Day 3 Craft Note
Why are so many of us afraid of titling our work?
Day 2 Craft Note
There’s something I’ve always appreciated about writing. The more restricted I feel, the freer I become.
Reading List
These are some (if not all) of the works I’ll be referencing in our weekend class.
Jumping Lines: Day 3
Learn what instruments are available to you, and when to use them: it’s your song, after all. Play, play, play.
Jumping Lines: Day 2
Here is how I am making sense of this emotion, this heartache, this problem, the world, they offer to us in the same way a child may show an adult their finger-painting or macaroni art. I made this for you. What do you see in it?
Jumping Lines: Day 1
Feel free to approach this weekend with the freedom of children ripping down tape at the end, or drawing on your friend’s arm, or clearing an Etch-a-Sketch board: free from judgment and full of joy.
Jumping Lines Workshop Reading List
Before our first Zoom meeting, please consider one or more of the following texts and take some general notes on how images and words interact on the page.
Common Threads: Q&A
You should query or submit the collection when it is a complete work of art, a full dinner, a wrapped-up conversation.
Common Threads: Day 3
So: flip your stories, dear ones. Marinate your poems, flambé your essays. Make a mess, clean it up, start over where you have to.
Common Threads: Day 2
Themes and images are not finite resources. You can repurpose your obsessions again and again and again.
Common Threads: Day 1
What anchors your work? If you were a squirrel, what cues would you look for to find the bounty you’ve created—and what you will continue to collect?
Common Threads: Reading Lists
Before our first meeting, please select one of the following reading lists and take notes on the common threads that you find in the pieces.
Expand/Contract: Day 3
In developing and revising works that linger and/or zoom, think of yourself as an aye aye, tap tap tapping at the words on the page to see where you might find a crack, where you might be able to open the piece up and find something delicious or deliciously weird.
Expand/Contract: Day 2
Maybe we can learn from the way film moves, how it plays with time and pulls us along with it. And maybe we can also learn from the way even a static image can interact with the viewer's memory and deceive it, telling the story the viewer wants to see.
Expand/Contract: Day 1
Creating space in your writing for misfits—for deliberately building space for opposition—can open your work up and let a small word count encompass so much more than the words on the page.
Make It New: Day 3
The trouble with the Sierra Wave is eventually, the pilot must come down. And, as you've surely heard, the flying isn't the hard part; it's the landing.
Make It New: Day 2 (Exercises)
My work in revision is to make pathways to that pulse.
Make It New: Day 2 (Poetry)
But revision is just as much about being comfortable in the labyrinth as it is trying to bulldoze through the walls.
Make It New: Day 1
Generative revision happens before editing. It's a process of fanning the flames of what's working in your piece, of tossing in stones and following the ripple effects.
Inner Workings Bonus
When I was putting my short story collection manuscript together, I came to think of the central themes and images as rays of light passing through the prism of the collection as a whole.
Inner Workings: Day 3
Layers Let’s start today with the story of a woman. A woman whose beauty is beyond compare, with…
Inner Workings: Day 2
"That's a rule for me."
Inner Workings: Day 1
What is the intellectual, emotional, and physical journey you as a reader take, and what happens through and beneath the words to cause it?
Turn Up the Quiet: Day 3
Meander Spiral Explode By Jane Alison I hope…that thinking about patterns other than the arc will become natural,…
Turn Up the Quiet: Day 2
Everything Is Listening: The Sound of Silence in Fiction by Maud Casey We writers spend days, weeks, years…
Turn Up the Quiet: Day 1
The Quiet Machine by Ada Limón I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I…
Zoom Recordings
In case you’d like to revisit any of our live sessions, they are available here. These are only…