Lit Fest 2024

Writers taking workshops with Steve Almond, Emily Rapp Black, Mark Doty, Danielle Evans, Amitava Kumar, T Kira Māhealani Madden, Claire Messud, Beth Nguyen, Jenny Offill, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin, join us on Sunday afternoon for quick introductions to your instructor and fellow classmates and a tour of the Lit Fest campus. Stay for the Lit Fest Kickoff Party!

Once we accept that perhaps we might get a book published, the pressure is on to spin a story that absorbs readers so fully, they miss their subway stop. How do we write stories that keep people turning pages and feel true to our artistic vision? In this generative workshop, we’ll use these questions to dig deeply into the elements of fiction, helping us recast our work in effective, organic ways. We’ll also focus on bringing joy back into the work and the writing, the best-known cure for writer’s block. Accepted participants will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Maurice during the week of class.

Often the process of drafting fiction is a process of uncovering what it is we actually mean to be writing about and bringing that thread to the surface in revision. At the same time, one of the great pleasures of reading is noting what suggestions or questions remain just beneath the text or come to the surface as surprise or revelation. In this workshop, we'll consider the “layers” of a story and the way that being attuned to what’s just underneath the obvious story can guide us toward structures and narrative arcs that serve the project. We'll negotiate the balance between what works best when illuminated and said directly and what works best when left to be discovered by the reader. Each workshop will open with a discussion of a published short story and a brief responsive writing exercise, then move to an in-depth discussion of work submitted by participants. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 manuscript pages by May 13, and will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Danielle during the week of class.

In this workshop, we'll explore the clarification and magnification of what Virginia Woolf once called "moments of being." We'll focus on the small, the habitual, the overlooked, and discuss how we as writers might transform these seemingly modest things with the force of our attention. Each class will feature discussion of an assigned short story followed by a student workshop. We'll discuss why a specific (and at times mysterious-seeming) choice has been made by a writer as well as expand our conversations to include larger philosophical questions prompted by these explorations of craft. Topics for discussion will include the science of attention, the uses of ritual and repetition, "the discipline of rightness" (as Wallace Stevens once described it), and emotional vs. literal autobiography. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 13, and will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Jenny during the week of class.

When listening to music, we can hear a false note. So, too, when reading a work of fiction, we can feel it. In this workshop, we'll consider our manuscripts through the lens of 'fictional truth' (not the same as literal truth), asking how we might more closely approach it in our work. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 manuscript pages by May 13, and will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Claire during the week of class. Any additional external readings will be provided.

Writing is decision making, nothing more and nothing less. What word? Where to place the comma? How to shape the paragraph? Join Steve Almond for a workshop focused on improving the decisions you make in your writing. By looking critically and carefully at other people’s work, you’ll walk away with a better sense of how to improve your own. The idea is not to slow your rate of composition via compulsive revision, but to instead make better decisions in the first place and to recognize quickly when you haven’t. Accepted participants will submit short pieces of up to 15 pages by May 13, and will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Steve during the week of class.

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, the writer is always striving for authenticity, a sense of the real on the page. (William Maxwell: "After forty years, what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath of life.") This workshop will look at brief examples of fiction (Arundhati Roy, Sheila Heti, Zadie Smith, Claire Messud, Denis Johnson, Lydia Davis), memoir (Maggie Nelson, Annie Ernaux, Joy Williams), travel writing (Ryszard Kapuscinski, Ian Jack), journalism (Janet Malcolm, Svetlana Alexievich), mixed-genre writing (John Berger, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Forche) to learn how to create in our writing a certain effect of solidity or at other times dazzling impermanence or instability and even doubt. There is no one way to be authentic, there is no single, fixed notion of authenticity: instead, the richness of literature, regardless of genre, is the ability to use language to portray the richness of life itself. Each workshop meeting will be devoted to 10-minute writing exercises, an hour of discussion about the readings for the day (10-15 pages), and the rest of the time to a close reading of any one workshop-participant's work. Open to nonfiction and fiction writers, accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 13, and will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Amitava during the week of class.

Art is architecture; art is artificial; art is...? The biggest challenge for any writer of narrative is finding the map from beginning to end. This workshop is designed for writers working on a book-length memoir and wish to delve more deeply into issues of structure, style, and voice: these three craft points will be our focus, as these make up the net that holds a narrative together in a propulsive, engaging, immersive, and beautiful way. The goal of this workshop is to take your completed manuscript to the next level. We'll also discuss different avenues of publication. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 13, and will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Emily during the week of class.

This nontraditional workshop serves as a kind of supportive think tank for writers of memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collections, or any other form of nonfiction. We’ll explore everything from the writing process to key elements like structure, character, and perspective, and then delve into ethical concerns (how do we write about other people? What should we or shouldn’t we write?). Our mission will be to clarify our stories and emerge with a greater sense of focus, forward progress, and inspiration as we get back to them. Writing nonfiction creates its own particular concerns and tensions, and this workshop’s mission is to address those together so that we can also reap nonfiction’s many rewards. Accepted participants will submit up to 15 pages by May 13 and will have the opportunity to meet with Beth one-on-one during the week of class. During workshop, emphasis will be placed on verbal feedback and group discussion, and written feedback among participants will be optional.

Our lived experiences, and our memories, are rarely understood through a tidy, "traditional" chronology. They seldom mirror a Western "hero’s journey;" and they shouldn’t have to. In this generative workshop, we'll investigate speculative structures, parallel realities, hypothetical What If’s? and honor every Self as Narrator in order to come closer to the story. We'll focus on compression, syntax, and identifying narrative heat and emotional potency in our memories, our selves, and all the selves we’ve been, discussing strategies one uses to render characters inspired by real people, and the compromises and thrills that come with that responsibility. Writers should be prepared to experiment, play, share, and offer first impression oral feedback. Writers will leave with new work every day. Accepted participants have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with T Kira during the week of class.

This workshop will focus primarily on poetic form. We'll explore not merely what these particular forms are but why, how and the often underdeveloped sense of when you may think to use them. This will involve our studying, in brief, the history of these forms, their strict and loose interpretations, and how your formal poems can thrive in the present instead of seeming beholden to, and sounding like they were written, in the past. This workshop is designed for advanced poets, regardless of past experience with formal poetry. Accepted participants will submit one poem by May 13, and will be expected to write a new poem in a new form for every workshop meeting. Participants will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Rowan during the week of class.

Do you ever look at a poem you’ve written and sense that so much—the elusive but essential core of what you felt but couldn’t say—has been left out? This workshop is designed for experienced poets who would like to deepen, complicate, and enlarge their poems. We’ll read exemplary contemporary poems, engage in in- and out-of-class writing exercises, and cheer each other on in our quest to get more of the gorgeous mess of life onto the page. You will need a notebook or laptop, a willingness to experiment, and a degree of courage, which the group will help you find if need be. Each participant will submit up to four poems for review by May 13. Although all four poems may not be workshopped in class, there will be an opportunity to discuss them all in-depth during individual meetings with Mark to be scheduled the week of class.

In this seminar, we’ll explore the craft of dramatic writing, specifically crafting your first original television pilot—an essential “calling card” for breaking into the industry. We'll discuss character arcs, narrative structure, dramatic escalation, conflict, and the construction of compelling scenes. We'll look for ways to preserve our literary voice and unique identity in a form often (mistakenly) considered formulaic. We’ll watch clips from some successful pilot episodes as illustrations whenever possible, and some outside viewing may be suggested (particularly the pilot episodes of Atlanta, Reservation Dogs, Insecure, Severance, The Curse, and Breaking Bad.) We’ll also talk about the art of adaptation—turning one of your own stories/novels (or somebody else’s) into a pilot script. Finally, we'll end with one generative exercise each session, designed to get you started on the first ten pages of your script and rough outline by the end of the week. While the course is geared towards creative writers interested in trying to write their first script, the principles taught in this class can easily apply to any narrative work—stories, novels, memoirs, essays, plays, etc.