Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic instructors from Stanford’s writing, literature, and arts programs. Each week focuses on a specific craft element or process, with opportunity to experiment and practice. You’ll leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do. Designed for students but open to the whole Stanford community, the workshops are held most Mondays from 6:00-7:30pm when classes are in session at Stanford. Unless otherwise noted, workshops are at the Hume Center, Room 201. See each quarter’s schedule below for details.
Spring 2023
| SESSION | DESCRIPTION | FACILITATOR |
You Must Change Your Life: Poems about Art Monday, April 10 | At the end of his famous poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke tells the reader (and himself), “You must change your life.” Many poets have documented their encounters with works of art, and, in the process, created works of art of their own. In this workshop, we will spend some time discussing some of the greatest poems ever written about art, and then work towards a draft of a poem about a work of art we love. It will be helpful to arrive at this workshop with some sense of which work of art you’d like to write about (a favorite painting, photograph, sculpture, etc). So take up Rilke’s challenge, and change your life, if only a little bit, by joining us at the Writer’s Studio.
| Austin Smith is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where he teaches courses in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and nature writing. He is the author of two poetry collections, Almanac (2013) and Flyover Country (2018), and lives in San Francisco. |
Great Interviews Create Beautiful Stories Monday, April 17 | Do you sometimes find yourself wanting new ideas for a story or essay? In this workshop, we’ll learn how skillfully interviewing a family member, professor, or recently internet-famous alumni can provide the spark – and sparkle – you’re looking for. You’ll come away with the secrets of being a great interviewer – how to create rapport with your interviewee, how to shape questions, how to elicit vivid, sensory details, how to listen with curiosity and empathy, and how to easily avoid common pitfalls. These strategies will help you find the magic ingredients you need to develop a rich and compelling narrative. Or, maybe, the interview even becomes the story itself. | Melissa Dyrdahl is a Stanford University DCI Fellow and a Senior Producer at the Stanford Storytelling Project, where she helps students develop narrative craft skills and learn how to produce audio documentaries. She is also the course assistant in Jonah Willihnganz’s popular Continuing Studies course, Reading as a Writer. Prior to joining Stanford, Melissa was an executive at some of Silicon Valley’s most well-known technology companies. |
| Effing the Ineffable: Writing What Cannot Be. Monday, April 24 | From the most transcendently miraculous to the inconceivably dreadful, there are experiences, stories, and states that language fails to describe. By the same token, it is often our inclination, and sometimes our responsibility, to render them in words anyway. When attempting to “eff the ineffable,” metaphor is a powerful technology for getting us closer to the beating heart of mysterious matters. Metaphor allows us to write about feelings, thoughts, things, experiences, etc., for which there are no easy words – the icy wall in our body when the phone rings, or the glitter bomb that goes off in our mind when our best friend appears at our door from halfway across the world for a surprise visit. In this workshop, we will employ different ways to harness metaphor and bring words to a topic that otherwise defies articulation. Writers will walk away with techniques for generating potent and original metaphors and new ways to enter writing projects on topics that elude elucidation. | Allie Wollner is a podcast producer and language connoisseur living in Oakland, CA. She is also an alum Senior Producer of the Stanford Storytelling Project. |
I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me): Addiction and Redemption in Fiction & Pop Culture Monday, May 1
| “I can’t feel my face…I mean, I can touch it…but I can’t feel it inside,” says Bobcat Goldthwait’s character in 2001’s Blow, just after doing a line brought to him by the one and only Johnny Depp (as the infamous George Jung). In this writing workshop, we’ll explore the function and significance of drugs in literature and pop culture, whether we’re talking about Succession, Euphoria, Requiem for a Dream, the Teacher’s whiskey that Duane downs in Raymond Carver’s “Gazebo,” the Substance D that Bob Arctor gets addicted to in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, or whether we’re dialing it all the way back to Don Quixote’s Balsam of Fierbras. What constitutes believable portrayals of drug use? Are recovery and redemption both necessary parts of a character’s arc? Do drugs serve as crutches for dialogue, plot, and character development or are they essential ingredients for storytelling? Could the consumption of fiction, television shows, and films be seen as a “drug” since they demand that we suspend reality and escape our own lives? Come prepared to dialogue about these questions, to dive into your own favorite drug scenes (literary and/or pop culture-y). | Jenn Alandy Trahan has stayed away from booze since her so-called drinking renaissance came to an end in 2015, several months after she earned her MA and MFA from her graduate school in Louisiana (land of drive-thru daiquiri shacks and jukebox-driven dive bars). Her work has appeared in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper’s, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories. A former Stegner Fellow, she’s currently a Jones Lecturer teaching Fiction Writing, as well as co-teaching a course she designed with Professor Gavin Jones, Contemporary American Short Stories. In both classes, Jenn’s stoked about discussing more fiction (Denis Johnson’s “Two Men,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Bettering Myself,” and Michael Deagler’s “New Poets,” just to name a few) centering on addiction and the possibilities — and perils — of journeys to redemption.
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Myth & Memoir | Learn how memoir writers borrow from the mythological to make their narratives come alive: sense of place, dialogue/monologue, character, and research. We’ll focus on a particular moment when you broke a pattern in your life. This workshop captures that particular personal change through vivid, embodied storytelling that uses all our senses, and borrows some from more than human worlds. | Christy Hartman is a story doula. She received her MA in Ecopsychology and Environmental Humanities from Viridis Graduate Institute and holds a certificate in writing from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She is currently the program coordinator at the Stanford School of Medicine’s Medical Humanities and the Arts Program and was a staff producer for the Storytelling Project’s podcast State of the Human podcast for over a decade, coaching Stanford University students in storytelling craft. Her essays have been published in Souvenir Lit Journal, About Place Journal, The Stanford Daily, and in the book, Aftermath: Explorations of Loss & Grief. |
The Short Poem Monday, | In this workshop, we will read work by a selection of poets who use brevity to create incisive, energetic pieces, and then apply their strategies to craft our own short poems. Together, we will look at poems in standarized forms, such as the haiku and the tanka, alongside short free verse poems, identifying a stylistic economy of language that spans centuries. Poets discussed will include Kobayashi Issa, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Louise Glück, Sandra Lim, Rachel Mannheimer, and Harryette Mullen. | Madeleine Cravens is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. She was the first-place winner of Narrative Magazine’s 2021 Poetry Contest and 2020 30 Below Contest, a finalist for the James Hearst Poetry Prize, and a semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Prize. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, American Chordata, Best New Poets, The Kenyon Review, and Third Coast, among other publications. |
| Mental Illness and the First Person Monday,May 22 | Some of literature’s most storied narrators are also its most afflicted. How can modern fiction writers respond to this tradition without glorifying or flattening characters who are hamstrung by their own minds? How do we parse the line between condition and personhood, and what impact does that have on voice, plot, and theme? To answer these questions, we’ll study the work of Adam Haslett and Otessa Moshfegh, and then turn to a series of exercises intended to enrich participants’ own work. | Rose Himber Howse is a queer writer from North Carolina. She is a current Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University and was a 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow in fiction at San Jose State University. She’s also a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as fiction editor of The Greensboro Review. Rose’s fiction and essays appear in Joyland, The Carolina Quarterly, YES! Magazine, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. |
Fall 2022
| SESSION | DESCRIPTION | FACILITATOR |
Why Say Everything? Considering Ellipsis in Poetry
| Within poetry—a mode of writing that often prides itself on the concision and precision of language—there exists a wide range of linguistic volume. That is, some poems say more than others, fill in more blanks, provide more specific details to guide the reader through a particular experience of the poem. This workshop focuses on poems that let things go unsaid, leaving more to the reader’s imagination—elliptical poems, we sometimes call them. Together we will discuss elliptical language, how to use it in poems, and to what effect.
| D.S. Waldman is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, LitHub, Narrative, and other publications. Waldman has received additional support and awards from Middlebury College, Claremont Graduate University and San Diego State University, where he earned his MFA. He serves as poetry editor at Adroit. www.dswaldman.com @ds_waldman
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Haunting VoicesMonday Oct 24 | What happens when the dead speak to us? This workshop allows us to give disembodied fictional characters – or real people who once walked the earth – a chance to tell us their side of the story. We’ll consider what unfinished business they might have on earth and what the experience is like on the other side. We’ll focus on voice and dialogue to inspire new stories or creative nonfiction or revise works in progress.
| Valerie Kinsey is a Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Her fiction has appeared in Angel City Review, Adelaide, Arcturus and elsewhere; she also writes personal essays, which have been published in Evening Street Press and Streetlight Magazine. She earned her MFA (creative writing) and PhD (English) at the University of New Mexico. In PWR she teaches The Rhetorics of Trauma and The Rhetorics of Monuments and Memorials.
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From the Page to the Stage: Telling Your Story to a Live Audience
| We recall twice as much information when we hear it in a story as opposed to a straightforward recitation of facts, because stories connect to the things that matter to us. They work so well that organizations, businesses, and social justice movements have returned in recent years to weaving storytelling into their internal and external practices. So what do stories—especially live ones—activate that a standard presentation doesn’t? And how can we use them to complement our lives? In this workshop, we will explore contemporary live storytelling, taking a deep dive into form, function, and process. We’ll learn about story arc, beginnings and endings, creating narrative gems, and engaging with a live audience. We’ll then apply those lessons by sketching out and practicing part of our stories. Bring what you’ve got on the page–fiction and non-fiction–and put it on the stage.
| Harriett Jernigan is a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and the coordinator for the Notation in Cultural Rhetorics. A regular performer at The Moth Story Slam and a Grand Slam finalist, she has published fiction, essays, and articles on German language and culture and social geography. Harriett earned her B.A. in creative writing from the University of Alabama and her Ph.D. in German Studies from Stanford University. Currently, she teaches PWR 2: “Speaking Ironic Truth to Power: The Rhetoric of Satirical Protest”. When she’s not working, Harriett’s probably baking or fencing épée.
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Harness the Power of PoetryMonday, Nov 7
| A single lyric or line from a poem can hold great emotional weight. So why not harness that power for other writing projects? In this workshop, we’ll look at how poetry can be used to evoke emotion and engage readers in nonfiction—such as research papers, journalism, creative nonfiction, and course essays. Using examples of poems and lyrics as frames and touchstones for articles and essays, we’ll practice ways we can connect the short, emotional power punch of poetry with our longer nonfiction forms. Using our favorite poems or our own poetry, we will combine forms and walk away with ideas for new pieces of writing that utilize the emotional strength of poetry in unusual ways. | Kath Rothschild is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University who has an MFA in Fiction Writing and a PhD in Applied Linguistics. Her first-person essays have been published on KQED/NPR, in The San Francisco Chronicle, and in many other Bay Area and California publications. She has received artist’s grants from Vermont Studio Center and Kindling West. Her debut novel for young adults, Wider than the Sky (Soho Teen/PRH, 202) is available everywhere books are sold.
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And Then I Woke Up: Dreams in Narrative
| Ben Okri issued a call in the Guardian for writers to “confront the climate crisis” with “existential creativity.” He writes “If you knew you were at the last days of the human story what would you write? How would you write?” What does this mean, tangibly: to create a new form and philosophy to grapple with climate change in writing? What about elements of craft? What of humor and subject matter? Are there to be no more stories of first dates? Do we look at the crises head on or at a slant? In this workshop, we’ll look at examples of contemporary climate fiction and distinct approaches to addressing the climate emergency through story. We’ll also work through exercises to tease out and begin to shape our own “new form” to meet these unprecedented times.
| Georgina Beaty is the author of the short story collection The Party is Here (Freehand Books, 2021). Her fiction has appeared in New England Review, The Walrus, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, PRISM and elsewhere. As an actor and playwright, she’s worked with theatres across Canada and internationally, most recently with Belarus Free Theatre. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and has been supported by fellowships and writing residencies at MacDowell, the Canadian Film Centre and The Banff Centre. She’s currently a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.
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Emergency! Writing Vital Drama
| The very word “emergency” derives from the phenomenon of emergence, the experience of an object or concept or circumstance becoming suddenly visible. As we know from our recent, contemporary emergencies, dramatic or dangerous events can reveal great forces such as inequality, kindness, community, and anxiety. In fiction, emergencies are often much smaller in scale – a fight with a friend, a death, a divorce – but they, too, reveal and make visible things about character, relationships, and truths. In this workshop, we’ll practice writing scenes of great drama or conflict as a way of surfacing elements of character and theme. In particular, we’ll study setting and physical gesture as techniques that heighten drama and produce feelings of fear or anxiety in readers, in the service of emerging truths. | Shannon Pufahl is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program and the author of the novel On Swift Horses. She is a former Stegner Fellow in Fiction. She grew up in rural Kansas. For many years she worked as a freelance music writer and bartender. Her essays, on topics ranging from eighteenth-century America to her childhood, have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. |
SPRING 2022
| SESSION | DESCRIPTION | FACILITATOR |
Under the Fire-Snakes: Creative Nonfiction through Meditation
Monday, April 25
| In this workshop, you will learn and practice a number of creative and contemplative exercises to help quiet the ego, reduce distracting mental chatter and sharpen the observer mind as you write, read and compress short excerpts of memoir, reporting, lyric essay or other forms of creative nonfiction. In one exercise, you will practice close, sustained and non-judging observation of others engaged in simple tasks. In another, called the Sensory Camera, you will strive to render observable or recalled phenomena in their barest perceptible attributes, stripped to the degree possible of conscious interpretation. | Andrew Todhunter is Co-Director of Stanford’s Senior Reflection creative capstone program, a lecturer in Biology, and a Co-Founder of the Stanford LifeWorks program. He has written for The Atlantic, National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal and is the author of three books, including the PEN USA award winning A Meal Observed. A climber, diver and sea kayaker, he has practiced meditation for more than twenty years, and incorporates meditation and wilderness training into many of his courses at Stanford.
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MultiLayered Dialogue
Monday April 25 | Great dialogue is essential to drama, fiction, and even creative nonfiction because it does so much for a story: characterization, exposition, and action. Dynamic dialogue—dialogue that does a lot of these things at same time—is the holy grail for dramatists and screenwriters, and at least sacred for many novelists and journalists. In this workshop, we’ll look at how to create this kind of dimensional, double-duty (or triple!) dialogue, looking particularly how it’s done by masters of it such as Sherman Alexie, Langston Hughes, Amy Tan, and Tobias Wolff.
| Jonah Willihnganz is the Director of the Stanford Storytelling Project and Co-Founder of the LifeWorks program for integrative learning. He has published fiction, essays, and scholarship on American literature and mass media. He has taught writing and literature at Stanford since 2002. |
Writing the OtherMay 2
| Our imaginations are not entirely our own. They have a cultural context; they have a history. What are the ethical nuances and concerns of representing the other in our fiction? What is it about this figure that troubles, frustrates, and enlightens us? How do we create culturally diverse fiction without falling into familiar and outmoded themes? Those identified by Claudia Rankine as: I traveled to another country, state, or borough, and met race there. Or: race is racism. Or, more candidly: I met an other and it was hard! These tropes posit race primarily as an occasion to encounter or project one’s own feelings, one’s self. In this workshop we will look at selections from Paul Beatty, Leilani Raven, Ben Lerner, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, to explore the singular vicissitudes of power and race, self and other, as we work together to craft culturally inclusive scenes. | Nicole Caplain Kelly is a current Stegner Fellow at Stanford. She holds an MFA from Columbia University where she was nominated by the faculty for the Henfield Prize. She made her professional start at Jazz At Lincoln Center where she came under the mentorship of Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and Albert Murray. She has received support for her work from Faber & Faber in the UK.
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Setting as a Character: Using Sensory Details to Write a Place that Propels NarrativeMondayMay 9
| Setting is often neglected as a source of power in narrative writing. In this session, we’ll discuss ways to build a setting that calls on the five senses and helps propel narrative momentum by influencing character action. Generative prompts will include: writing from the perspective of place, writing across the five senses to generate description, writing inventories that fuel character thought and action. | Yohanca Delgado‘s work appears in The O’Henry Prize Stories 2022, The Best American Fantasy and Science Fiction 2021, The Paris Review, One Story, A Public Space, among others. She is a collaborator in Janelle Monáe’s forthcoming short story collection, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer. She is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow and a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University. |
And Then I Woke Up: Dreams in Narrative
| Dreams fill the world of fiction. From the stories of Franz Kafka to the opening of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca”, from the novels of Haruki Murakami to Kelly Link’s imaginative and genre-bending fiction, dreams guide the narrative in new and surprising directions. They can introduce memories or release a suppressed emotion, foreshadow the events to come or offer a key to unlock the story’s symbolism. In this workshop, we will read short stories by Murakami, Ottessa Moshfegh, Robert Olen Butler, and others, and discuss the wide uses of dreams for a fiction writer, both in traditional and experimental fiction. In a series of writing prompts, we will craft dream sequences and explore their potential to advance a story, deepen our understanding of character, see the familiar scene in a new light, or enrich a story’s atmosphere.
| Evgeniya Dame is a Fulbright scholar and a 2020-2022 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction. Her stories appear in Ploughshares, Subtropics, The Southern Review, and Joyland, and her non-fiction has been published in Electric Literature and online in The New England Review. She is a fiction editor at Joyland. |
WINTER 2022
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From the Page to the Stage: Telling Your Story to a Live Audience Monday, January 10
| We recall twice as much information when we hear it in a story as opposed to a straightforward recitation of facts, because stories connect to the things that matter to us. They work so well that organizations, businesses, and social justice movements have returned in recent years to weaving storytelling into their internal and external practices. So what do stories—especially live ones—activate that a standard presentation doesn’t? And how can we use them to complement our lives? In this workshop, we will explore contemporary live storytelling, taking a deep dive into form, function, and process. We’ll learn about story arc, beginnings and endings, creating narrative gems, and engaging with a live audience. We’ll then apply those lessons by sketching out and practicing part of our stories. Bring what you’ve got on the page–fiction and non-fiction–and put it on the stage. | Harriett Jernigan is a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. A regular performer at The Moth Story Slam and a Grand Slam finalist, she has published fiction, essays, and articles on German language and culture and social geography. Harriett earned her B.A. in creative writing from the University of Alabama and her Ph.D. in German studies from Stanford University. Currently, she teaches “What Are You Anyway?” The Rhetorics of Racial and Ethnic Identity. When she’s not working, Harriett’s probably baking or fencing épée. | |
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Writing Lost Places Monday, January 31 | So much can be inferred from a place beyond location. A place is a marker of time, and it shows the socioeconomic attribute of a story’s setting. Places change. Old buildings get torn down and new ones are built. Industrial buildings are being remodeled for office spaces. The demographics of people in neighborhoods change. In this workshop we will bring our childhood neighborhood, towns, and cities back to life. We will write from our memories and into the present. We will write of the place no one will ever see again because it has changed. In our writings, these places will be alive. | Ajibola Tolase is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared in American Chordata, LitHub, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. | |
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Automatic for the People: Harnessing the Power of Freewrites Monday, February 7 | Freewrites are an incredibly versatile writer’s tool. They can be used daily for warm up; for breaking out of ruts and procrastination; for getting you unstuck from a writing problem; or for dropping down into a deeper level of your work. In this seminar we will practice freewriting from different vantage points and with different prompts to get an experiential feel for the many ways this tool can work for us. We will borrow exercises from Nathalie Goldberg and automatism techniques from the current Met show, “Surrealism Beyond the Borders,” as well as consider short, stream of consciousness excerpts from Morrison and Joyce. | Kevin DiPirro is a writer, theater-maker, and deviser who teaches in PWR as advanced lecturer. His plays have appeared in New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Stanford. A Hewlett Fellow for American Theatre Magazine, he lives on the coast where he swims, gardens, cooks and writes. | |
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Language for Love Monday, February 14 | Metaphor is the basis of most of the meaning-making we humans do—talking about one thing in terms of another is in fact at the heart of language, cognition, and imagination. For storytellers, metaphor is often the way we stretch our consciousness, and invite others to stretch theirs. It is also the way storytellers try to grasp and express core human experiences such as loss, awe and, especially, love. In this workshop, we’ll look at how writers find their way to powerful articulations of love, whether romantic, familial, spiritual, or between friends. We’ll explore how contemporary writers often rework traditional tropes of love and mine ordinary encounters, objects, and even bits of dialogue to invent a fresh, specific expression of the feeling. Through a variety of short exercises, you’ll begin developing your own language for love. | Jonah Willihnganz is the Director of the Stanford Storytelling Project and Co-Founder of the LifeWorks Progam for Integrative Learning in the School of Medicine. He has published fiction, essays, and literary criticism and has taught writing and literature at Stanford since 2002. This winter he is teaching, with Shannon Pufahl, Fight the Future, a course on speculative fiction and social justice. | |
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Monday, February 28 POSTPONED TO SPRING, DATE TBA | Dreams fill the world of fiction. From the stories of Franz Kafka to the opening of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca”, from the novels of Haruki Murakami to Kelly Link’s imaginative and genre-bending fiction, dreams guide the narrative in new and surprising directions. They can introduce memories or release a suppressed emotion, foreshadow the events to come or offer a key to unlock the story’s symbolism. In this workshop, we will read short stories by Murakami, Ottessa Moshfegh, Robert Olen Butler, and others, and discuss the wide uses of dreams for a fiction writer, both in traditional and experimental fiction. In a series of writing prompts, we will craft dream sequences and explore their potential to advance a story, deepen our understanding of character, see the familiar scene in a new light, or enrich a story’s atmosphere. | Evgeniya Dame is a Fulbright scholar and a 2020-2022 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction. Her stories appear in Ploughshares, Subtropics, The Southern Review, and Joyland, and her non-fiction has been published in Electric Literature and online in The New England Review. She is a fiction editor at Joyland. | |
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Writing Wild with the Senses Monday, March 7 | In this workshop, we’ll use visceral engagement with the senses to open new paths in your writing that can help make story elements more accessible to readers. We’ll use evocative images, unexpected smells, and diverse sounds from the wild, along with several guided writing prompts, to conjure forgotten stories and inspire you to imagine new ones. Please bring your sense of adventure, ready to do some wild writing together. | Emily Polk, an Advanced Lecturer in PWR and the author of Communicating Global to Local Resiliency, has worked around the world as a media professional, supporting documentaries and human rights-based media in refugee camps from Burma to Ghana. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Creative Nonfiction, The National Radio Project and elsewhere.
Richard J. Nevle is the Deputy Director of the Earth Systems Program, a scientist, teacher, dad, and writer in love with the natural world. His work has appeared in Home Ground, The Oxford Climate Review, and The National Catholic Reporter. His first book, The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2022. |
FALL 2021
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The Micro Story Monday, Oct 4 | The really short form—prose of 1-3 pages—has been around for more than a century, but has gained new popularity since the 1990s, when all kinds of new names were invented for it—flash fiction, micro fiction, short memoir, etc. The very short piece uses all of the art of longer prose forms, but it is also a form unto itself, with its own special constraints and opportunities. We will take a quick but deep dive into both process and craft, giving you an opportunity to practice the kinds of attention and writing that produce powerful short pieces. We will focus equally on fiction and non-fiction, with emphasis on how to use skills common to both, to create a vivid lightning strikes of truth and beauty (why not?). | Jonah Willihnganz is the Director of the Stanford Storytelling Project and Co-Founder of the LifeWorks Progam for Integrative Learning. He has published fiction, essays, and scholarship on American literature and mass media. He has taught writing and literature at Stanford since 2002 and this year is teaching the popular speculative fiction course Fight the Future (English 29SF) and social justice course Counterstory in Contemporary Literature and Media (Education 141A).
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(Stories About)
| In his 2016 essay “Reflections on True Friendship” for The New York Times, Andrew O’Hagan reflects on the idea of “undocumented friendship” and remembers a long-lost childhood friend that he was never photographed with and writes “It’s the mindfulness I miss…[social media gives us]…the option of corraling people into ‘close friends’ or ‘acquaintances’ and, naturally, [we] always have the option of clicking ‘unfriend.’ But are the majority of these people friends or are they just names? You can know everything that’s going on in people’s lives without knowing a single thing going on in their hearts. But is that friendship?” In this workshop, we’ll explore that question while we discuss representations of (or the glaring absence of) platonic friendship in literature. We’ll read excerpts from contemporary short stories by Rick Bass, Denis Johnson, Beth Piatote, and Said Sayrafiezadeh and then we’ll “document” and craft the beginnings of our own short stories about friendship…while listening to Whodini’s “Friends,” of course. | Jenn Alandy Trahan found one of her best friends in high school, two in college at the University of California, Irvine, and then luckily found two more best friends at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where she earned her MA in English and MFA in Fiction. Her work has appeared in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper’s, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she’s currently a Jones Lecturer teaching English 9CE: Creative Expression, English 90: Fiction Writing, and English 190: Intermediate Fiction Writing for the 2021-2022 school year; all places to meet new friends.
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Haunting Voices
| What happens when the dead speak to us? This workshop allows us to give disembodied fictional characters – or real people who once walked the earth – a chance to tell us their side of the story. We’ll consider what unfinished business they might have on earth and what the experience is like on the other side. We’ll focus on voice and dialogue to inspire new stories or creative nonfiction or revise works in progress. | Valerie Kinsey is a Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Her fiction has appeared in Angel City Review, Adelaide, Arcturus and elsewhere; she also writes personal essays, which have been published in Evening Street Press and Streetlight Magazine. She earned her MFA (creative writing) and PhD (English) at the University of New Mexico. In PWR she teaches The Rhetorics of Trauma and The Rhetorics of Monuments and Memorials. |
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A Thing with Feathers: Poems about Birds Monday, Nov 1
| Over the course of the pandemic, many of us have felt a fresh appreciation for (and perhaps envy of!) those creatures who don’t have to socially distance or quarantine. Perhaps we have lived vicariously through our observations of them, and found relief in time spent in the natural world. Throughout history, poets have written about birds in moments of physical, emotional and spiritual paralysis, identifying with various elements of the avian world: their flight, their song, the beauty and delicacy of their eggs and nests. Poets have written movingly about watching, listening to, even killing birds. Indeed, the imagination itself seems to embody certain avian characteristics – we say someone had “a flight of fancy,” and the poet John Keats described soaring “on the wings of poetry.” In this workshop, we will read some of the most famous poems ever written about birds, share some general birdwatching tips particular to the Stanford campus, and write a bird-based poem of our own.
| Austin Smith is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford. He is the author of two poetry collections, Almanac and Flyover Country, both published through the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. A recent NEA fellow in prose, Smith teaches courses in poetry, fiction, environmental literature and documentary journalism. |
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Bodies that Matter Monday, Nov 8
| What makes the human body human? What makes it animal? How do bodies move and convey feeling? How do we describe attraction, violence, gender, or race without banality or vaguer? In writing we must attend to the body constantly – we have to get people into the room, out the door, into bed, and on the dancefloor. Characters must laugh and blush and cry. Embodied characters feel real to readers, and they make the stories we read feel real. In this workshop, we’ll read across genre and style – from Virginia Woolf to James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks to Cormac McCarthy – for tips and tricks for describing the human form. We’ll pay special attention to constructions of gender and race, and how writers have used bodies to subvert convention. We’ll write our own profiles and character sketches, and leave with the start of someone new. | Shannon Pufahl is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program and the author of the novel On Swift Horses (Riverhead 2019). Her essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. |
SPRING 2021
| SESSION | DESCRIPTION | FACILITATOR |
| What’s Next? Monday, April 12 | Sometimes, stories come in flashes: we see one character, or one concept, or one line of dialogue. We might have the seed of an idea but get stuck wondering – now what? How can I turn this flicker of inspiration into a full-fledged story? Join us for a night of ideation and exploration as we practice taking that critical next step. Together, we’ll spend the first half of this workshop mining for story ideas and grow our bank of potential projects. Then, we’ll dive deeper and learn strategies to flesh out the world behind that seed of a thought. You’ll walk away with new tools for whenever you face the question: what comes next? | Megan Calfas is a playwright, journalist, and podcast producer. She’s also a mentor with the Stanford Storytelling Project – sign up to work with her here. Outside of Stanford, she teaches live, personal storytelling with StoryCraft and is in the process of co-creating an original musical. Previously, she’s reported on the environment for the Los Angeles Times, investigated maternal mortality in Zanzibar, and once convinced Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne to perform in a musical alongside personified, dancing peanuts. |
| The Micro Story Monday, April 19 | The really short form—prose of 1-3 pages—has been around for more than a century, but has gained new popularity since the 1990s, when all kinds of new names were invented for it—flash fiction, micro fiction, short memoir, etc. The very short piece uses all of the art of longer prose forms, but it is also a form unto itself, with its own special constraints and opportunities. We will take a quick but deep dive into both process and craft, giving you an opportunity to practice the kinds of attention and writing that produce powerful short pieces. We will focus equally on fiction and non-fiction, with emphasis on how to use skills common to both, to create a vivid lightning strikes of truth and beauty (why not?). | Jonah Willihnganz is the Director of the Stanford Storytelling Project and Co-Director of the LifeWorks Progam for Integrative Learning in the School of Medicine. He has published fiction, essays, and literary criticism and has taught writing and literature at Stanford since 2002. This spring he is teaching, with Shannon Pufahl, Fight the Future, a course on speculative film and fiction, and he cannot wait for a lot of Octavia Butler’s work to finally be coming to the screen over the next year. |
| My FLI-Called Life: FLI Creative Writing Monday, April 26 | “Greatness is all the more admirable if it’s achieved against the odds,” writes R.S. Pine-Coffin, reflecting on St. Augustine’s autobiography, Confessions. We won’t have enough time to write our own full-blown FLI autobiographies in this workshop, but we will have the time to discuss our cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds in order to create “moment maps” of prose that illustrate key points in our lives. We’ll write and share where we’ve been, how far we’ve come, and where we’re headed so that we can carry these maps with us into any future creative project — whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenplays, etc. We’ll never feel lost again. | Jenn Alandy Trahan was a first-generation college student herself at the University of California, Irvine, in the early-mid aughts and then went on to earn her MA in English and MFA in Fiction at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she’s currently a Jones Lecturer teaching English 9CE: Creative Expression all year (her favorite undergraduate course to teach). Also, in a recent virtual event hosted by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Alec MacGillis discussed his new book Fulfillment; Jenn took messy notes in her journal as MacGillis talked about the “toxicity of hyper-prosperity” in certain areas of the country (ahem, this one), something that we can also discuss in this FLI workshop. |
| Melody as Muse: Writing About Music in Fiction Monday, May 3 | Musical artists such as Frank Zappa and Laurie Andersen have famously stated, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” These are compelling words, their force relying in part on the irony of the formulation—in effect, the quote does that which it claims isimpossible to do, explicating in words the difficulties of translating musical experience into prose while at the same time using words to communicate some of the elusive affective power of music. When writers attempt to describe a distinctive mood, or emotion they must be quite creative in order to truly get the audience to feel it. Examining how people have written about music can help us write about the ineffable in any kind of story you would like to produce; plays, poems, short stories, novels. In this workshop, through a series of listening and writing exercises we practice rendering the ineffable into compelling prose. | Tiffany Naiman is a scholar of popular music, temporality, and gender. She is the Managing Editor of State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project, and lecturer at Stanford University where she teaches classes on David Bowie, podcasting, music documentaries, concept albums, and sound stories. Along with her musicological research and teaching, Tiffany is a DJ, electronic music composer, and award-winning documentary film producer. |
| Exploring Our Place Inside of Nature Through Metaphor Monday, May 10
| One of the things telling a story can do is help us investigate an experience we’ve had—especially if we use figurative language. In this workshop we’ll focus on our experience of the natural world and discover what emerges when we describe it from a position beyond human supremacy. We will develop metaphors based on the biogeochemical cycles of the earth, the behavior of other animals, plants, and fungi. We’ll explore how these metaphors lead us to see greater detail and meaning in our patterns, including how you can use story creation to “compost” narratives from your own life. | Christy Hartman is a storyteller with nearly a decade of experience working in higher education. In addition to being a longtime Senior Producer for the Storytelling project, she is currently the Program Coordinator for Stanford’s Medicine and the Muse program, in the School of Medicine. Skilled in mentoring, narrativizing research, and podcast production, she is interested in amplifying the wisdom of lived experience. She holds graduate certificate in writing from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and prefers the forest. |
| Identity Writing: Excavating Your Narrative Monday, May 17
| You are the expert on your own life, but what is your story? Often, it’s more than just yours alone. It can be a part of a collective: your generation, your team, your tribe. In this class, we’ll examine remarkable voices that speak for both the singular and the collective with true authority and dive into narratives that pack emotional heat. Along the way we’ll examine our own anthems, memories, and histories through exploratory writing prompts. We’ll deconstruct point of view through exercises meant to catapult moving, energetic writing into a powerful and personal essay. Don’t think you have a story to tell? Come anyway and surprise yourself. | Rose Whitmore’s writing has recently appeared in The Southern Review, Image, The Kenyon Review and Alaska Quarterly Review. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford where she is working on a novel about Olympic Weightlifting during Enver Hoxha’s communist regime in post-World War II Albania. |
