Vanessa Hua is an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the national best-seller “A River of Stars” and “Deceit and Other Possibilities,” a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, her honors include the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and Steinbeck Fellowship, among others. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and elsewhere. Her novel “Forbidden City” is forthcoming.

Course Description

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro said, “Stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”

In a time when the world’s divisions have been laid bare, the stories we tell have the power to connect us. Let’s ask questions about the meaning of community, family, power, and survival in 2021. Let’s shine a light onto untold stories.

We’ll examine the building blocks of fiction—such as stakes, dialogue, setting, and point of view—as we workshop submissions in a constructive, encouraging environment. We’ll also work on in-class writing exercises and read short stories, craft essays, and novel excerpts. Come ready to experiment and share, and leave with strategies to help you revise and build a strong writing practice.

Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of two novels and three story collections, most recently “Maggie Brown & Others” (Little, Brown, 2019), a New York Times Notable Book. His novel, “Love and Shame and Love,” won a California Book Award and his essay collection “Am I Alone Here?” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Peter’s first book, “Esther Stories,” was re-issued in 2013 with an introduction by Marilynne Robinson. A three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Peter has received the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. Peter has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, The University of Montana, Northwestern, and currently is on the faculty at Dartmouth College as well as the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Peter lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont where he’s also a member of the fire department.

Course Description

Joan Didion once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

That line has always stopped me cold. Consider the stakes implied in this brief, seemingly simple sentence. And yet: How much depends on the stories we tell ourselves? This fiction workshop will attempt to harness this idea on the page—We tell stories in order to live—and also, of course, to engage, entertain, and move—other people, strangers. We’ll focus our discussion on fiction already in progress as well as the generation of new work. For me, the best stories are those that have blood in their veins; they’ve got to be alive sentence for sentence. To this end, we’ll be working on the myriad ways to make our work more vital, more immediate. We’ll also be reading and discussing excerpts of published work, including, Shirley Hazard, John Edgar Wideman, Lucia Berlin, Gayl Jones, Italo Calvino, Andre Dubus, and others, plus some poetry, too. 

Luis Alberto Urrea is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and the best-selling author of 18 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His most recent book is “The House of Broken Angels,” a New York Times Notable Book of the year, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recently acquired by the Hulu network for a series. His novel “Into the Beautiful North” is a selection of the NEA Big Reads program. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Course Description

You have a work in progress and I want to hear it from you. Reading your work to the group out loud is a semi-mystical experience that puts breath into those words and that’s what we are here for: to make your work come alive. Each of our sessions together will feature craft discussion, ideas for your practice and careful reading of — and listening to — our work. What we are after is working with the spirit of writing and all of your senses to bring your work to its most alive. It is our sense working overtime; your gift to us, and ours to you.

Emily Rapp Black is the best-selling author of “Poster Child: A Memoir,” “The Still Point of the Turning World,” “Sanctuary” and ”Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg.” She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside and the UCR School of Medicine.  

Course Description

This class is for people who are writing a book-length memoir. We will focus specifically on three craft points: worldbuilding, structure and language. We will also discuss the “three narrators” in nonfiction and the concept of layering in narrative, all in the interests of bringing your draft to the next level. Critique will be our focus, although we may look at passages from exemplary works of creative nonfiction as guides. 

Brian Turner’s latest book, “My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir” has been called “Achingly, disturbingly, shockingly beautiful” by Nick Flynn and “a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature” by Tim O’Brien. His two collections of poetry: “Here, Bullet” and “Phantom Noise” have also been published in Swedish by Oppenheim forlag. His poems have been published and translated in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Swedish. His poetry and essays have been published in The New York Times,National Geographic, Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. His most recent book of poetry, “Phantom Noise,” was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize in England. 

Course Description

Aligning Structure in Ecopoetics 
Ecopoetry incorporates aspects of ecology into poetic practice.  In particular, through both content and form, ecopoetry often examines the relationship between built and natural environments. In this experimental workshop, students will explore the idea of “eco-architecture” as it applies to a poem’s form and shape. The workshop will especially consider how an attentive experience of place and space affects our sense of that place, and explore how that sense can be recreated in poetry.

Emily Bernard is a writer and professor. Her first book, “Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten,” was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book, “Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine,” won the 2019 Los Angeles Times - Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Emily was recently named a 2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the MacDowell Colony, Emily lives in Burlington, Vermont, with her husband and twin daughters.  

Course Description

Writers of personal essays use the interior journey as a way of trying to connect with the world. The self is in service of the journey; the “I” is only one player in the story. How do you compose a self? How to craft an effective story from your life experience? Where does your story end and someone else’s story begin? In our workshop, we will keep these questions balanced in our minds as we discuss the craft and ethics of writing about our lives. Our workshop activities will include detailed discussions of student manuscripts, along with short craft talks, readings, and in-class writing exercises.

Laura Fraser is the author of the New York Times-bestselling memoir “An Italian Affair” (selected by Fodor’s as one of the “15 memoirs to inspire you to travel after Covid”), as well as two other non-fiction books. She recently collaborated with MacArthur fellow Saul Griffith on “Electrify,” a book on climate change due out from MIT Press in the fall. She has taught writing for many years, mainly at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, but also at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Stanford Continuing Studies and Aspen Summer Words. She has worked with numerous writers to help edit and develop their books from idea to publication. She’s also hired outside editors who to help her shape her own books. As co-founder and Editorial Director of Shebooks.net, Laura acquired and edited 75 short books by women authors. Laura is a 4th-generation Coloradan whose great-grandfather was Aspen’s town doctor; she currently lives in San Francisco. 

Course Description

When you’re immersed in writing a book, it’s often hard to step back and see the stakes, structure, and story. That’s why you need an editor. In this intimate workshop with six participants, we will look at how to pare down your book to get at its essential and most compelling story. Whether the work needs line editing, narrative tweaks, or a structural overhaul, we’ll use constructive peer and expert feedback to bring out your best book.

Rebecca Stead writes novels for children, including “When You Reach Me” (2010 Newbery Medal, Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Fiction, New York Times bestseller, NYT Book Review Notable Book for Children); “Goodbye Stranger” (New York Times bestseller and NYTBR Notable Book for Children); “Liar & Spy” (2013 Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, Carnegie Medal finalist, NYTBR Notable Book for Children); “Bob” (co-written with Wendy Mass); and, most recently, “The List of Things that Will Not Change.” Rebecca lives in New York City with her family. 

Course Description

Writing Novels for Middle-Graders
In this advanced workshop, we’ll examine both published work and student writing intended for young readers (ages 8-14), giving particular attention to voice, dialogue, interiority, and pacing. We often talk about a writer’s metaphoric “tools,” but it’s sometimes helpful to think in terms of lenses instead – ways of seeing our work more clearly, or in new ways. The premise here is that while mastery is elusive, there is always a way forward, and the workshop is one of the most productive methods of exploration. I anticipate that we’ll discuss aspects of craft including structure, point of view, and compression, among others, using student work as a starting place. Throughout the week, we’ll also exchange ideas about the stages of fiction writing, including generation of material, revision, and forms of resistance.