Writing the Familiar into Strange
with Roohi Choudhry
Saturday, April 17th, 2021
Description: If you’re feeling sapped of creativity and craving escape from the mundane, inspiration is right in front of you. This is a generative writing class about unearthing strange stories inside familiar rooms. We’re accustomed to searching for ideas in the outside world — sketching from nature or capturing family drama or scribbling down overheard conversations on the street. In this class, we turn inward. We’ll mine the drips and drabs from everyday objects and incorporate magic, fantasy and horror to turn the banal into the babadook. Using discussions, readings, prompts and games, we’ll spot the spooky stories hiding within familiar rooms, books, songs and memories.
Onramps to New Ideas
with Ellen Adams
Saturday, April 24th, 2021
Description: In this generative, skill-building session—welcoming prose writers, poets, songwriters, and playwrights alike—we’ll explore onramps to new ideas. From choosing the freshest details to deepening characterization, we’ll learn strategies that open the door to creative discovery. Through illustrative examples from poetry, prose, and songwriting, we’ll identify the moves authors make to upend our expectations, then we’ll try these techniques with our own words. We’ll also step outside writerly genres, borrowing concepts from color theory and architecture to access untapped or just-under-the-surface elements in our creative work. We’ll end our time together with some surefire tactics for getting out of a rut and back on the road. We will each leave with new pages, plus powerful, practical tools that will make our writing even more alive.