Writer's Studio Spring 2022
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 |
---|---|---|
April 18 | Under the Fire-Snakes: Creative Nonfiction through Meditation | Andrew Todhunter |
April 25 | Multi-Layered Dialogue | Jonah Willihnganz |
May 2 | Writing the Other | Nicole Caplain Kelly |
May 9 | Setting as a Character: Using Sensory Details to Write a Place that Propels Narrative | Jade Cho |
May 16 | And Then I Woke Up: Dreams in Narrative | Evgeniya Dame |
Under the Fire-Snakes: Creative Nonfiction through Meditation
Monday, April 18 with Andrew Todhunter
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.
Multi-Layered Dialogue
Monday, April 25 with Jonah Willihnganz
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 Other
Monday, May 2 with Nicole Caplain Kelly
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.
Setting as a Character: Using Sensory Details to Write a Place that Propels Narrative
Monday, May 9 with Yohanca Delgado
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
Monday, May 16 with Evgeniya Dame
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.