as intimate as a page from your favorite book or your own diary, as impersonal as a questionnaire or a legal complaint. It may be written by someone you love, someone you’ve never met, someone dead or someone alive, someone well known or someone anonymous. What’s important is that the text be meaningful to you.

A collaborative text reader will be provided closer to the workshop date. Reading it in advance of the workshop is recommended but not required.

Jennifer Tseng’s first book, The Man with My Face (AAWW 2005), won the 2005 Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Open Book Award; her second book Red Flower, White Flower, winner of the 2012 Marick Press Prize, features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen, alongside English originals; her novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, was a finalist for the Robert W. Bingham Award for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award. Her new book, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, poems made with her late father’s English letters, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by University of Massachusetts Press in April. Currently a professor of literature and creative writing at University of California, Santa Cruz, Jennifer is so very grateful to her beloved island friends for making Martha’s Vineyard feel like a forever home.

Scrivener: From Confused to Comfortable with the Popular Writing App with Gwen Hernandez
Date: Sunday, June 9
Time: 1:00PM - 4:00PM ET
Location: Art Barn Library at Featherstone Center for the Arts and Online via Zoom
Fee: $60
Have you heard about Scrivener? This program is a combination typewriter, file organizer, outliner, and research repository for both Macs and Windows that is used by best-selling writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mark Manson, Jia Tolentino, and Grant Faulkner, director of NaNoWriMo. Scrivener formats and organizes writing projects including novels, screenplays, academic tomes, features, stories, and essays. It also compiles and formats finished drafts and transfers them to other writing applications, like Word. But discovering which of Scrivener's many capabilities is best for you can be overwhelming. In this three-hour small-group session with Gwen Hernandez, author of Scrivener for Dummies, you will learn what Scrivener can do in general and specifically for your writing.

Hernandez will guide you through the how-tos of:
 Creating a new project.
 Importing existing work, notes, and even pictures.
 Designing a storyboard.
 Tracking word counts.
 Moving work to Word and other apps.

Choose between in-person or online attendance. Class size is limited to ensure you have ample time to ask questions specific to your projects. (Not yet using Scrivener? You can download a free 30-day trial of the app here.)

Gwen Hernandez, the author of Scrivener For Dummies, helps writers all over the world master Scrivener through online courses, in-person workshops, and private training. When she's not using Scrivener to write romantic suspense while surrounded by houseplants, this lifelong nomad likes to travel, read, run along the beach, practice tree pose, and explore her current home of Southern California.

The Art of Layering for Scene and Character Fiction Writing Workshop with Jennifer Smith Turner
Days: Thursdays
Dates: March 7, 14, 21, 28
Time: 5:00PM - 6:30PM ET
Location: Online via Zoom
Fee: $275 for 4 week workshop
Appropriate for all writing levels

We all love a good scene in an interesting novel. Usually there is something that happens in the very beginning of the scene that causes us to want to read on and find out what happens next in the story and to the characters. If the scene is particularly well written, we can put ourselves in the very space that the characters are in. We can feel, hear, smell, and even taste the environment that surrounds them. But how does the writer move the reader from being a distant observer to someone who is fully invested in the storyline? What causes the reader to want to root for a particular character or be so turned off by a character that they begin to love to hate them?

In this class you will learn the art of layering to develop three-dimensional characters and intriguing scenes that will hold the reader’s attention and create a thirst for “what’s next”. Just as painters will use layering as a technique to build their canvas, as writers we can learn to layer our writing so that we build a canvas of words that catches the readers eye and mind for the full length of a novel.

This is an intensely generative class which allows for each writer to explore the technique of layering in scene and character development and apply it to current work in progress.

Jennifer Smith Turner is an award-winning author. Her debut novel Child Bride won several literary awards including Best E-book for 2020 by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and Biblioboard, and 2020 Winner of the Sarton Women’s Book Award. She is the author of two poetry books: Lost and Found Rhyming Verse Honoring African American Heroes and Perennial Secrets Poetry & Prose. She is working on a sequel to Child Bride and a third poetry collection. She has conducted online writing workshops for Storycircle Network and run poetry workshops for high school students in MA and CT. Jennifer has written several book reviews for the Martha’s Vineyard Times, and a recent article about the renaissance of Black art on Martha’s Vineyard for their Arts and Ideas magazine.

Humor Writing Workshop with Damon Young
Days: Mondays
Dates: February 19, 26, March 4, 11
Time: 8:30PM - 9:30PM ET
Location: Online via Zoom
Fee: $275 or 4 week workshop

Everyone appreciates a funny story. Some of us can even tell one. But how do you write one? What makes a written story or essay funny? What are the rules of rhythms of writing humor? When is a laugh, embedded in an essay, appropriate, and who makes that judgment? How do you prepare and prime your audience for satire? What’s the difference between humor as a crutch, and humor as a heat-seeking cruise missile?

Damon Young, author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker - winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor - will answer these questions and more, during a four session seminar on how to be almost as funny as he is.

Pittsburgh writer Damon Young's debut memoir, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays (Ecco/HarperCollins), won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and Barnes & Noble's Discover Award. Damon is also a founder of the culture blog VerySmartBrothas, and was a contributing columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, a columnist for GQ, and was the creator and host of the Crooked Media podcast "Stuck With Damon Young."

Currently, he is the inaugural writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh's David C. Frederick Honors College.

Memoir Boot Camp Writing Workshop with Laurie Lindeen
Days: Tuesdays
Dates: January 23, 30, February 6, 13
Time: 6:00PM - 7:30PM ET
Location: Online via Zoom
Fee: $275 for 4 week workshop
Open to all genres, all levels

Are there specific times in your life that you’ve always wanted to write about? Marriage? Career? Parenting? Parents? Childhood? Travel Education? Aging? Illness? Your wild youth? Your life as a…? Have people often said to you, “You should write a book”?

This 4-week mid-winter Tuesday evening writers’ workshop will provide the time, the toolkit, and the guidance that includes writing prompts, workshopping, reading samples, instructor feedback, creative breakthroughs, and a few laughs! Join memoirist and essayist Laurie Lindeen (author of the memoir Petal Pusher).

Laurie Lindeen is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Petal Pusher (Atria,’07) chronicling her years as the founding member of the all-women indie rock band Zuzu’s Petals. She also wrote the widely shared New York Times essay “Johnny Goes to College”(8/25/17). Her writing has also appeared in The Huffington
Post, as well as in anthologies, newspapers, magazines, and in literary publications. After teaching creative writing and literature at the University of St. Thomas, she recently moved back to Martha’s Vineyard after a 30-year hiatus in Minneapolis and currently teaches English at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School.

Writing the Self through Others: The Ethics of First-Person Narrative Writing Workshop with Emily Bernard
Days: Monday - Thursday
Dates: June 26 - 29
Time: 4:00PM-5:30PM each day
Location: Art Barn Library
Fee: $275 for 4 day workshop

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 at 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.

One Day Writing Workshop: Crafting Compelling Characters with Dawnie Walton
Date: Wednesday, April 5th
Time: 6:00PM-9:00PM ET
Location: Online via Zoom
Fee: $100

Making up people can be a tricky business. Write them too wild and they become unbelievable; hew them too close to real human behavior and speech patterns and they’re in danger of coming off boring. So what’s the proper balance to strike, to both convince and surprise? How do writers build characters their readers will root for (or sometimes against)? What are round and flat characters, and how can each be useful to your storytelling? And what exactly is meant by an adage you’ve probably heard a time or two, “Plot is character”? In this class, we’ll do close readings from contemporary literature featuring fictional people who leap off the page (or at least make a strong impression from the start). We’ll study four core methods writers use to develop three-dimensional characters, and devote time to exercises and discussion to help you interrogate your own.

Dawnie Walton is the author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, winner of the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Audie Award for Fiction. Her debut novel was also longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, and former U.S. President Barack Obama. She is the cofounder and editorial director of Ursa, an audio production company celebrating short fiction from underrepresented voices, and is the cohost of its accompanying podcast. Formerly an editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly, she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Tin House, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she has taught a fiction seminar). Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

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Writing Workshops

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