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Writer's Studio Winter 2023

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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
January 23The Micro StoryJonah Willihnganz
January 30Finding Your Writing Voice through Audio FormLaura Joyce Davis
February 6The Idea of TV PilotsAdam Tobin
February 27The One Sentence StoryFaith Merino
March 6The Epistolary PoemMadeleine Cravens

The Micro Story

Monday, January 23 with Jonah Willihnganz

The really short form—prose of 1-3 pages—has been around for more than a century, but has gained new popularity since the 1990s, when all kinds of new names were invented for it—flash fiction, micro fiction, short memoir, etc. The very short piece uses all of the art of longer prose forms, but it is also a form unto itself, with its own special constraints and opportunities. We will take a quick but deep dive into both process and craft, giving you an opportunity to practice the kinds of attention and writing that produce powerful short pieces. We will focus equally on fiction and non-fiction, with emphasis on how to use skills common to both, to create a vivid lightning strikes of truth and beauty (why not?).

Jonah Willihnganz is the Director of the Stanford Storytelling Project and Co-Director 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. He has published fiction, essays, and scholarship on modernist literature and this winter is teaching Fight the Future, a course on speculative fiction and social justice.

Finding Your Writing Voice through Audio Form

Monday, January 30 with Laura Joyce Davis

Jazz legend Miles Davis once said, “sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” In writing—and podcasting—we often have to write and revise many drafts before we understand the magic of telling stories in a way that is all our own. In this workshop, we’ll discover what the audio form can show us about finding our voice on and off the page, and learn how to reincarnate our written words to become vibrant, sound-rich podcast episodes. Come with printed pages of an essay or short fiction you’d like to transform, or use the time to find the spark for a new story.

Laura Joyce Davis is a Lecturer and Managing Editor for the Stanford Storytelling Project. She is the Executive Producer of Shelter in Place, which won the International Women’s Podcast Awards category for “Changing the World One Moment at a Time.” She co-founded a PR News Social Impact Award-winning podcast training program, teaches online with Narrative Podcasts, and was one of Podcast Magazine‘s Top 22 Influencers in 2022.

The Idea of TV Pilots

Monday, February 6 with Adam Tobin

Some of the most idiosyncratic, challenging, cinematic storytelling is in “television,” a medium that is constantly being redefined. Episodic or serialized, half-hour or hour, commercial or subscriber, ongoing or limited series, streaming or cable or broadcast — these are all called TV. As the first episode launching a series, a pilot script needs to tell an engaging story, create an original world, channel the writer’s distinctive voice, introduce an ensemble of characters, and provide the possibility for dozens or hundreds of stories to come. This workshop will look at the building blocks of an idea for a television pilot and series and allow students to begin their journey into writing for “television.”

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.

The One Sentence Story

Monday, February 27 with Faith Merino

Many of us grew up learning the importance of the tight, coherent sentence as the most efficient way to convey meaning, but what happens when you unharness the sentence and let it run wild? How does a story change when it’s not constrained by the linear subject-verb-object sequence? In this workshop, we’ll read fiction by Carmen Maria Machado, Annie Proulx, and Simon Han that use the run-on sentence to craft narratives that are arresting, urgent, and propulsive, and we’ll write some of our own.

Faith Merino is a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford with an MFA in Fiction from UC Davis. She is the author of the novel Cormorant Lake, which was longlisted for the 2021 Center For Fiction First Novel Award, and her short stories have appeared in The Forge, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Indiana Review, and more.

The Epistolary Poem

Monday, March 6 with Madeleine Cravens

T.S. Eliot once wrote that “a good love poem, though it may be addressed to one person, is always meant to be overheard.” Epistolary poems–– poems that take the form of a letter––share this paradox. They convey a sense of intimate communication between two parties, but are ultimately intended to be read by a larger audience. In this workshop, we will look at a variety of short contemporary letter poems by John Keene, James Schuyler, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Mennies, and others. We will attempt to discern what exactly distinguishes a letter poem from other poems that engage a second-person “you,” and to identify what effects these craft decisions create for readers. Finally, we will draw upon techniques of correspondence to begin our own pieces of writing. Fiction and nonfiction writers welcome.

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.