Writer's Studio Spring 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.
Date | Description | Facilitator |
---|---|---|
April 10 | You Must Change Your Life: Poems about Art | Austin Smith |
April 17 | Great Interviews Create Beautiful Stories | Melissa Dyrdahl |
April 24 | Effing the Ineffable: Writing What Cannot Be | Allie Wollner |
May 1 | I Don't Like Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me) | Jenn Alandy Trahan |
May 8 | Myth and Memoir | Christy Hartman |
May 15 | The Short Poem | Madeleine Cravens |
May 22 | Mental Illness and the First Person | Rose Himber Howse |
You Must Change Your Life: Poems About Art
Monday, April 10 with Austin Smith
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 with Melissa Dyrdahl
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 with Allie Wollner
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 1st with Jenn Alandy Trahan
“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.
Myth & Memoir
Monday, May 8th with Christy Hartman
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, May 8th with Madeleine Cravens
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 22nd with Rose Himber Howse
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.