Writer's Studio Spring 2019
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.
Session Date | Description | Facilitator |
---|---|---|
Monday, April 8 | Embodied Storytelling | Jessia Hoffman |
Monday, April 15 | Paragraphs with Legs | Clara Lewis |
Monday, April 22 | Micro-Fictions | Ed Porter |
Monday, April 29 | Writing the Translingual Voice | Tessa Brown |
Monday, May 6 | Worth a Thousand Words: Writing and Multimedia | Kai Carlson-Wee |
Monday, May 13 | Copying as Creation | Eldon Pei |
Monday, May 20 | Epistolary Magic | Allie Wollner |
Embodied Storytelling
Monday, April 8 with Jessia Hoffman
Most of us sit down to write: at a desk, on our bed, under a tree, in a coffee shop. But is sitting essential to the writing practice? Why do we physically restrict ourselves as we try to capture the intricacies of a living, moving world? For the past 50+ years, improvisational theater has explored the art of creating fully realized characters and satisfying stories…all on the spot. This workshop will offer a series of exercises focused on spontaneous character building and collaborative story generation. We will use improv as a launching pad for quickly generating material, and then hone those ideas on the page. Come see how you might add an element of play and movement to your writing process!
Jessia Hoffman is an improv coach, communication trainer, playwright, and Stanford alum. She designs and delivers improv-based trainings and workshops to professional teams to enhance communication, cultivate connection, and spark creativity. Jessia teaches classes with BATS Improv and coaches the Unscripted Playhouse of Stanford (UPS) on campus – open to all students!
Paragraphs with Legs
Monday, April 15 with Clara Lewis
Have you ever noticed how really wonderful paragraphs walk an idea or observation forward? Like a step taken from heel to toe, a paragraph can open in one place and tap down a small distance away. Awareness of this kind of literary traveling can gift your creative and academic writing momentum. But it isn’t just speed we’re after, so much as more room to maneuver our thinking. This active writing workshop invites you to level-up your writing one paragraph at a time. We’ll find inspiration in music, in poems by Kay Ryan and Mark Doty, and in paragraphs by Michael Pollan and Joan Didion. Then we’ll play with a series of exercises that lead up to crafting your own stomping, striding paragraphs to share.
Clara Lewis teaches in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Previous work includes Tough on Hate? The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes (Rutgers University Press) and articles on the visual culture of extreme sports, gentrification and yoga, and the history of mechanization at Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. She is drawn to subjects that illuminate how we surf social, physical, and emotional extremes.
Micro-Fictions
Monday, April 22 with Edward Porter
In this workshop, you’ll write complete pieces of fiction in the two hundred words or less range, working from a variety of examples and prompts. Extreme brevity may look like a constraint, but it can free the writer to take chances and make leaps of faith. Make icebergs speak! Tell the history of a marriage in a sip of coffee. It’s speed dating with your imagination!
Edward Porter’s short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, Best New American Voices, and elsewhere. A former Stegner Fellow, he is currently a Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University.
Writing the Translingual Voice
Monday, April 29 with Tessa Brown
Why do we always write like we’re at school? That’s wack, right? When you speak with your people, what languages or dialects do you use—and can you make space for all your voices in your writing? In this workshop, students will watch and read a variety of codemeshed or translingual texts that move between standard English and other englishes or languages. Then, directed writing prompts will help us bring our array of spoken voices to the page. We’ll think together about how to decenter English-only audiences, using multilingual writing to turn toward the communities whose unique blended languages we speak. 怎么样?
Tessa Brown is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, where she teaches the courses “Hashtag Activism” and “Hiphop, Orality, and Language Diversity.” She holds a doctorate in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric with a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, and an MFA in Creative Writing – Fiction from the University of Michigan. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, Hyperallergic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as the research journals Peitho and Kairos, with an article forthcoming in the Journal of Basic Writing.
Worth a Thousand Words: Writing and Multimedia
Monday, May 6 with Kai Carlson-Wee
From Allen Ginsberg to Rupi Kaur, writers have often used multimedia approaches to expand their written work. With the recent proliferation of visual media through online platforms like Youtube and Instagram, writers have been finding new and innovative ways to reach a wider audience. In this Writer’s Studio, we will be looking at ways in which language and imagery intersect and considering strategies to enhance our work through a visual lens. All levels welcome!
Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of Rail (BOA Editions, 2018). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Best New Poets, New England Review, and The Southern Review. His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine, and his poetry film, Riding the Highline, has screened at film festivals across the country. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.
Copying as Creation
Monday, May 13 with Eldon Pei
Let’s pull the plug on the idea of the authored text as something original, unalterable, complete-in-itself, and conceived in isolation by some singular genius. Writers and artists as diverse as Isidore Ducasse (aka Comte de Lautréamont), Sherrie Levine, and Joseph Saddler (aka Grandmaster Flash) have exposed the unimaginativeness of equating creation with origination, publication with consummation, and copying with criminality. “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it” (Lautréamont). In this workshop, we will experiment with composition strategies that—depending on context, technique, and genre—have gone by various names: appropriation, assemblage, re-authoring, citation, collage, cut-up, pastiche, sampling. Through an investigation of forms ranging from readymades to remixes, found poetry to fan fiction, imitatio to internet memes, we will experience the excitement of using preexisting texts and images to produce new work that is critical, transformative, and hopefully irresistible to the next data thief. Who’s down with O.P.P.?
Eldon Pei is an art historian and film and media scholar who once dreamed of being a fiction writer before winding up writing in the infinitely more fictional genres of equities research and securities offering documentation. The regulators never caught on. He is still at large today and rumored to be teaching for the Program in Writing and Rhetoric.
Epistolary Magic
Monday, May 20 with Alessandra Wollner
A letter can be many things – a bomb, a call to arms, a line in the sand, a way to let go or hold on. Writing a letter can offer profound catharsis, and receiving one can feel like a gift…or a punch in the gut. Whether we feel inquiring, incensed, inconsolable, or inseparable, missives offer a magic all their own, especially handwritten ones. In this Writers’ Workshop, we’ll investigate the inner workings of letterwriting, and sample famous dispatches across genres, from protest letters to fictional dispatches to sacred testaments to personal communiqués, and conjure some epistolary magic of our own.
Alessandra Wollner is a Senior Producer and the Community Engagement Lead for the Stanford Storytelling Project. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Ohio State. Today, she teaches, podcasts and storytells from Oakland, CA.