Workshops

Transforming your drafts, rather than tinkering with them, will help you overcome writing plateaus and get your work published.

In Transformative Revision, I offer helpful frameworks for regarding revision and practical tools for improving your work in substantial ways. You'll get a personalized critique of one standalone piece of fiction or nonfiction (e.g., essay, story, or chapter) up to 5,000 words long. I'll tailor discussions and exercises to address common challenges I notice in students' manuscripts. There will be plenty of time for questions.

Transformative revision requires curiosity, honesty, and fearlessness. It asks us to be vulnerable and open to change. Revision that goes beyond tinkering will change the work and its author for the better.

In this workshop you’ll experiment with several techniques to transform your fiction or nonfiction in and outside of class. You'll learn what works for you. You'll leave with a new version of your work-in-progress and a custom revision toolkit you can use with other pieces. You'll also leave--I hope--with more confidence in your material, your process, and your writing self.

Powerful essays and memoirs stretch beyond the lives and events they depict. In this workshop, we'll explore several techniques for expanding the dimensions of creative nonfiction, including speculation, research, structural invention, and stylistic innovation. We'll read examples of these techniques in works from authors such as Jo Ann Beard, Ross Gay, Maxine Hong Kingston, Claudia Rankine, and Jesmyn Ward. Students are asked to bring the draft of an essay, memoir excerpt, or hybrid piece on which to work.

We'll discover where and how various techniques enhance our themes and content. We’ll address questions of balance, scope, and shape in our pieces. We’ll aim to stretch and surprise ourselves, to weave the universal with the personal in captivating ways.

Every true story contains gaps. Imagining our way into these gaps, we transform our material and our writing experience. In Filling the Gaps, we’ll explore the power in what might have been. We'll examine more than a dozen reasons for speculating and inventing in creative nonfiction and discover how these techniques lead us to deeper truths. We’ll take inspiration from authors such as James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joshua Wheeler. We’ll zero in on how, where, and why writers pivot between the known and unknown. And we’ll discuss ways of distinguishing imagined content while integrating it seamlessly.

Worried you'll bore readers by incorporating facts in your creative nonfiction? Learn how to make researched material work for you.

How do you know when too much information will bog down a narrative and bore the reader? How can you tell which facts will complement your scenes and reflections in an essential way? Weaving researched material into your essay or memoir skillfully will deepen your work's impact, reflecting the universal in the particular and offering new contexts for experiences that might otherwise feel familiar.

In this workshop, you'll discover how facts, anecdotes, oral histories, or interviews can benefit your personal essay or memoir. You’ll learn techniques for integrating this material to varying extents and purposes, from a casual reference that fills a gap to a daring leap that makes the reader’s head spin. You’ll examine inspiring examples from well-known authors. You’ll also learn about potential pitfalls and how to avoid them.