Writer's Studio Fall 2023

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. The full archive of Writer's Studio Workshops is coming soon to this site.

Propulsive Dialogue

Monday, October 16 with Tom Freeland

What makes for good dialogue? How can we use dialogue to propel a story forward, without wandering into digression or cliché? This workshop will explore the composition of effective dialogue, drawing on examples from playwriting, journalism, history, and first-person narrative to formulate principles of clear, authentic voice in storytelling. We will experiment with the rhythms of speech, the music of word choice, and the balance of enigma and information that pull listeners forward in their seats to catch the next line.

Tom Freeland received his BFA and MA in Theatre from the University of Colorado and his PhD in Drama from Stanford. He has appeared in a number of professional productions of works by Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht (among others). He also directs, writes and translates plays. Since 2000, he has been a Lecturer in the Oral Communication Program at Stanford.

The Poetic Self-Portrait

Monday, October 23 with Madeleine Cravens

Self-portraits in visual art are abundant, but is it possible to successfully portray the self through a poem? In this workshop, we will look at a range of contemporary poetic self-portraits, including pieces by Adam Zagajewski, Cynthia Cruz, Donika Kelly, and Chen Chen. We will discuss the different strategies these poets use to present themselves on the page, and then craft and share our own poetic self-portraits.

Madeleine Cravens is a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, the Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Pleasure Principle, will be out in June with Scribner.

Appropriation or Affinity? How to Write Well About Others

Monday, October 30 with Austin Smith

Walt Whitman, in Leaves of Grass, writes: “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” This is a radical act of empathy. The poet recognizes that it is his responsibility not merely to report what the wounded person feels, but to feel what the wounded person feels. Another poet, John Keats, told a friend that, through an act of the imagination, he could feel what it feels like to be a billiard ball, experiencing “a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness, volubility, & the rapidity of its motion.” And yet we live in a moment when people are understandably concerned about writers inhabiting the perspectives of characters unlike themselves. The fallout over the controversial novel American Dirt is an example of a writer being called out for appropriating a story that isn’t theirs to tell. In this Writer’s Studio, we’ll discuss examples of writers successfully inhabiting different perspectives, and examples where writers have failed in such efforts. At the end of the workshop, we’ll practice some empathic writing of our own. Our goal is to emerge from this workshop newly inspired to write about others with respect and consideration.

Austin Smith is the author of two poetry collections, Almanac and Flyover Country. He has received an NEA grant and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. A Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he lives in San Francisco.

Writing the Photograph

Monday, November 6 with Jade Cho

Photos can offer portals to personal and communal memory; to ancestors, past selves, and places changed or gone. They can also serve as tools of criminalization, surveillance and control. What then is the role and responsibility of the writer working with photos? In this workshop, we will read and discuss poems that incorporate photos, including hybrid and visual works, thinking through the writers’ craft and ethical decisions. We will then engage in generative exercises to write and experiment with our own images. Please bring a photo that moves or haunts you (preferably a digital or print copy that can be altered) to work with.

Jade Cho is a Stegner Fellow in Poetry. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and has appeared in Apogee, BOAAT, The Offing, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley, where she studied and taught in Poetry for the People, and an MFA from Arizona State University, where she served as a June Jordan Teaching Fellow. A grandchild of immigrants from Hoisan (Toisan/Taishan), she is working on a book tracing memory, grief, and desire through the archive of Chinese Exclusion and the Chinese Confession Program.

Real Talk

Monday, November 13 with Georgina Beaty

How can you craft a story (fiction or non) from real events and interviews? The class will be centered on gathering verbatim material: how to choose a strong overall topic, what makes a good question, various ways of gathering and notating material, and how to craft that raw text into something that lifts off into story. We’ll look at short excerpts from verbatim and autofiction texts, and you’ll have a chance to try out the form yourself. Whether you’re a fiction lover who wants to work on dialogue and the specificity of character voice or whether you have a larger documentary-style fiction project in mind, this workshop will offer a taster of what’s possible when you are working from the material of real life.

Before turning to fiction writing, Georgina Beaty spent a decade as an actor and theatre maker, often working in verbatim (or documentary) forms with the company she co-founded, Architect Theatre. Her book of short stories, The Party is Here is, to a great extent, inspired by the real, though taken to an extremely fictional place! You can find her as a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford or working away on her next book.

The Idea of TV Pilots

Monday, November 27 with Adam Tobin

Some of the most idiosyncratic, challenging, cinematic storytelling is in “television,” a medium that is constantly being redefined. Episodic or serialized, half-hour or hour, commercial or subscriber, ongoing or limited series, streaming or cable or broadcast — these are all called TV. As the first episode launching a series, a pilot script needs to tell an engaging story, create an original world, channel the writer’s distinctive voice, introduce an ensemble of characters, and provide the possibility for dozens or hundreds of stories to come. This workshop will look at the building blocks of an idea for a television pilot and series and allow students to begin their journey into writing for “television.”

Adam Tobin is a Senior Lecturer teaching screenwriting in the Film & Media Studies program in the Department of Art & Art History. He received his MFA in screenwriting from USC School of Cinematic Arts and worked in industry in Los Angeles and New York. He created the comedy series About a Girl and the reality show Best Friend’s Date for Viacom’s The-N Network, and has advised animation studios including DreamWorks Animation, Aardman Animation, and Twentieth Century Fox/Blue Sky Studios. He also wrote the book and lyrics for She Persisted: the Musical, a New York Times critic’s pick, at the Atlantic Theatre Company.