Writing

Writing Classes

• Now What: Fiction Intensive
• Remembering How: Beginning and Continuing Fiction
• Seeing It Through: Shaping and Crafting Fiction
• Introduction to Fiction
• Prose Writer’s Workshop
• Playing with Words
• Creative Nonfiction
• Poetry Workshop
• Screen Writing
• Writing Effective Web Content
• Writing and Publishing Children’s Books
• Pictures and Words
• Mythic Storytelling

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Now What: Fiction Intensive
Beginning/Intermediate
You started it and got stuck. You finished it, but it’s not wonderful. You revised it, and it’s ready. It got rejected. It got accepted. You’ve been asked to read it. Out loud. Now what? This short course will help students answer these and other perplexing questions about writing, revising, and persisting. We’ll talk first about your work and where it goes from here, then about revision and polishing, and then about two aspects of reading – how to read your own work to an audience, and what you read as a writer. Come with writing materials, work, anxieties, misgivings, and questions. We will make use of them all.

• Deirdra McAfee
  Tuition: $95 (members $85)
  January 17, 19, 24 & 26
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Remembering How: Beginning and Continuing Fiction
All Levels

Howard Ikemoto, an artist and teacher, writes, “When my daughter was about seven, she asked me what I did at work. I told her that I worked at the college, teaching people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘You mean they forget?’”

This class will help beginning and experience fiction writers unforget. We’ll air out all those excellent grown-up reasons why we can’t, don’t, or shouldn’t write (this will not take long), then we’ll write to discover what we do remember. In-class exercises and outside activities will offer ways to make it easier to begin and to continue. We’ll produce work to build on or expand and deepen work in progress. This course is a prerequisite for McAfee’s “Seeing It Through,” offered later this semester.

• Tuition: $125 (members $110)
  Deirdra McAfee
  6 Mondays, January 31 – March 7
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Seeing It Through: Shaping and Crafting Fiction
Prerequisite: “Remembering How”

What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, every stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together-radiant, everlasting.
— Alice Munro

This class, the sequel to “Remembering How,” will help students see and capture that radiant reality. Assigned exercises will sharpen their perception as writers, and class sessions will help clarify what works and doesn’t work in stories. We’ll discuss how to make stories shapely and how to revise for revelation. We’ll improve or revive our grasp of grammar, punctuation, and mechanics, we’ll explore the nuts and bolts of submitting manuscripts-how to format them, where to send them, what to say in the cover letter, and what rejection really means-and we’ll offer useful and professional feedback on each other’s work.

• Tuition: $125 (members $110)
  Deirdra McAfee
  6 Mondays, April 4 – May 9
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Introduction to Fiction
Beginner/Intermediate
Here is your chance to learn or brush up on the fundamentals of fiction writing in a relaxed and inviting environment. In this class, students explore the basic principles of fiction writing: plot, structure, description, character development, point of view and dialogue. These principles are illustrated through class lectures, writing exercises and critiques.

• Lee Bloxom
  Tuition: $125 (members $110)
  6 Wednesdays, March 2 – April 6
  10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

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Prose Writer’s Workshop
All Levels
Join with a community of beginning and intermediate writers and share your work-in-progress in a supportive setting. Come prepared to write and to share your writing with others. Also, be prepared to give meaningful feedback on other participants’ short stories, novel “starts” and essays.

• Tuition: $125 ($110 Members)
  Lee Bloxom
  6 Wednesdays, April 13 – May 18
  10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

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Playing with Words
All Levels
This course is for those who want to play — with words, with images, with story-telling. We’ll explore our inner terrain with a mix of creative writing exercises and art-making. The goal will be inspiration and self-discovery through play and thoughtful writing.

• Tuition: $125 ($110 Members)
  Lee Bloxom
  6 Wednesdays, January 19 – February 23
  10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

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Creative Nonfiction
All Levels
Travel writing, memoir, journalism, personal essay and voice-driven commentary are all included in the genre of creative nonfiction. Using many literary techniques found in fiction, including, dialogue, a subjective point of view, imagination, speculation and sensory images, while maintaining the integrity of what actually happened, you may write in any of the above types of nonfiction. Sample readings will be offered and studied, but the primary focus is on sharing and discussion of your own writing in workshop format.

• Tuition: $125 (members $110)
  Rose Elliott
  6 Wednesdays, March 23 – May 4, no class April 13
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Poetry Workshop
All Levels
Students will write and critique poems, study form, read essays about poetry, and study the work of other poets. In short, we will participate in a lively conversation on craft, attempt new forms, and revise poems that already mean a lot to us. The workshop is open to beginners as well as to those who are stuck, or who are open to receiving constructive feedback from a vigorous community of readers.

• Leslie Shiel
  Tuition: $165 (members $150)
  8 Wednesdays, April 6 – May 25
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Screen Writing
Beginning/Intermediate
This workshop-format class covers issues ranging from character and plot development, all the way to proper screenplay margin format. Students will write the treatment for a film and begin work on the full screenplay. Lots of individual attention lets students advance at their own pace. This is a good class for the beginner or for someone who wants to polish a first draft.

• Helene Wagner
  Tuition: $165 (members $150)
  8 Tuesdays, January 25 – March 15
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Writing Effective Web Content 
All Levels
This class will help you organize and shape content for delivery on the Web. We’ll discuss and practice chunking information effectively, making text more readable online, restructuring print content for the Web, resolving common Web style issues, and we’ll review the role of the writer and editor on a Web team.

• Larry Comstock
  Tuition: $100 ($85 members)
  4 Thursdays, January 27 – February 17
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Writing and Publishing Children’s Books 
All Levels
Students will learn the basics of successful writing for young readers from an author of over two dozen books for young people and educators. Topics covered include an examination of the current children’s market, revising and rewriting, manuscript mechanics, writer’s rights and responsibilities, how to contract publishers, and writers’ finances. Students will develop their own project, share and provide feedback on other’s projects.

• Paul Fleisher
  Tuition: $125 ($110 members)
  6 Thursdays, April 7 – May 12
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Pictures and Words 
Basic writing and photographic skills needed
This course explores the relationships between image and text in participant’s works. Assignments will guide students through a range of possibilities, looking at how different interactions between images and text produce different rhythms and interpretations. Class time will be devoted to review and discussion of student works. Students should have a camera and be prepared to process photos outside of class time.

• Charles Gustina
  Tuition: $125 ($110 members)
  6 Thursdays, February 24 – March 31
  6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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Mythic Storytelling 
All Levels
A class geared for all levels of screenwriters, novelists, playwrights or anyone interested in learning how to crack the secret code of storytelling. A MYTH IS A STORY THAT IS MORE THAN TRUE. Many stories are true because one person somewhere at sometime lived it. It is based on fact. But a myth is more than true because it is lived by all of us at some level. It is a story that connects and speaks to us all. All stories consist of a few common structural elements found universally in myths, fairy tales, dreams and movies. They are known collectively as The Hero’s Journey. Understanding these elements and their use in film, novels and plays is the object of our quest. Used wisely, these ancient tools of the storyteller’s craft have tremendous power to heal people and to make the world a better place. Class will view and discuss film clips from familiar Hero’s Journey stories, such as “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and “Star Wars,” and examine Healing Myth stories, such as “On Golden Pond” and “Seabiscuit” and “Cold Mountain.”

• Helene Wagner
  Tuition: $65 ($55 members)
  Saturday, April 9
  10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.