Writer's Studio Winter 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.
Date | Description | Facilitator |
---|---|---|
January 10 | From the Page to the Stage: Telling Your Story to a Live Audience | Harriett Jernigan |
January 31 | Writing Lost Places | Ajibola Tolase |
February 7 | Automatic for the People: Harnessing the Power of Freewrites | Kevin DiPirro |
February 14 | Language for Love | Jonah Willihnganz |
February 28 | And Then I Woke Up: Dreaming in Narrative | Evgeniya Dame |
March 7 | Writing Wild with the Senses | Emily Polk & Richard Nevle |
From the Page to the Stage: Telling Your Story to a Live Audience
Monday, January 10 with Harriett Jernigan
We recall twice as much information when we hear it in a story as opposed to a straightforward recitation of facts, because stories connect to the things that matter to us. They work so well that organizations, businesses, and social justice movements have returned in recent years to weaving storytelling into their internal and external practices. So what do stories—especially live ones—activate that a standard presentation doesn’t? And how can we use them to complement our lives? In this workshop, we will explore contemporary live storytelling, taking a deep dive into form, function, and process. We’ll learn about story arc, beginnings and endings, creating narrative gems, and engaging with a live audience. We’ll then apply those lessons by sketching out and practicing part of our stories. Bring what you’ve got on the page–fiction and non-fiction–and put it on the stage.
Harriett Jernigan is a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. A regular performer at The Moth Story Slam and a Grand Slam finalist, she has published fiction, essays, and articles on German language and culture and social geography. Harriett earned her B.A. in creative writing from the University of Alabama and her Ph.D. in German studies from Stanford University. Currently, she teaches “What Are You Anyway?” The Rhetorics of Racial and Ethnic Identity. When she’s not working, Harriett’s probably baking or fencing épée.
Writing Lost Places
Monday, January 31 with Ajibola Tolase
So much can be inferred from a place beyond location. A place is a marker of time, and it shows the socioeconomic attribute of a story’s setting. Places change. Old buildings get torn down and new ones are built. Industrial buildings are being remodeled for office spaces. The demographics of people in neighborhoods change. In this workshop we will bring our childhood neighborhood, towns, and cities back to life. We will write from our memories and into the present. We will write of the place no one will ever see again because it has changed. In our writings, these places will be alive.
Ajibola Tolase is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared in American Chordata, LitHub, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
Automatic for the People: Harnessing the Power of Freewrites
Monday, February 7 with Kevin DiPirro
Freewrites are an incredibly versatile writer’s tool. They can be used daily for warm up; for breaking out of ruts and procrastination; for getting you unstuck from a writing problem; or for dropping down into a deeper level of your work. In this seminar we will practice freewriting from different vantage points and with different prompts to get an experiential feel for the many ways this tool can work for us. We will borrow exercises from Nathalie Goldberg and automatism techniques from the current Met show, “Surrealism Beyond the Borders,” as well as consider short, stream of consciousness excerpts from Morrison and Joyce.
Kevin DiPirro is a writer, theater-maker, and deviser who teaches in PWR as advanced lecturer. His plays have appeared in New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Stanford. A Hewlett Fellow for American Theatre Magazine, he lives on the coast where he swims, gardens, cooks and writes.
Language for Love
Monday, February 14 with Jonah Willihnganz
Metaphor is the basis of most of the meaning-making we humans do—talking about one thing in terms of another is in fact at the heart of language, cognition, and imagination. For storytellers, metaphor is often the way we stretch our consciousness, and invite others to stretch theirs. It is also the way storytellers try to grasp and express core human experiences such as loss, awe and, especially, love. In this workshop, we’ll look at how writers find their way to powerful articulations of love, whether romantic, familial, spiritual, or between friends. We’ll explore how contemporary writers often rework traditional tropes of love and mine ordinary encounters, objects, and even bits of dialogue to invent a fresh, specific expression of the feeling. Through a variety of short exercises, you’ll begin developing your own language for love.
Jonah Willihnganz is the Director of the Stanford Storytelling Project and Co-Founder of the LifeWorks Progam for Integrative Learning in the School of Medicine. He has published fiction, essays, and literary criticism and has taught writing and literature at Stanford since 2002. This winter he is teaching, with Shannon Pufahl, Fight the Future, a course on speculative fiction and social justice.
And Then I Woke Up: Dreams in Narrative
Monday, February 28 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.
Writing Wild with the Senses
Monday, March 7 with Emily Polk and Richard Nevle
In this workshop, we’ll use visceral engagement with the senses to open new paths in your writing that can help make story elements more accessible to readers. We’ll use evocative images, unexpected smells, and diverse sounds from the wild, along with several guided writing prompts, to conjure forgotten stories and inspire you to imagine new ones. Please bring your 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 J. Nevle is the Deputy Director of the Earth Systems Program, a scientist, teacher, dad, and writer in love with the natural world. His work has appeared in Home Ground, The Oxford Climate Review, and The National Catholic Reporter. His first book, The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in 2022