Craft Intensives
$75
Online Craft Intensives
We’re offering online classes year round! Taught by some of our favorite writers, these three-hour online classes combine close readings, practical advice, and in-class writing exercises.
If you’d like to be notified about our upcoming online programming, including lectures, multi-week workshops and craft intensives before they’re added to the website, sign up here!
JUNE
Something Borrowed: Generating New Writing Out of Old Writing with Jeannie Vanasco
NOTIFY ME WHEN THIS CLASS BECOMES AVAILABLE AGAIN
Let’s avoid the blank page. For a lot of us, it’s too anxiety-inducing—whether we’re starting a new chapter, a new section, or an entirely new project. In this craft intensive, you’ll borrow from your existing writing to make new writing.
Bring at least one manuscript—poetry, fiction, nonfiction—at any stage and of any length. You’re encouraged (but not required) to share why you chose it: “I’m tempted to abandon it.” “I don’t know if I’m revising the life out of it.” “I worry it’s the best thing I’ll ever write.” You’ll then follow prompts designed to defamiliarize or complicate what’s there. The prompts will address the sentence-level (using figures of speech, such as anadiplosis and anaphora) and the idea-level (maybe a brief scene in one work deserves to be its own work). You’ll play around with cut-up techniques and erasure.
We’ll move back-and-forth between conversation and generative exercises. My goal is for you to leave the seminar with 1) new writing you’re excited about, and 2) strategies to help you keep writing when you feel stuck.
After the seminar, you’ll receive a mini course pack, which will include our in-class prompts, new prompts, and the readings that inspired them.
HYBRID ASSEMBLAGE: Poetry and Performance Possibilities with Kay Ulanday Barrett
Sunday, June 18
10:30 AM – 1:30 PM PST/ 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM EST
Understanding hybrid approaches to poetry means to embrace critical strategies beyond the literary norms of writing. Here, the building of poems will be like the construction of a mixtape, a curated and connected composition. Poems innovated by multiple forms of artwork and connective physical experience can magnify our impact. Collectively, we will read, write and share work, pushing our own multiple tool kits that emphasize poetry as method, as interrogation, as performance, as praxis. This session will incorporate theater, performance, writing exercises, and encourage us to polish our emotional and connective landscape. This is generative intensive will also include readings, video study, sound study, and discussion. Sign-up here!
First Impressions: On Pitching Essays to Magazines with Isle McElroy
Sunday, June 25
10:00 AM – 1:oo PM PST/ 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM EST
For writers accustomed to submitting to literary journals, pitching essays to magazines often requires a massive shift in technique. Many of the rules of submitting to journals—only send completed work, don’t over explain your piece in the cover letter, let the writing speak for itself—don’t apply when writing a pitch. The pitch needs to grab an editor’s attention in the first paragraph; it needs to present an entire piece in only a couple of sentences. Making this shift can be difficult, but it’s not impossible. In this intensive workshop, we will work on writing our own pitches, moving from the initial spark of an idea to outlining an opening email to editors. We will discuss strategies for finding the right editors for a piece, how to shape pitches for time-sensitive news stories, when to follow up, tips for conducting interviews, and how to determine your rates.
Disclaimer: This class will focus largely on the pitching process. Though we will briefly discuss journalistic ethics, this workshop is not recommended for writers looking to learn more about the reporting and research required for longer reported pieces. Sign-up here!
JULY
Propulsion: How To Keep Your Readers Hooked with Cleyvis Natera
Saturday, July 1st
10 AM – 1 PM PST/ 1 PM – 4 PM EST
In this generative workshop, participants will be guided through a series of craft insights to better understand narrative tension as a critical aspect of propulsion. We will discuss the works of authors such as Mateo Askaripour (Black Buck), Tony Early (Place of Safety), and Alyssa Songsiridej (Little Rabbit) – among others – that illustrate how narrative stakes grounded on character desire, environmental or self-imposed obstacles, and setting can be leveraged as propulsive elements in fiction. Then, we’ll use writing prompts to practice what we’ve learned. By the end of the workshop, writers will have the knowledge to inject propulsion into existing prose or the seeds for a new short story or novel chapter.
This intensive is for all experience levels. Sign-up here!
Developing Your Critical Voice with the Book Review with Asa Drake
Sunday, July 2
10:00 AM – 1:oo PM PST/ 1:30 PM – 4:30 PM EST
Looking to become a more active literary citizen? Book reviews not only expand the reach of newly published work, they support the publishing ecosystem, allowing librarians and teachers to justify the purchase and inclusion of contemporary work within syllabi and collections. For emerging writers, they can be an important tool for establishing a critical voice and building confidence in a personal aesthetic.
In this generative workshop, we’ll cover essential elements of long and short form reviews, with a special focus on essay-length reviews. We’ll also address practical aspects of writing criticism including choosing work to review, finding a home for your critical essay, and ethical considerations that will help you respond not only to work you love but to factors that impact how that work is read. Come having read an advanced reader copy of your choice or receive one through the class! Sign-up here!
Curating the Essay with Lars Horn
Saturday, July 8
9 AM – 12 PM PST/ 12 PM – 3 PM EST
In 2011, a lapidarium of miraculous healing glowed within glass case. A silver arm encased holy fragment of bone. The British Museum’s “Treasures of Heaven” exhibit assembled relics and reliquaries from across the globe. In the quiet darkness of a vaulted, yet receding display area, only the relics shone beneath bulbs—a trail of gold and gemstones, of martyred limbs and shrouds. Meanwhile, a year later, across the Thames, London’s brutalist-style Hayward Gallery curated “Invisible: Art About the Unseen, 1957-2012,” an exhibition organised around invisible or absent artworks—Song Dong’s “Writing Diary with Water,” Jay Chung’s “Nothing is More Practical than Idealism” a film shot across two-years and, unbeknown to the actors, without film in the camera—an exhibition of, essentially, empty space.
How might one translate a series of glowing relics to essay form? How can we guide a reader through vacuous space without losing their interest? Curating the Essay will consider the ways in which the making of art works and how their curation can allow nonfiction writers to rethink the creation and organisation of their writing whether at the level of the sentence, paragraph, essay, or across a book-length project. Through generative exercises and discussion of specific artworks—how they are made, the effects they achieve—excerpts of written work, and gallery curations, the class will reflect upon the vocabularies of visual arts and curatorial practice, inflecting and rejuvenating our approaches to writing nonfiction. Sign-up here!
AUGUST
Let’s Get Weird: Experimental Writing with Marisa Crane
Sunday, August 6th
10 AM – 1 PM PST/ 1 PM – 4 PM EST
In this generative course, open to writers with all levels of experience, we will focus on studying and writing experimental work that breaks boundaries, subverts (Western) literary conventions, and refuses genre. There are infinite ways of telling a story, and we are going to explore those possibilities.
We will do close readings of various experimental pieces, from re-imaginings and hermit crab pieces to erasure pieces and experimental points of view, and examine how writers use unconventional forms to enhance the themes and narrative. This is a generative class, which will include discussions and writing prompts and exercises. Students will leave with strategies for writing hybrid, genreless (or genre abundant!) work as well as the confidence to lean into play and experimentation.
We will play, we will delight in our work, and we will push ourselves to get weird with it. Sign-up here!
Faculty
Asa Drake is a Filipina American writer and public services librarian in Central Florida. She is a recipient of 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest and Idyllwild Arts’ Writers Week fellowship. Her poems are published or forthcoming with The Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel and The Paris Review Daily. You can find her on Twitter @AsaLDrake.
Isle McElroy is a nonbinary writer based in Brooklyn. Their debut novel, The Atmospherians, was named a NY Times Editors' Choice. Their second novel, People Collide, is forthcoming from HarperVia. Other writing appears in The NY Times, NYT Magazine, The Guardian, The Cut, Vulture, GQ, Vogue, The Atlantic, Tin House, and elsewhere.
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl (Tin House, 2019)—which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of the year by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye (Tin House, 2017), which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of the year. Her third book, A Silent Treatment (Tin House), is forthcoming. Her essays have appeared in The Believer, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry and a recipient of a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship Award at MacDowell. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. They have received fellowships from VONA Voices, Monson Arts, Macondo, and The Lambda Literary Review. They have featured at The United Nations, The Lincoln Center, The Hemispheric Institute, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Museum, Dodge Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The School of the Arts Institute, Manchester PRIDE, Sesame Street, & more. Their contributions are found in The New York Times, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Magazine, Colorlines, Asian American Literary Review, The Advocate, Al Jazeera, NYLON, Vogue, The Rumpus, The Lily, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. Currently, they serve as a co-curator at The Asian American Writer's Workshop. Project Description: Kay will continue to work on their new poetry collection, Root Systems and also editing a collection of essays, Eat Good for Me. Through an array of forms, Root systems examines ancestral connection and disabled life as a trans brown person. Eat Good For Me explores a trans Filipinx in grief and growing up not to mention the recipes that keep them alive. Residency: 2022 General
Lars Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental non-fiction. Their first book, VOICE OF THE FISH, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was named an honor book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award, and an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce Selection. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere.
Marisa Crane is a writer, basketball player, and sweatpants enthusiast. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Joyland, No Tokens, TriQuarterly, Passages North, Florida Review, Catapult, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. An attendee of the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and an American Short Fiction Workshop Merit Fellow, they currently live in San Diego with their wife and child. Their debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, was a January Indie Next Pick and a New York Times Editors' Choice.
Applying
After submitting payment, you will receive an email with registration information.
Online Intensives are held on Zoom and you do not need a paid account to participate. We cap classes at 25 participants.
Classes will be recorded and participants will have access to recordings for one month.
We offer full refunds for class cancellation up until a week before the Intensive. After that date, we do not offer refunds.
Scholarships
We have a very limited number of scholarships available for the Intensives. If you are interested in putting your name in the lottery, please fill out this form. Please fill out a separate form for each class that you would like to attend.