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Writer's Studio Winter 2020

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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 DateDescriptionFacilitator
Monday, Jan 13Writing Wild with the SensesEmily Polk and Richard Nevle
Monday, Jan 27Funny BusinessEd Porter
Monday, Feb 3Monster! Mother! Sweater! Strider! Choosing a Strong Perspective for Your StoryRachel Hamburg
Monday, Feb 10If You'll Let a Guide Direct You: Poems that CommandAustin Smith
Monday, Feb 24Places that Make Us: Harnessing the Power of SettingRose Whitmore
Monday, March 2Playing with TimeValerie Kinsey

Writing Wild with the Senses

Monday, January 13 with Emily Polk and Richard Nevle

In this workshop, we’ll use visceral engagement with the senses as a way of opening doors to writing that will make elements of your story more accessible as well as offer new avenues of inspiration. We’ll use various images, unexpected smells, and diverse sounds from the wild along with several guided writing prompts to conjure forgotten stories and to inspire you to imagine new ones. Please come with a sense of adventure, ready to do some wild writing together.

Emily Polk, an Advanced Lecturer in PWR and the author of Communicating Global to Local Resiliency, has worked around the world as a media professional, supporting documentaries and human rights-based media in refugee camps from Burma to Ghana. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Creative Nonfiction, The National Radio Project and elsewhere. 

Richard Nevle is the Deputy Director of the Earth Systems Program, a scientist, teacher, dad, and writer in love with the natural world. He muses at The Feral Naturalist and is working on a book of essays and prose poems focused on the natural history of the Sierra Nevada.

Funny Business

Monday, January 27 with Edward Porter

In this workshop, we’ll examine some of the time-honored principles of how writing is made funny, and then you’ll respond to short prompts designed to get your personal sense of humor out in the open, where it can run free and play with others.

Edward Porter’s humor writing has appeared in places such as Barrelhouse, Booth, and Miracle Monocle, and has been anthologized in Winesburg Indiana and My Name Was Never Frankenstein. A former Stegner Fellow, he is currently a Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University.

Monster! Mother! Sweater! Strider! Choosing a Strong Perspective for Your Story

Monday, February 3 with Rachel Hamburg

Sometimes we think of stories as existing beyond the teller. Ancient myths, for example, survived through the mouths of anonymous speakers. Traditional journalism in its own way, too, often invokes an objective perspective – a bodiless questioner who hovers above the subject matter. But every Beowulf begs for a Grendel – a radical re-imagination of problem, protagonist, and perspective. In this workshop, we will hear from a little girl, an old sweater, a lusty insect, and more. We will discuss how those perspectives are achieved through writing, voice, and audio technique, as well as what they offer their stories that a more obvious perspective could not. Then we will spend time developing radically different views into the same story, before broadening the exercise to an examination of the stories we are waiting to tell and what carefully choosing the story’s perspective can do.

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.

You'll Let a Guide Direct You: Poems that Command

Monday, February 10 with Austin Smith

All poems address the reader either directly or obliquely, but certain poems address the reader in a more specific way, guiding us, goading us, commanding us. These poems can be both comforting and challenging. In perhaps the most famous poem of this kind, “Directive,” Robert Frost assures us that we need only let the poet-guide direct us, before admitting that this poet-guide “has at heart [our] getting lost.” In this workshop, we will consider poems by Frost, William Matthews, Rainer Maria Rilke, and others. In doing so, we will discuss how to approach poems that command. What is the proper way to read such a poem? And how can mere words on the page inspire us to make actual changes in our lives? In the second half of the workshop, we will draft “directive” poems of our own.

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.

Playing with Time

Monday, March 2 with Valerie Kinsey

How can we bend, control, and play with time to increase the power of the stories we want to tell? In this workshop, we will experiment with manipulating time to create more impactful moments, scenes, and plots. We’ll start by looking at writers who manage time in their work in effective and innovative ways. We’ll also consider ways music and image can help us think analogously about time. Most of our workshop will then be devoted to our own experiments with time in story. Whether your goal is to build suspense, create patterns, or capture a single ground-shifting moment, this workshop will give you new options to explore.

Valerie Kinsey is a Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Her fiction has appeared in Angel City Review, Adelaide, Arcturus and elsewhere; she also writes personal essays, which have been published in Evening Street Press and Streetlight Magazine. She earned her MFA (creative writing) and PhD (English) at the University of New Mexico.