Week 2

Week 2

POETRY WORKSHOP
Writing Beyond the Bruise: Moving Ahead in Poems that Look Back

July 6–10 / 8:30–10:30 a.m. 

Mary Biddinger
Course Description: Memories can be powerful fuel for poetry, but what if sharing takes you past your comfort level in ways that are incompatible with creation? In this generative workshop we will discuss and attempt new methods of working with material from our past, finding fruitful practices for transforming those threads into verse. Participants will experiment with mimetic exercises based on poems provided by the instructor, and will receive substantial feedback in an atmosphere calibrated for supportiveness. We will also discuss writerly self-care and ways that poets can fortify themselves. Writers from all levels of experience welcome. Generative (ages 18+)

Bio: Mary Biddinger is the author of six full-length poetry collections, including a new book of prose poems, Partial Genius (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, Court Green, Poetry, Sugar House Review, and Tupelo Quarterly among others. She has received awards from the Ohio Arts Council, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Biddinger is professor and assistant chair of English at the University of Akron, where she is poetry editor at the University of Akron Press.

PROSE WORKSHOP
The Breathing Story

July 6–10 / 1:15–3:15 p.m. 

Jacob White
Course Description: To write a story is to redefine what a story is. In that spirit, this generative fiction workshop will set aside notions of what a story is supposed to look like and search, instead, for plot in unlikely places—such as walking, gardening, distracted thinking, staring at art, conversation, or fieldwork. These activities will shift the fiction writers’ focus from intention to attention, creating a space to respond in authentic ways to the world within and without. Writers will then, through a process of reflection and selection, shape their experiences into a work of fiction that offers genuine discovery and a dramatic experience for readers.

Bio: Jacob White is an assistant professor at Ithaca College. His story collection Being Dead in South Carolina was published by Leapfrog Press in 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in many places, such as The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The Literary Review, Shenandoah, Cimarron Review, Salt Hill, New Orleans Review, Modern Language Studies, Juked, Hobart Online, and The Sewanee Review, from whom he received the Andrew Lytle Prize. He has received honorable mentions in both Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize anthologies, as well as the Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Fiction from the University of Houston and the Father William Ralston Fellowship from The Sewanee Writers' Conference. He co-edited Green Mountains Review from 2011-2013.

Week 3

Week 3

POETRY WORKSHOP
Summer of Joyful Ghosts: A Workshop Jubilee

July 13–17 / 8:30–10:30 a.m. 

Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Course Description: Poems are wonderful occasions to let our ghosts come to the party. Be it the ghost of events we haven't been able to articulate in their joy, mystery, and/or sorrow. Or the ghosts of forms we love but can't quite master, which is to say, the ghosts of history that is around us always. In this class we'll use rigorous craft and joyful experiment to open the gates to all the spirits that have been trying to find their way into our poems. We'll read and write and get deeply into poems. This is a generative workshop so you'll also leave with a lot more poems than you came in with. Rejoice! It's the Summer of Joyful Ghosts! Open to all levels since we're always beginners at something and are always opening to our mastery. Generative. (ages 18+)

Bio: Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi's poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The New York Times, POETRY, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Carrboro, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.

PROSE WORKSHOP
Writing the Other

July 13–17 / 1:15–3:15 p.m. 

Eleanor Henderson
Course Description: We often talk about point of view in terms of privilege: which character do we have the privilege of accessing? Indeed, the gift of a character’s interior life is among the greatest privileges we have as readers. But when we’re talking about writing beyond our own backgrounds, we must consider this privilege—and the power it holds—with new seriousness. How do we write respectfully and responsibly about people—real and imagined—who are different from us? Can we? Should we? And can we get beyond this “language of rights,” as Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda implore, “to ask why and what for, not just if and how”? Through a study of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism (including Toni Morrison and Zadie Smith), and through generative exercises, writers in this workshop will explore these difficult but essential questions of representation, appropriation, and writing across identity. Students are invited to bring excerpts of their own prose-in-progress, whether they’re writing historical novels, family memoirs, or anything in between. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Eleanor Henderson is the author of the novels The Twelve-Mile Straight and Ten Thousand Saints, which was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by The New York Times and was adapted into a movie starring Ethan Hawke. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Short Stories. An associate professor at Ithaca College, she is working on a memoir titled Too Much Fire.

Week 4

Week 4

PROSE WORKSHOP
Voice, Vision, & Re-Vision

July 20–24 / 1:15–3:15 p.m. 

Janice Eidus
Course Description: Using inspiring prompts – visual art, music, “found” objects, and more – you’ll create short stories, flash fiction, and/or parts of novels. This welcoming, supportive, non-judgmental workshop will foster creative growth for writers at every level of experience. Generating new writing each day will free up thoughts, memories, ideas and images, allowing you to tap into your deeply rooted voice(s) and vision(s). In addition, re-vision strategies and techniques will help you to strengthen and enhance character, description, plot, texture, and story structure. At the end of the week, you’ll come away with powerful new knowledge and skills that will enable you to communicate to others with your truest and most authentic voice, vision, and writing self. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Janice Eidus, twice winner of the O.Henry Prize as well as a Pushcart Prize, is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and freelance editor/writing coach. Among her novels areThe War Of The Rosens;Urban Bliss; and,The Last Jewish Virgin; her short story collections includeVito Loves GeraldineandThe Celibacy Club. Her autobiographical essays about such subjects as her Bronx childhood and life as the adoptive mother of a daughter from Guatemala appear inThe New York Times,Purple Clover, Lilith, and elsewhere. Among the 40-plus anthologies in which she’s published areFrom Sea To Stormy Sea: 17 Stories Inspired By Great American Paintings;Idol Talk: Women Writers On The Teenage Infatuation That Changed Their Lives; andThe Oxford Book of Jewish Stories. She lives in the heart of New York City with her husband, teenage daughter, and Cherry, their rescue cat.

Week 5

Week 5

POETRY WORKSHOP
Waking the Present and Dreaming the Future

July 27–31 / 8:30–10:30 a.m. 

Philip Metres
Course Description: In the words of Audre Lorde: “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity for our existence. It forms the quality of light from which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” Poetry is both a refuge into which we can enter, to dream the future, and a site of active struggle, where we can use our voices to tell our personal and social truths. This generative workshop will offer prompts and space to create poems that wrestle with our pasts, wake us to the present, and dream into a better future. Generative. (ages 18+)

Bio: Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon 2020), Sand Opera (Alice James 2015), and The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018). Awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Fellowship, three Arab American Book Awards, two NEAs, and the Adrienne Rich Award, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.

PROSE WORKSHOP
Wonder of All Wonders: Writing the Natural World

July 27–31 / 1:15–3:15 p.m.

Charlotte Matthews
Course Description: During the total eclipse two summers back a group of people in Oregon burst into shouts of joy at the moment of totality. Another group in Canada went completely silent. Which one feels right to you? Over the course of this week we will use writing as a tool to slow down and pay attention to the world around us. We will listen to birdsong, touch moss, and smell freshly mown grass as ways to inspire and generate percipient writing. Come ready to roll up your sleeves and write. Generative. (ages 18+)

Bio: Charlotte Matthews' works include a novel, The Collapsible Mannequin, a memoir, Comes with Furniture and People (2019) and three poetry collections. Recipient of The Adele F. Robertson Award for Excellence in Teaching, she is Associate Professor at The University of Virginia. She lives near Charlottesville Virginia with her husband, her two teenage children and an opinionated black lab.

Week 6

Week 6

POETRY WORKSHOP 
Elegy and Anti-Elegy

Aug. 3–7 / 8:30–10:30 a.m. 

Allison Joseph
Course Description: In this workshop, participants will engage and examine poetic elegies. What makes a poem an elegy? What makes a poem an anti-elegy? Do poems about death and its circumstances have "requirements"? Does the elegaic mode include poems that consider the deaths of animals, neighborhoods, and traditions? Poets to be considered during this workshop include Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Michael S. Harper, Kim Addonizio, and Tony Hoagland. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Confessions of a Barefaced Woman(Red Hen Press, 2018); Worldly Pleasures (Word Press, 2004); and What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award.

Joseph has received fellowships and awards from the Illinois Arts Council. She teaches at and directs the Southern Illinois University–Carbondale MFA Program in Creative Writing, where she also serves as the editor-in-chief and poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review.

PROSE WORKSHOP
Bodies in language, bodies of language

Aug. 3–7 / 1:15–3:15 p.m. 

Hilary Plum
Course Description: This workshop will explore and celebrate the problem of writing the body. Our inquiry will be wide-ranging: from memoirs of illness, to the creation of characters in fiction, to deepening how we write what we know through our senses. How does a character take form, as the illusion of a body, in works of prose? How does the shared body of language—its rhythms and sonic landscape—come to evoke the singular body we live in? How is language involved with—how can language talk about—our experiences of everything sensory, mortal, encoded in flesh, blood, feeling? The workshop will be both generative and reflective, including our work in progress, looking for moments the body is there. We’ll include the playful, the scientific, the painful, the new, the formally inventive, the transformative, the fantastical, the acute. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Hilary Plum is the author of the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose (2018); the work of nonfiction Watchfires (2016), winner of the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award; and the novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013). She has worked for a number of years as an editor of international literature, history, and politics. She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program and is associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press.

Week 7

Week 7

POETRY WORKSHOP
Non-Traditional Poetic Forms

Aug. 10–14 / 8:30–10:30 a.m. 

Mathias Svalina 
Course Description: Every piece of writing plays by a set of rules. This workshop will seek to explore new rules to incorporate into your writing through non-traditional forms. With a mixture of generative writing exercises, discussion of examples, & constructive critique of yours & peers’ writing, the workshop will introduce you to non-traditional poetic forms, help you develop poetic forms out of your interests, & consider how working in form can tap into new inspirations for your poetry. Some forms we might explore could include lyric recipes, absurdist historical markers, deconstructed sonnets, spells, etc. Generative. (ages 18+)

Bio: Mathias Svalina is the author of five books, most recently The Wine-Dark Sea from Sidebrow Books. has taught writing at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He has won fellowships and awards from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Iowa Review, and New Michigan Press. His poems have been published in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, The Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Jubilat, and others. He is an editor for Octopus Books and runs a dream delivery service.

PROSE WORKSHOP
The Shape of Things to Come: How Playing with Form Can Invigorate Creative Nonfiction Work

Aug. 10–14 / 1:15–3:15 p.m. 

Randon Billings Noble
Course Description: "The word “essay” comes from the French essayer: to try. In this workshop we’ll move beyond traditional narrative and expository forms to try a more experimental approach: playing with form. We’ll look at some of the many forms creative nonfiction can take, including lyric, segmented, braided, and hermit crab essays. And we’ll write from a variety of prompts to sketch essays and short memoirs in these forms. At the end of the week we’ll try some creative and unexpected ways of revising what we’ve written. This generative workshop will benefit beginners as well as advanced practitioners. Come prepared to try, to risk, to dare – and to play. Generative. (ages 18+)

Bio: Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her full-length essay collection Be with Me Always was published by the University of Nebraska Press in March 2019 and her lyric essay chapbook Devotional was published by Red Bird in 2017. Individual essays have appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times, The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Shenandoah, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She has taught at New York University, American University, and a variety of community writing centers such as The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD and Politics and Prose in Washington, DC. She has had residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge, and the Vermont Studio Center, and in 2013 she was named a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow to attend a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts. Currently she is the Founding Editor of the online literary magazine After the Art and teaches creative writing classes at American University.

Week 8

Week 8

PROSE WORKSHOP
Writing to Heal: Writing About and Through Trauma

Aug. 17–21 / 1:15–3:15 p.m. 

Lori Jakiela
Course Description: “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”  ― Fred Rogers

This workshop is designed to provide a supportive, safe space for writers to embrace freedom of expression, one of our most essential human rights. 

During our week together, we will consider the ways writing helps us heal, both personally and collectively. Writing our truth can be transforming. It can connect us to one another. It can set us free. Sharing our experiences with others through writing can change not only our lives, but maybe even our world. And this kind of writing can be terrifying, even so. 

During our week together, we will tackle the difficult things we feel we’re ready to write. Writers will be encouraged and supported to write those subjects that feel most urgent for them.

“A writer has to get naked on the page,” the writer Harry Crews said. 

We will talk about what it means to be naked and vulnerable on the page. We will place emphasis on taking risks and experimenting with forms that will create new ways of seeing our writing and our lives. We’ll push each other to expand boundaries and challenge each other to write what matters most.

Writing in all its embodiments is hard work, and writing about trauma, however one defines trauma, is no exception. This week can be the beginning of a journey of strength and healing, for each writer, in their own way, at their own pace. 

Bio: Lori Jakiela is the author of the memoir Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe, which received the Saroyan Prize for International Literature from Stanford University, was a finalist for the Council of Literary Magazines & Small Presses Firecracker Award and the Housatonic Book Award, and was named one of 20 Not-to-Miss Nonfiction Books of 2015 by The Huffington Post. She is the author of two other memoirs – Miss New York Has Everything and The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious, as well as a poetry collection, Spot the Terrorist, an essay collection, Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker, and several chapbooks. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Rumpus, Brevity, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Chautauqua Magazine, and elsewhere. Jakiela has been awarded the City of Asylum Pittsburgh Prize, multiple Golden Quill awards from the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania, fellowships to the Bread Loaf and Bennington Writers Conferences, and more. Most recently, she was a finalist for the Stockholm First Pages Prize for her novel-in-progress, The Trailing Edge. She directs the undergraduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where she is a professor of English and Creative/Professional Writing. She has co-directed the Chautauqua Institution’s Summer Writers Festival, and currently directs the summer Be Here Now yoga/writing retreats at Pitt-Greensburg and curates the Sunday Poem section for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her next collection of poems, How Do You Like It Now Gentlemen? is forthcoming in 2020. She lives in Trafford, PA with her husband and their children.

Week 9

Week 9

POETRY WORKSHOP
The Music of What Happens: Poems of Self & Other

Aug. 24–28 / 8:30–10:30 a.m. 

Ralph Black
Course Description: In this workshop we will think about poems as a “transformational art form,” an imaginative/ linguistic process in which “the stuff of life” is refracted or alchemized through the music of language. We will read poems from around the world and focus on such craft-related questions as the poetic line, the art of diction, and cadence and music—the pulse of the poem.

Bio: Ralph Black’s first collection of poetry, Turning Over the Earth, was published by Milkweed Editions. He is also the author of the chapbook, The Apple Psalms. The recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review and the Chelsea Poetry Prize, his poems have appeared in such journals as The Georgia and Gettysburg Reviews, Orion, West Branch, and AGNI. His most recent collection, Bloom and Laceration, won the Hopper Poetry Prize from Green Writers Press. He teaches English and creative writing at SUNY Brockport.

PROSE WORKSHOP
On Holding Attention

Aug. 24–28 / 1:15–3:15 p.m. 

Jack Wang
Course Description: According to Will Storr, all writers face the challenge of “grabbing and keeping the attention of other people’s brains.” What kinds of narrative strategies earn attention in fiction, and what can evolutionary psychology and neuroscience tell us about the kinds of stories that engage us most? Through readings, exercises, and workshop, we will explore the art of captivating readers through fiction. Flexible. (ages 18+)

Bio: Jack Wang is the author of We Two Alone, a collection of short stories and a novella. His fiction has been longlisted for the Journey Prize and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2014-15, he held the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. He teaches writing at Ithaca College.

Registration

Registration

New in 2020, the Writers' Center workshops have moved to Chautauqua's new Online Classroom where you can enroll in master and enrichment classes from your home this summer and year-round. Click here to view all Writers' Center workshops. Courses are available for writers at many stages of experience and development, though students must be at least 18 to enroll.