Writer's Studio Winter 2024

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.

Writing into Grief 

Monday, January 22 with Kevin DiPirro

Grief provides a rich space for the experience of loss that comes with any major change. By writing into grief, writers may very well be able to explore more deeply their characters’ experiences, motivations, backstories, interactions, and plotlines—or their own authorial expressions of such. In this workshop we will follow some grief writing exercises based on Angela Hennessy and Marvin K. White’s work for the De Young Museum’s Writing as Ritual workshop for the Kehinde Wiley exhibit this past year. Writers of all genres and kinds are encouraged. Grief involves any loss—not just those involving mortality.

Kevin DiPirro is a playwright, 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, Kevin’s most recent work, Underworld, was performed on Stanford’s campus in the Nitery and other parts of the Old Union Complex.

Do You Want to Write for Kids? 

Monday, February 5 with Kath Rothschild

In this workshop we’ll explore the differences in kid lit genres, and where your ideas might fit into the complex kid-book world. From picture books and chapter books to middle grade and young adult, we’ll learn what makes each genre unique, and where your story would shine most brightly. Taking time to develop ideas, this workshop will encourage you to delve deeper with your current ideas or draft and figure out what your dream can become and where it might go!

Kath Rothschild is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University who has an MFA in Fiction Writing and a PhD in Applied Linguistics. Her first-person essays have been published on KQED/NPR, in The San Francisco Chronicle, and in many other Bay Area and California publications. She has received artist’s grants from Vermont Studio Center and Kindling West. Her debut novel for young adults, Wider than the Sky (Soho Teen/PRH) is available everywhere books are sold.

L to the OG: Writing Characters in Succession

Monday, February 12 with Jenn Alandy Trahan

What kind of person sends sixty-seven emails in one night with “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Greggs” as the subject line and what kind of person confesses “the good thing about having a family that doesn’t love you is you learn how to live without it” in a karaoke room? Logan, Connor, Kendall, Shiv, and Roman will be in the “boardroom” with us, so to speak, but we’ll also look at Stewy, Marcia, Gerri, Willa, and any character the group would like to analyze as we think about what E.M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel about flat characters and round characters. If you haven’t seen Succession, what have you heard about it? For those who have seen it, what moments in the show encapsulate certain characters for you? What kind of moments truly define an individual? How do people surprise us? We’ll let our discussion of the characters in Succession inspire us to write our own characters in succession, so you’ll leave the workshop with ideas for at least (the same number of Roy siblings) four new characters.

Jenn Alandy Trahan started watching Succession on March 24, 2023 and finished the series in three months (if only she could say the same about writing the first draft of her book). Her work has appeared in Permafrost, Blue Mesa Review, Harper’s, One Story, and The Best American Short Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she’s currently a Jones Lecturer here at Stanford teaching English 9CE: Creative Expression, English 90: Fiction Writing, as well as co-teaching a course she designed with Professor Gavin Jones, English 177B/American Studies 177B: Contemporary American Short Stories. She typically feels self-conscious talking about herself in bios such as these, but in the words of Succession’s inimitable Gregory “Greg” Hirsch, “if it is to be said, so it be. So it is.”

Poems Made by Walking

Monday, February 26th with Gahl Pardes

As writers, we are often trapped on one side or the other of a false binary: that good writing is either the product of meticulous planning and technical execution, or, solely, of pure and unbridled inspiration. Is it necessarily true, as Hemingway (maybe) said, that “the first draft of anything is s***”? Or, as Clarice Lispector’s work seems to suggest (“Hallelujah, I shout, hallelujah merging with the darkest human howl of the pain of separation but a shout of diabolic joy…”), does one have to be in the throes of a full-on mystical experience as a prerequisite for writing? In this workshop, we will work to complicate both of these notions, and to build our own individual relationship with the generative, early stages of a writing project. Many of us know the difference between the in-the-moment magical sense of creative flow and the clunky feeling of forced writing. How can we reach for a state of flow? How can we set ourselves up for the kind of writing that feels like entering a dream? And how can we be confident that what we generate within that dream is coherent and worthy of revision, and, ultimately, of being read by others? We will approach these questions through collaborative close reading, discussion, and a final writing exercise.

Gahl Pardes is a writer from the Negev. Her work has received recognition from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Henfield Prize for Fiction (runner up), the Balch Prize for the Short Story, and others. She taught writing and literature at the University of Virginia, where she also received an MFA as a Poe/Faulkner Fellow in fiction. A ’23-’25 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Gahl is at work on a novel and a short story collection.