This workshop will discuss some of the guiding principles for writing plays. The workshop includes ways to develop character, creating dialogue and generating situations for scripts. While theatre is the focus of this workshop, the skills and techniques discussed can be applied to screenwriting and other forms of performance.

Fiction writers often have a hard time writing dialogue—take it from a playwright. Let's cram as many tips and strategies for constructing good and distinct dialogue for your characters into this hour as possible.

The workshop focuses on expanding the writer's word choice.  Poets often use a few words over and over.  One way to break this pattern is to use different words--ones that have not been used.  This workshop uses an exercise to generate new poems and as a tool that the students can take with them.
For beginners.

This 90-minute session examines how to write, and how to pitch for publication, a nonfiction book. These are two very different skills, but are fast becoming equally important. The writing of a nonfiction book involves not only focus – the shape and organization of the subject – but the tricky task of scheduling and conducting interviews. And once all the research is done, the hard part really begins. As for selling your proposed book to an agent or publisher, that involves a lot of work, too, using different sets of muscles and skills. 

NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross TV critic David Bianculli has written nonfiction books on TV since 1992, generating hefty book proposals and lengthy interview lists in the process, talking to everyone from Mel Brooks to Ken Burns. He’ll go through the process of both writing and pitching, with tips and warnings regarding both, conduct a classroom exercise on outline organization, and leave lots of time for Q&A.

Bad news: There are business reasons for would-be journalists and non-fiction writers to turn back --- journalism jobs are scarce, publishers have trouble selling non-fiction. Good news: There are business reasons for those writers to turn to fiction. 1) Great stories have all the characteristics of fiction: character, plot, conflict. 2) Great stories have what distracted readers crave: velocity. 3) Consider Balzac, champion of realism, as a non-fiction writer of novels.

After 40 years as a journalist, I now write plays and novels. My play tells the little known story of the final years of Henri Matisse, the 2^nd most famous artist of the last century. My new novel is another little known story: the life-changing White House love affair of John F. Kennedy, the most famous President of the last century. Both exhaustively researched, both aimed at the literary and mass audience.

In this advanced level session, participants will share stories they might want to write as non-fiction, and we’ll discuss their viability as fiction.

This Workshop is designed to engage participants with contemporary poets, many of whom are writers of color, and their different strategies to generate new work.  

The Workshop will be in two parts:

#1.  Participants will look at poems in the packet and discuss the work of those poets with whom they unfamiliar.

#2.  We will use vocabulary from two or three of the poems to generate new work.

We will use poems as catalyst for new works. Poems by Bojan Louis, Gregory Pardlo, Jennifer Bartlett, Marilyn Chin, Maureen Owen, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Sally Mao Wen, and  David Rivard may be included. Participants must be prepared to read and write, write and write.

At the end of this workshop, it is my hope that participants will have created poems that they feel good about and have learned about.
For advanced poets. 

Reading poetry out loud in front of real live people can be nerve-wracking, but its rewards are numerous: engaging with your readership, dynamic feedback on work, community-building. This workshop, aimed at intrepid readers, will provide techniques for reading and performing through tips, in-class exercises, and examples.

When resources are limited, content marketing is an effective way to attract readers to your books. With 1.32 billion daily users, Facebook is the world’s most widely used platform. As such, it’s a great place to find and engage with your target reader audience. For free! It can be a time-consuming proposition, but there are a lot of creative ways you can connect to potential readers for exactly zero dollars! And for those operating on a shoestring marketing budget, it’s a great place to create a foundation for your fandom.

During the Reading & Signing Event, guests will have the opportunity to hear the works of the talented authors, Amy Tan, Colum McCann, and Eloisa James. Guests are welcome to enjoy light hors d'oeuvre, wine, and beer. After the reading, the authors will sign copies of their work.

Colum McCann will guide a small workshop group on the journey towards writing outside of our immediate experience.  How does the writer gather the courage to go elsewhere?  How does he/she make the imaginative leap into a character that seems so different to oneself?  How and where does a writer draw the lines?  How does he/she garner the language to go into uncharted territory?  The workshop will include in-depth discussion of craft and, if possible given time constraints, one short writing exercise.  

Every writer has personal obsessions, whether they realize it or not. Repeated metaphors, images, conflicts, etc. can all go in to making a poet's distinct body of work; however, it's also important to be aware and in control of personal cliches. In this class we will examine the obsessions of a few published writers, and will try to identify our own obsessions. We will use a series of exercises that help the writer play, experiment, and push past the boundaries of what they are used to writing. As Robert Frost said: “All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself.” Students are encouraged to prepare original 3-5 poems. Early or rough drafts are OK -- these will be used as part of a writing exercise, and will not be shared or workshopped in class. Preferably, poems should be accessible on a laptop. Laptops are recommend.

Bigotry and oppression can be seen as crises of imagination. While the manifestations of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, etc. are real and physical, their roots are, at least partially, storied. In other words, they originate from the way we narrate ourselves and our communities. Who counts as a real American? How do we conceptualize what our neighborhoods look like? Who is a criminal, a terrorist, a threat? And who, in turn, gets to be a hero?   In the words of the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

Children’s literature has a critical role in shaping and transforming our collective imaginations – and that role has too long been fulfilled through inaccurate and bigoted narratives, as well as through a lack of narratives. Marginalized communities have been trivialized, demonized, and made invisible. However, movements such as #weneeddiversebooks and #ownvoices in young people’s literature are changing this historical reality. This talk will address the need for diverse and inclusive stories for young people – not just so that marginalized readers can see themselves reflected positively in literature from the beginning of their reading lives – but so that we can collectively engage in acts of radical imagination – bending the arc of all our futures toward justice.

How can we expand our poetic vocabulary to include new and different syntax, structure, and voice? This workshop is aimed at beginners, but will be beneficial to anyone stuck in a rut of their design. We’ll look to poems as models and inspiration, play games, and participate in writing exercises all with one objective: break habits that are holding our writing back.   
For beginner poets. 

It’s essential to understand what your competitors are doing and how they are engaging with their audience. Interaction is key when trying to attract readers, so watching the people who have had proven successes with book promotion is key to developing your own goals and objectives. While it might be tempting for you to focus on building your brand, it’s even more important to determine how they are approaching the market. Knowing what they are doing and where they are playing online – platforms they most frequently use, marketing tactics they employ, content of their messaging, degree of audience engagement– can make a big difference when you are creating a strategy to build your own audience and business.

While physics and dragonology may get a lot of fictional attention, there's serious fun, and excellent writing to be had in engineering -- from widgets and timers to bridges and wings, we'll look at how engineering can work to strengthen plot, underpin character, and expand a book's impact. (appropriate for adult, YA, and children's authors)

This workshop is aimed at intermediate or advanced writers of chapter books and novels for young people. In this workshop, we will collectively examine middle grade and YA novels that have historically done injustice to marginalized communities – as well as texts that have sought to represent our diverse worlds with greater sensitivity, solidarity, and accuracy. Simultaneously, this workshop will take the perspective that writing for young people is less about “teaching a good lesson” and more “telling a good story” – and that in fact, telling good stories involves representing our communities in all their rich diversity.

Writers will be asked to bring a “first page” of writing for young people, without their names on it. We will workshop these first pages aloud – gathering collective input on their openings, voice, world building and representation. We will also discuss practical matters such as querying agents, understanding market trends and seeking publication.

For intermediate and advanced writers.

Description coming soon.

Many authors find, counterintuitively, that plot is the most challenging part of creating fiction: it’s easy to make up the people, but hard to figure out what to do with them.  This is true even though plot is the most elemental part of storytelling, the thing we use when we relay gossip to our friends, tell our partners about our day, or explain the world to our children. This session will help writers find the tools they need to create compelling plot, exploring the mechanics of action.  We’ll examine how to build sympathy for characters and suspense about what’s going to happen to them next.  We’ll also find the connecting points between character, voice, and plot, and consider the way these crucial elements of fiction relate to one another.