Pioneering Our Little Worlds

with Instructor Mamie Morgan

October 19, 2024 (9am-12pm)

& October 20, 2024 (1-3pm)

All levels, all genres, 12 students max

$250

Pioneering our Little Worlds is a two-day course devoted to energizing scene, prioritizing fun, and creating spaces within ourselves and on the page we’re hungry to explore. Our main goal will be to ignite literary processes so that the art we’re embarking upon might feel more alive, available, enticing to make. 

There are so many aspects of writing I wish I’d made friends with earlier: joy, for one. Humor. Kinship. Extravagance. Curiosity, but, like, the brand of curiosity that’s consumed seven too many energy drinks. Fun, the biggest of them all. I didn’t know how much fun we should be having until I turned forty. With so much else in life that’s not fun, often some of the things with which we’re grappling in our work, I’m uncertain as to why I didn’t allow it to lead me earlier. So, I suppose this might turn into a course where we figure out how to change our minds as well.

Whether you’re working on poems or screenplay or memoir or nothing at all just yet—not to mention that other kind of project, the one where you have no idea just yet what the heck it’s supposed to be, what genre(s) in which it should live---this will hopefully be a few days where we can listen, read, play, write, and begin building the worlds of our making, piece by piece. 

Sampling of art we’ll explore: Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Felice Brothers songs, Rufi Thorpe novels, José Olivarez poems, two of my childhood scrapbooks (apologies in advance), Jason Isbell lyrics, a few Nora Ephron essays, Chris Abani, Open Mike Eagle, scathing google reviews of hotels, various photography exhibits on which I haven’t quite decided, Lysley Tenorio short stories—you get the gist…

Writing The Everyday

with Instructor Lindsey DeLoach Jones

October 26, 2024 (3-5pm)

All levels, Nonfiction only

$50

Writers are often under the misunderstanding that trauma, major life overhauls, and wild adventures are the only subjects that make for moving nonfiction. But most hours of most of our lives are spent inside smaller, quieter experiences—and those too can be the topic of meaningful essays and even memoir. The trick is becoming the kind of writer who relentlessly pays attention to the “mundane” world, training yourself to see connections where others see nothing at all.

Come prepared write in class. In this presentation, we will do writing exercises to help you transfer what you notice about your everyday life to the page, and we'll examine others' writing to see how ordinary things can become the building blocks of transcendent personal essays and poems.

With discipline and over time, you will find you are never at a loss for what to write about.

Go here for more information about Lindsey.