Our workshops are THREE HOURS long and require preregistration because of limited spaces available.  You may register via PayPal or send in a registration form with payment.  (see the registration page)

If there are still available spots come festival time, tickets will need to be purchased at the Town Center Information Table.

Each workshop is $25 per person.  Registering online will be an option once times & locations are confirmed.

(This workshop will be offered once with Laux and Millar leading together.  Yes, this is a change!)

The Family: Everybody has one, whether traditional or non-, an underground confluence of riptides and eddies that buffets and buoys us forth, confused, inspired, wounded, into the flow of the world. This workshop, directed toward the various aspects of kinship, will be a forum for discussion and development of our own work, using models for exercises poems by such writers as Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds and BH Fairchild. Open to all skill levels.

each workshop will be capped at 25 participants

Less really can be more when it comes to description. This workshop will present strategies for delineating a person or a place in a few well-chosen words -- words that will pinpoint the essentials while leaving peripheral details to the reader’s imagination.

First, working from picture prompts, memory, or imagination, participants will explore the use of the five senses to bring a setting alive.  Next, keeping the principle show, don't tell firmly in mind, participants will use picture prompts or imagination, to create two or three characters. Finally, after a discussion of setting as environment rather than backdrop, each writer will create a brief scene, putting characters into a setting, to influence and be influenced by it.

workshop will be capped at 12 participants

Interesting, believable characters are the heart of every story.  Whether you want to write about your Great Uncle Bob’s third wife or a character you dreamed up last night, the task is the same: how can you make someone come alive on the page? How can you show a person’s complexity—his humor or pathos or kindness or viciousness or strength or weakness or all of the above—in such a way that your reader believes he is real? 

In this three-hour workshop, we will use a variety of techniques designed to help you translate one of the rich, fully-dimensional people you know (whether in real life or in your imagination) into an equally rich, fully dimensional character.  You will do a character “interview”, in which you write down the answers you think your character would give to a list of twenty questions, a series of “free-writing” exercises in which you imagine your character in situations he or she would not normally be in, and a sensory-based exercise in which you explore the way your character sounds, smells and moves. 

At its best, writing is an act of discovery; when a writer is surprised and enlightened by what he or she has written, the reader will be equally surprised and enlightened.  The goal of this workshop, then, is to help you use the act of writing as a way to get to know your characters better and, in the process, to reveal characters more deeply than you knew you could.

workshop will be capped at 12 participants
 

workshop will be capped at 12 participants