Even the most seasoned writers have difficulty carving out time and summoning inspiration. This popular, productive morning workshop provides quiet, structured writing time among peers, some fabulous prompts to get you rolling, thoughtful, supportive feedback on your work, and your morning coffee, tea, fruit and muffins in our light-filled Florence studio. Jumpstart your writing life this season! Craft tips and inspiring quotes each week…
Tues/Thurs or Friday mornings, 9:30 am – 12:30 pm; Spring Session starts week of March 10
You have an important story to tell, but what’s the best way to tell it? Memoirists grapple with many of the same structural questions that face novelists and other storytellers. Through specific craft exercises, examining published excerpts, generating new work and receiving supportive feedback, writers will try out potential structures for their memoir and gain tools for choosing and incorporating a structure that will help their story shine.
6 Wednesdays, 9:30 am – 12:30 pm, starting Feb 26 ($245)
In this workshop, writers will learn the individual craft elements essential to great story-telling. Each week, we will start with a brief warmup, a craft tip, and a series of prompts designed to add specific craft elements to each writer’s toolbox—setting, dialogue, subtext, conflict, backstory.
Monday nights, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.: 8-week Spring Session begins March 2 ($325)
In this weekly generative workshop, writers will receive a series of prompts to help them tap into their deepest material and move them into a sustained period of writing. Afterward, we’ll have the opportunity to share our work and receive thoughtful feedback from the group. Weekly craft tips!
Wednesdays, 6-9pm: 10-week Late Spring workshop begins May 6 ($395)
The perfect way to jumpstart your next creative project! Spend four weeks in March devoted to your writing. In each of the weekly workshops, writers will start with a brief warmup, an inspiring set of prompts, craft tips, and plenty of time to write.
Thursdays, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m.; 4-week workshop begins March 5 ($175)
This 6-week workshop is tailored for writers who want to explore settings outside the ordinary, known world. Each week, we’ll highlight a craft topic related to world-building, including: the role of research, mapping your world, when/how to use unfamiliar languages, establishing or researching the rules of your world, and keeping your characters believable within the parameters you or history has set for your story.
6 Tuesdays, 6 – 9 pm, Starting April 7 ($245)
In this morning craft intensive, we’ll cover some essential techniques for mastering narrative time, including how to create deeply experiential ‘real-time’ scenes, integrate lively backstory while maintaining narrative flow, flash backward and forward in time without losing the thread, and build effective transitions for holding it all together.
Saturday, February 29, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)
In this half-day workshop, writers will discover the fundamentals of submitting their work to literary journals, websites, and magazines. We’ll discuss how to find the right venue for your work, how to organize your submissions, what to include in a cover letter, and how to deal with and respond to inevitable rejections (or acceptances!).
Saturday, March 7, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)
In this half-day workshop, multi-published author Susanne Dunlap will bring her background in advertising and marketing to the table to help writers navigate the murky waters of self-promotion. We will cover the basics of using your free social-media accounts to connect with readers, as well as how to set up Facebook ads and dip your toes into Amazon advertising—without losing your shirt.
Saturday, March 14, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)
Want to try something new with your writing in the New Year? Are you curious about reading or writing graphic novels but don’t know where to start? In this workshop, writers will receive a crash course in the graphic novel manuscript format. We’ll break down page-based pacing, learn the mathematical formulas that balance graphics with wordage, and turn the medium’s monotonous conventions into something with a little more approachability and style.
Saturday, March 21, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)
Journals and notebooks are the unsung heroes of the writer’s life, where we record, reflect and celebrate the sources of our creative works: daily observation, imagination, memory, and dream. In this workshop, we’ll enliven our journaling practice to recharge our creativity, hone our craft, and connect more deeply with the source of our writing.
Sunday, March 29, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)
Back by popular demand! Effective dialogue is the linchpin of successful scene-writing. Dialogue can propel a story forward, reveal character, increase narrative tension: in short, dialogue done well engages readers like no other craft element. Yet, for almost all writers, writing compelling and authentic dialogue is one of the biggest hurdles. In this illuminating half-day intensive, writers will look closely at the elements of dialogue that make for effective scene work.
Saturday, April 4, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)
Do you long for a breakthrough in your writing, feel locked-in to patterns, or abandoned by your muse? Does your writing style need an infusion of freshness or depth? This afternoon workshop goes beyond genre to explore the lyric in your prose (and narrative in your poetry)—and in everything you read.
Saturday, April 25, 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. ($75)
The braided essay takes any number of differing narratives and with those “strands,” weaves them together to form a braid. In this half-day workshop we’ll explore some braided essay examples, brainstorm and trouble shoot ideas for your own, and have some guided writing time to help get a draft down on paper.
Saturday, May 2, 9:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m. ($75)
Spend the morning with a published romance novelist, learning to marry the basics of fiction craft with the specific requirements of this compelling genre. Whether you seek to write historical or contemporary, realistic or paranormal, queer or straight, vampire or time-traveler romances, you’ll come away with tools for writing stories that readers will fall in love with.
Saturday, May 9, 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. ($75)
Writing about the hard stuff is, well, hard. And sometimes it takes courage to share your stories. It helps to have some tried and true techniques for accessing deep material, as well as ideas for how (and whether) to share it. Use this half-day workshop as a laboratory for uncovering or discovering what you most want (but fear) to give voice to.
Saturday, May 16, 9:30 a.m. – 12:20 p.m. ($75)
Come join us for a morning of writing among peers in our bright, beautiful space! After a short warm up, we’ll engage in a sustained writing period in response to a variety of prompts. We’ll share some of our work and receive supportive feedback. A great way to jumpstart your writing projects! Rotating instructors… Suggested donation of $10.
First and Third Sunday of every month (except June), 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
January 19: Emily Lackey
February 2: Dori Ostermiller
February 16: Cathy Luna
March 1: Justin LaFrenier
March 15: Tzivia Gover
April 5: TBD
April 19: TBD
May 3: Dori Ostermiller
May 17: TBD
June 21: Justin LaFrenier
Writing a book in isolation can feel like climbing Mt. Everest with no oxygen and no guide! In order to support and guide writers through this daunting task, we offer the Manuscript Intensive Series, a year-long program for writers with prose manuscripts in progress that call for critical response and new writing. Writers can be working on novels, short story collections, memoirs or essay collections. This group will provide the structure, support, inspiration and critical feedback to help writers complete a book-length manuscript.
This is serious work that gets books written! Dozens of finished manuscripts have emerged from this process, and many have gone on to publication, including Dinah Mack’s Pirates of Cologne, Dusty Miller’s Alice Ott Mystery Series, Ruth Lehrer’s Being Fishkill, JoAnne Jones’s Headstrong, Steve Bernstein’s Stories from the Stoop, and Dori’s Outside the Ordinary World, among many others…
