Morning workshops
Our morning workshops are a part of our larger annual conference. By registering for a workshop, you are registering for the conference.
Registration is first-come, first-served until all workshop seats are filled, or until June 30, 2024, whichever comes first.
The intimate and interactive workshops are restricted to ten participants each. Outside of our juried Master Class, no writing sample is required to register. Workshops meet all three mornings of the conference, Thursday, August 1 through Saturday, August 3, 2024, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. PDT. The conference must be attended in-person; no online or hybrid option is available.
Participants in all workshops will be expected to submit work in their workshop genre in early July and to read and comment on the work of others. Submission requirements for each workshop will be provided in early summer.
MASTER CLASS
THE NOVEL IN THREE STAGES: INSPIRATION, FIRST DRAFT AND REVISION
Francesca Lia Block
A novel can be developed in three basic stages: inspiration, first draft, and revision.
Inspiration can include dreams, automatic writing, visual art, music, movement, visions, myths, legends, fairy tales, history, real-life events, and catharsis.
First draft work can include character development (including gift/flaw, want/need, arc and wound), plot, setting, voice, and theme.
Revision can include strengthening all elements of the draft and considering external structure through story beats.
In this workshop we will start by doing some exercises to inspire. Then we will do some exercises to develop, using Francesca Lia Block’s highly effective “12 Questions." And finally we will do some exercises to shape using various structural approaches.
Please note: this year’s Master Class is juried - applications have closed for 2024.
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Francesca Lia Block, M.F.A., is the author of more than twenty-five books of fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry, and has written screenplay adaptations of her work. She received the Spectrum Award, the Phoenix Award, the ALA Rainbow Award and the 2005 Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as other citations from the American Library Association and from the New York Times Book Review, School Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly.
Photo by: Menat el Attma
Middle grade and young adult authors have a two-fold, nigh impossible task: to speak to contemporary readers who engage with storytelling through a multitude of mediums while cultivating an authorial imagination that'll keep their work relevant for generations to come. Pulling inspiration from other loci of youth cultures—music (the emotional world), animation (the dream world), and video games (the outside world as interactive environment)—participants will be guided through the modern media landscape while terraforming new terrain for themselves and their future readers.
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Lio Min writes at the nexus of queer youth culture and metamorphic Asia America. Their debut YA novel Beating Heart Baby follows two boys as they reckon with internet friendships, first love, family, fandom, and "the violence and ecstasy of what it means to become an artist" (Chicago Review of Books). BHB was named a best YA book of 2022 by Publishers Weekly, BookPage, BuzzFeed, and the Chicago Public Library.
Min's culture reporting and fiction have appeared in The FADER, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Nylon, and many other outlets. They live in California.
The opening of the novel is where the preliminary stakes are laid. Do you want to get to know this character more? Enter deeper into this world? Whether ensnaring a reader, an agent, or an editor, a writer doesn’t have time to get to the good part. In the words of Sam Lipsyte, “it all has to be the good part.”
In this workshop, we will focus on writing the openings of novels, which will hopefully assist writers in understanding characterization, setting, voice, tension, and scene among other craft elements. Besides examining each other’s writing, the group will work on exercises as well as have discussions about these different elements of craft. The hope is that you leave the conference more confident to take your novel draft to completion or through the next revision.
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Gene Kwak has published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Wigleaf, and Electric Literature among others.
Go Home, Ricky! is his debut novel and was a Rumpus October Book Club Selection, was featured in Vanity Fair magazine and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and has garnered rave review from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist among others. It was also recently translated into French with the publisher, Le Gospel Press.
He is also the winner of the 2022 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen WEX Prize, has attended workshops at Tin House and Yale, and soon plans to attend a residency through the Jentel Artist Residency.
He is also a Periplus mentor and co-founder of Tiger Balm, a Korean American writer’s collective, with Joseph Han. He currently lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University.
What makes a story “work”? How do we write stories that feel alive on the page? How can workshop further enliven a piece of writing, rather than sapping it of that first-draft magic? In this workshop, we’ll celebrate what’s already working well in each submission, and ask questions to discover how the story can more fully embody its ideal form. The class will encourage you to consider the craft choices you’re making, and how these choices contribute to the story’s overall effect. We’ll look at short, published works, with an eye toward what techniques we might borrow. We’ll discuss the conventions and expectations of literary fiction, learning the “rules” so that we can break them more artfully. We’ll also discuss revision techniques, and ponder that tricky question—how do we know when a story is done?
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Kate Folk is the author of Out There (Random House '22), a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, One Story, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and Zyzzyva, among others. She's received a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction from Stanford University, as well as support from MacDowell, Willapa Bay AiR, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her first novel, Sky Daddy, is forthcoming from Random House in 2025. Originally from Iowa, she lives in San Francisco.
Do you ever get tired of writing about yourself? Are you looking for new ways to write about yourself? Do you take a lot of selfies? If you answered, yes, to any of these questions, then this workshop is for you. Welcome to poets who are just getting started, poets who are just trying to get back into the swing of things, or more established, publishing poets, this workshop will give you the opportunity to write about the thing about which many of us are the most obsessed, ourselves!
Beginning with famous self-portraits from the visual art world by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, and Pablo Picasso, we will explore some of the motives and strategies of the self-portrait. After setting this visual foundation, each week we will then closely read and imitate the style and content of poems by Tiana Clark, Evie Shockley, Eduardo Corral, Dean Rader, Mary Szybist, John Ashbery, and others in hopes of generating new material and finding fresh new ways to render ourselves on the page.
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Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Whittier, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023). His poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with The University of Iowa's International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.
Writers have long used speculative or fantastic fiction to not only tell imaginative and mind-bending stories, but as means of reframing the struggles, injustices, and humanity of their current reality. Oftentimes, in order to really understand the world we live in, we need stories to take us somewhere else entirely. This need to refract rather than reflect our own reality has birthed some of the most pioneering writers in contemporary fiction and birthed entire mold-breaking subgenres. In this workshop led by Nic Anstett, writers will look at ways in which the unreal can help unveil personal, political, or emotional truths within their own fiction. Through workshops, short lectures, and in class writing, participants will explore how their work can engage with complex themes by tapping into traditional fictional tools such as plot, character, setting, and point of view.
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Nic Anstett, a writer from Baltimore, MD, loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the University of Oregon’s MFA program and has attended workshops through the Clarion Foundation, Lambda Literary, and Tin House, where she was a 2021 scholar. Her fiction can be found in publications such as One Story, Witness Magazine, Passages North, and Lightspeed Magazine and has been nominated for anthologies like the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Nic has also written essays and articles for Autostraddle and Tor.com.
Photo by: Myles Pettengill
Are you trying out a new genre for the first time? Adapting something you’ve already created into a different form? Hoping to shake up a work-in-progress or near-complete manuscript with dynamic revision? This is where that alchemy can happen. We’ll shirk formal constraints as an inspirational act, via generative prompts and transformative exercises (from impossible stage directions to erasure poetry to manifesto-making), and engage in multi-faceted critique across disciplines. Don’t settle for only one approach. Discover what your work is crying out to be. Crystalize both its purpose and its potential.
If you aren’t sure where exactly your writing fits, you fit here. I like to cultivate a space where no matter where we’re at in the writing process, or in our career, we can always be emerging.
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Henry Hoke is the author of five books, most recently the memoir Sticker (Bloomsbury) and the novel Open Throat (FSG/Picador), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. He co-created the performance series Enter>text in Los Angeles, and edits humor at The Offing.
What happens when your archive is a ghost? This workshop delves into the many layers of memoir writing, focusing on visceral language, deepening reflection, non-linear approaches, evocative syntax, and reworking archival source materials. This workshop is a mixture of generative writing, collaborative discussion, and radical revision.
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Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, Ucross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. An interdisciplinary artist as well, she has exhibited her poetry installations and performances at the Frye Art Museum, Richmond Art Gallery, and the Asian Art Museum. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University.
This seminar will engage with the practice of writing in any genre that begins with a question of the canon. What is the canon, who is included, and does it matter? What canon are we referring to when we write? How can the work of Hélène Cixous and Marguerite Duras create new pathways to amplify writing by women, writers of color, and queer authors, and give us the tools to create a new language? To whom do we owe respect when creating a written work? The writer, the reader, the consumer, ourselves? Is there any difference between ourselves and the writer? How do we limit ourselves, and destroy our writing before we've even begun?
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Jessica Ferri is a writer based in Northern California. She is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and the author of Silent Cities New York and Silent Cities San Francisco. She is the owner of the feminist bookshop, Womb House Books.