Creative Writing Workshop

Instructor

Maureen Jones

Course Description

Sometimes we don’t need all our words to tell a story. Sometimes it arrives like a bolt of lightning, or at least it feels that way to the reader. If you like the electricity and snap of saying more with less, flash fiction will give you a good workout. In this workshop we will explore how to hone in on the essence of character and plot and weed out what doesn’t need to be said. We will toy with the line between sudden fiction and prose poems, and let ourselves define the boundaries. We will dip into the history of this genre and its various forms, and in the process we will discover what surprises us and takes us someplace new.

Instructor

Jennifer Jacobson

Course Description

In this two-week session, we will write and revise our stories in a supportive community. The first week is designed to tap the muse and inspire new work through a series of writing exercises in-class and around Northampton. We will read short published work to deepen our understanding of scene, point of view, character, setting and dialogue. In week two, we will focus on revision. Through group discussions and an individual instructor conference, we will consider the strengths and weaknesses of the work we produce and identify revision strategies. Students will leave this course with lots of ways to generate new writing as well as tactics to move their work to the next level.

Instructor

James L. Cambias

Course Description

We live in a science fiction world, where billionaires build rocket ships and a new virus threatens civilization. The dreams and nightmares of science fiction writers are mundane reality, and nobody dismisses the genre as “Buck Rogers stuff” any longer. Realistic Unreality is a workshop for aspiring writers of science fiction and fantasy. We will focus on how to make stories which are good as fantastic fiction and good as literature. During the first week, students create stories, helped and inspired by writing prompts and readings from some of the field’s masters. Brief lectures address the fundamentals of character, plot, world building and voice. In the second week, the class will jointly critique stories and get practical advice on submitting stories, publishing and the business of writing.

Instructor

DJ Immergut

Course Description

In this generative two-week course, we’ll explore and expand our powers as fiction writers. Using works of brilliance—not only literature but also music and visual art—as portals, we’ll produce a dozen new story ideas, and hone one draft for workshopping in the second week. We’ll try out first-person monologues, god-like omniscience and a range of narrative structures from flowing to fragmented. We’ll move closer to understanding what makes each of our voices singular and compelling. Visits to galleries, gardens and bookstores on campus and in town will help inspire our work and play. In our second week, we’ll share work in a supportive atmosphere and discuss ways to sustain our artistic practice long after summer ends.

Instructor

Alex Terrell

Course Description

Weird worlds, peculiar places and eerie environments! That’s where we’ll find ourselves in this two-week workshop. We will explore what it means for something to be weird, mythical and magical. We will create and destroy worlds. We will become cruel gods and puppeteers pitting our characters against mythical creatures, disastrous events and maybe even apocalypses. This workshop is for writers who enjoy fiction with fantasy elements, so bring your heroines, your monsters, your ghouls, your ghostbusters, your stranger things and creatures that may live in the Upside-Down. The first week, we will engage in imaginative writing prompts, worldbuilding exercises and generate new material as we work to create a shared knowledge of common craft elements such as writing compelling characters, choosing the right setting and story structure. The second week, we will workshop each other’s stories, provide constructive feedback and apply the tools we learned in week one to help strengthen each other’s work. You’ll leave the workshop feeling energized to tell the stories you’ve always wanted to tell!

Instructor

Elizabeth Mikesch

Course Description

The way we choose our words can alter perception. We can render out-of-body experiences through synesthetic word combos, through rendering vivid scenes and weird ideas. It’s a power to be able to lull others into the rhythms of our visions, to sync with them. Our readers will superimpose their own impressions over what we create, and in that, there’s magic. To make a reader, listener, or audience member pay attention, to make our writing resonate with them, we have to be super sucked into what we’re trying to say: obsessed, even. Our aim for our time together is to initiate ourselves into a life of writing rituals in order to captivate our audience, but most of all ourselves.

We will become a word coven! When this word coven leaves Smith, we’ll return to our lives at home practicing our enchantment with language on our pages, and we’ll be able to share our secret to hybridized writing with friends and newcomers. We’ll pull this off through working on generating tons of beginnings to return to, by collaborating and looking at visual, aural, and textural art with words, through interviewing one another, through writing statements about our aims and aesthetics-- our codas to live by as creative people, and finally we’ll make our own rituals.

This class is collaborative and multi-genre, though we'll workshop our work as fictions, and it encourages discussion, suggestions, plans for the future, and open conversations about where you are at as a creative person today, who you want to be, and most importantly, why that is.

Forms we’ll use: lists, monosyllabic prose, mantras, long poems as narrative, exquisite corpse, videos, voicemail poems, ars poetica, writer’s statements, re-told fairytales, cut-ups, rorschach, lyrics, scripts, and interviews. Our gateway to creating new worlds will be through experimentation with form and through specific diction, making our pages sound new. We’ll also have access to a massive library of books, zines, projects, readings, settings, and sites to help inspire our rituals in generating, writing, editing, and casting our own fortune as writers.

Instructor

Morgan Sheehan-Bubla

Course Description

Do you write (or aspire to write) fiction unencumbered by what’s “realistic”? Are you inspired by fairytales, mythology, fantasy, science fiction, ghost stories or dreams? Do your characters sometimes have magical abilities? This workshop is for writers interested in exploring modes of storytelling other than realism while simultaneously learning how to strengthen all of the traditional elements of fiction. The first week, we’ll generate new work in response to a number of imaginative prompts and writing exercises. We’ll also look at short, masterful excerpts from authors who challenge realism, with special attention to the types of fabulist distortions used and the real-world truths they get at. We’ll turn an eye to questions of craft: What makes a compelling plot? How do we create characters so alive we can feel them breathing? How do we build tension from the first lines? The second week, you’ll receive feedback from the group on one story, and we’ll focus on revision and next steps in your writing journey. You’ll leave with lots of new work as well as tools and techniques that will help you continue to write and explore reality-bending stories on your own.

Instructor

Erin Butler

Course Description

Sometimes, we can understand reality better by writing just beyond what is real. In this two-week workshop, we’ll study what it means to write fiction that is rooted in, but not constrained by, reality. During our first week, you will read excerpts by some of the best writers who innovate by writing in the realm of the creepy, the otherworldly, the uncanny, and the psychologically complex. Then, you will generate lots of new work by responding to writing prompts that help you explode and extend what is realistic. During our second week, you will receive feedback on the story you’ve built and provide feedback on your peers’ work. Throughout the course, you’ll be asked to challenge your assumptions, extend your thinking, and consider what you might find beyond the borders of what you know and experience.

Instructor

Maureen Jones

Course Description

Is a song lyric a poem? Is it a grocery list? Is a sonnet a better poem than spoken word? Are there limits to who can be a poet? Does poetry have rules? What happens if a writer breaks those rules? We will ask these questions and more. We will explore both traditional and non-traditional poetic forms and examine how poetic elements combine to create successful poetry. We will experiment through our own writing generated and shared in class. We will also analyze poetry to understand how meaning is shaped. We will learn while we write. We will learn while we listen and respond to others’ writing. We will learn while we have fun.

Instructor

Jonathan Ruseski

Course Description

What does poetry look like in the year 2023? Why do we write it? Who are we writing for? What is it ‘about’? This workshop will approach these questions by exploring Emily Dickinson’s idea of the ‘Flood Subject,’ that one idea you always return to, as a means for developing a coherent body of poetic work. We will discover and explore our own Flood Subjects as a way to engage with important questions about identity, citizenship, history, origin, family, gender, sexuality, the body, love, loss, grief, joy and all the other conditions that affect our relationship to the larger world around us. We will experiment with imagery, narrative and editing techniques; and collaboratively support each to arrive at our own understanding of craft, voice and form. We will work together to take a deeper look at the complexity of poetry, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as an exciting venue to expand our capacity for language and ideas.

Instructor

Sara Eddy

Course Description

We all have stories we want to tell, about our lives, our families, things we have seen and things that happen in the world around us. How can we tell those stories compellingly? Creative nonfiction helps us tell “true” stories in ways that resonate with an audience, giving them an ‘in’ into our lives and our worldview. When writing these stories—in personal essays, memoirs, blog posts—we can borrow techniques from creative writing to connect with our readers and create diverse, creative, relatable work.

In this class we’ll explore the elements of creative nonfiction using food as our topic and inspiration. Food is a powerful force in our lives: it is a site of guilt, desire, joy, memory, self-denial, and even fear. This means it can be used as a potent tool in writing memoir, portrait and description. In the first week of this class we’ll examine short works of creative nonfiction that use food as a key element, and you will be given in-class exercises and prompts based on those works that will help you generate ideas and write your own pieces about food and its meaning in our lives. During the second week we will use a variety of workshop methods to help you expand, revise and polish one of the pieces from the first week. Take this class if you’d like to write about that time you snorted milk through your nose in the elementary school cafeteria.

Instructor

Afreen Seher Gandhi

Course Description

This course provides a basic and introductory exploration of screenwriting as a vehicle for drama development, cinematic presentation and storytelling. Students will apply their skills in the development of improvised scene work. The course will culminate with a finished working draft of either a short film or a lengthier complete scene sequence, which will then be presented through a dramatic narration and/or staged presentation. The final working draft of the script will have a complete beginning, middle and end. This course examines scenes and short films from across the world giving insight into the various different tools which can be used to create subtext in narrative. You will learn about basic screenwriting terminology, the qualities a screenwriter must have, how to format your screenplay through a screenwriting software, the difference between plot and story, creating characters and building an intriguing narrative for your initial story idea employing dialogue, action and characters.

Instructor

Chris Ayala

Course Description

In our workshop, we’ll approach writing as a playful endeavor, exploring epistolary poetry (poems as letters), ecopoetry (poems as activism for the environment), ekphrastic poetry (poetic responses to visual art), some fun new poetic forms, writing inside and outside in inspiring places, and writing in collaboration with each other. We’ll cultivate our imaginations while experimenting with our own writing and responding to the work of others. In the poems we create in workshop, and in the poems that we read and listen to together, we’ll investigate and appreciate originality, heart, music, the use of beautiful, interesting language, and the ways in which poems can represent us and take a stand for the things we hold dear and the things we want to change.

Instructor

Phil O’Donoghue

Course Description

In playwriting, students will have the opportunity to write and develop their own, original scripts. Starting with writing prompts, students will learn how playwrights nurture their own ideas into fully realized theatrical experiences. Students will have the opportunity to see and read scenes from famous plays, and then take their own ideas and out them into action. We will constantly stress that theatre is to be seen, and thus, students will integrate all facets of theatre—acting, lighting, set design, and costume design- into their scripts. All scripts will be read, discussed, reworked and performed. The goal is to have our students not only develop an appreciation of dialogue, but also to leave the workshop with a script they further develop and perform.

Instructor

Mike Haas

Course Description

Consider a strange form of writing ... where the words on the page are but the first step to an end product that is not based in words at all! The screenwriter uses words to illicit images, thus guiding readers to “make a mind movie” (and hopefully an actual movie in the future). In this course, we will study the three-act structure of film as a medium, then use our understanding of that structure to craft screenplays of our own. We will explore the use of tone, character voice, dialogue and action as vehicles to drive our scripts. By the end of the class, each student will have created a concept, written an outline for a full feature and penned three sequences from that film (one from each act).

Instructors

Kim DeShields; Jess Miller

Course Description

Stand-up comedy has the power to heal and renew, validate shared experiences, counterbalance bigotry and reach people who would otherwise be unwilling to listen. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to be a stand-up comedian. We’ll analyze the works of established comedians and discuss the impact of certain types of jokes. We’ll explore how to identify potential material, how to turn life experiences into jokes and make simple observations funny. You’ll learn ease, flow and stage presence through improvisational games and develop your own personal comedy style or persona. We’ll also discuss how to control hecklers and other distractions during a performance. By the end of the workshop, each student will have a stand-up set that they can perform for the class.