Writer's Studio Spring 2020
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 20 | Pitching Into Story | Rachel Hamburg |
Monday, May 4 | Building a Scene: The Dramatic Moment | Kevin DiPirro |
Monday, May 11 | A Thing with Feathers: Poems About Birds | Austin Smith |
Monday, May 18 | Trail Moments: Brainstorm Your Story by Writing its Movie Trailer | Adam Tobin |
Monday, May 25 | Emergency! Writing Vital Drama | Shannon Pufahl |
Pitching Into Story
Monday, April 20 with Rachel Hamburg
Pitching a story, whether it’s for a class project or for your favorite outlet in the world, can feel totally overwhelming. Especially when you’re asking permission to go out and investigate a narrative that’s still mysterious to you! But fear not. Crafting your pitch can be a surprisingly deep exercise in storytelling. In this workshop, we’ll focus on how to use the process of writing a pitch to investigate deep narrative questions, and also develop a sense of how different editors (or, perhaps, professors) evaluate the pitches they receive. Please bring a story idea, or several.
Rachel Hamburg is a senior producer at Audible, where she has produced a storytelling show with Dan Savage about sex and relationships, a sound collage of American cities using stand up comedy and interviews on the street, an audiobook about the women who took down Larry Nassar, a short story collection written from the perspectives of animals, a science series, and a one-man play slash sales workshop. Before Audible, she worked at The Stanford Storytelling Project, where she helped undergraduates hone their storytelling skills.
Building a Scene: The Dramatic Moment
Monday, May 4 with Kevin DiPirro
When building a scene, writers have recourse to a number of tools with character, action, and dialog—but perhaps the pivotal tool is the dramatic moment. In the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus looks back—sending his bride Eurydice back to Hades again. In this studio, we will use the “don’t look back” dramatic moment to collaboratively construct a scene that repurposes the myth in a contemporary setting. We will source your own ideas for character, action, dialog, and movement. Reverse-engineering from the dramatic moment, we will practice layering in the central tension of the scene and build it to our dramatic moment–then craft out that exquisite falling tension. Participants will take away to their own prose, poetry, fiction, and script projects the skills of scene building: layering, raising, and enacting the moments of released tension.
Kevin DiPirro is a playwright, theater-maker, and deviser who teaches in PWR as advanced lecturer. His plays have appeared in New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and at Stanford. A Hewlett Fellow for American Theatre Magazine, his current work, O ‘n E: Don’t (!?) Look Back, is slated for performances at SFMOMA, and in Galway, Ireland and Venice, Italy, this summer.
A Thing With Feathers: Poems About Birds
Monday, May 11 with Austin Smith
In this time of social distancing and quarantine, many of us are wondering how to engage with our creative spirits when so much seems closed and canceled. Throughout history, poets have written about birds in moments of physical and 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. They have written about watching, listening to, even killing birds. Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Robert Frost, Lorine Niedecker, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robinson Jeffers are amongst the poets who’ve written about winged things. We’ll discuss some of the most famous poems of this kind, and, because there should be birds wherever we find ourselves this spring, we’ll write our own bird poems too.
Austin Smith is the author of two poetry collections, Almanac and Flyover Country. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction, he is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches courses in poetry, fiction, environmental literature and documentary journalism.
Trailer Moments: Brainstorm Your Story by Writing its Movie Trailer
Monday, May 18 with Tiffany Naiman
“In a world where …” writers are struggling to develop and organize their stories, what can we learn from movie trailers? Quite a bit, actually. These mini-stories jam-pack character, conflict, and memorable setpieces into just a few short minutes. By breaking down various trailers we’ll explore the core concepts and relationships of a story and the most powerful lines of dialogue. We’ll also begin to brainstorm the dramatized elements of your own original story, television episode, or film.
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.
Emergency!: Writing Vital Drama
Monday, May 25 with Shannon Pufahl
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 current emergency, 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. She lives in Monterey, CA, with her wife and their dog.