This course will be an intensive and advanced fiction workshop. We will focus on what I believe to be the real artistry of prose writing: the translation of the emotional stakes of the story onto its physical landscape; the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup of our lived and witnessed experience and pull out what we need; the way we pick up hunks of the physical world and bring it back to the page, translated into language. My job as a workshop leader is to make and hold a safe space where we can bring our considered, compassionate and critical eye to each writer’s work and discuss how to make each manuscript even stronger. We will be aiming for sentences in which the language is always working in at least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too hot grill. We will work toward demystifying some of the essential components of storytelling (image, metaphor, structure, dialogue, character, scene, among others) and turning them into comprehensible tools that are at our disposal. We will, no doubt, be humbled in the face of languages unlimited possibility and well as its limitation. At the same time we will honor (and hope for) the inexplicable flights of creativity (and madness?) that take a good story and make it great. Manuscripts are limited to 5000 words.

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Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award and more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine.  She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Contents May Have Shifted, and four other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande and teaches creative writing at UC Davis and at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers and fiction editor at the Environmental Arts Journal Terrain.org. She raises Icelandic Sheep and Irish Wolfhounds and is a fierce advocate for the Earth.

In this workshop, we’ll work on how to move an essay or chapter away from the mundane in its form, language and imagery. How do we turn the mundanity of life into the extraordinary? If we’ve experienced, how do we present the extraordinary in a way readers can experience, too, in a way they can believe in? We’ll also discuss how to make the personal larger through research, formal choices, language choices, and also how to bring the broader world into our personal narratives. Manuscripts are limited to 5000 words.

Toni Jensen’s Carry is a memoir-in-essays about gun violence, land and Indigenous women’s lives (Ballantine, September 8, 2020). An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in 2020, Jensen's essays have appeared in Orion, Catapult and Ecotone. She is also the author of the short story collection From the Hilltop. She teaches at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Métis.

This cross- and mixed-genre workshop offers short readings and prompts drawn from fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in the rich mode of the interior journey:  spiritual, contemplative, metaphorical. We will pay particular attention to the role of reading and writing and the solitude they require as ways to build and strengthen the foundation for active, world-engaged lives. How can reading and writing help us endure challenging times?  How may they inspire our vision of the world and our place in it?  What are the aspects of each genre—creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry—that best suit it for your particular vision?  Before we gather, I’ll distribute via .pdf short readings from each genre to act as touchstones for our discussions of your work. Prose manuscripts should be no longer than 5,000 words. Poets should submit no more than seven pages of poems, and should select two for collective workshop discussion..

Fenton Johnson is the author of At the Center of All Beauty:  Solitude and the Creative Life.  He is author as well of the novels The Man Who Loved Birds; Scissors, Paper, Rock; and Crossing the River.  In nonfiction, Johnson has published Geography of the Heart:  A Memoir and Keeping Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey among Christian and Buddhist Monks. Geography received the American Library Association and Lambda Literary Awards for best LGBT Creative Nonfiction, while Keeping Faith received a Lambda Literary and Kentucky Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. His previous book Everywhere Home:  A Life in Essays (2017), includes essays on topics as diverse as San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic to spirituality to a youthful encounter with Ike and Tina Turner.  A regular contributor to Harper’s Magazine, Johnson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has been featured on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. He has written the narrations and served as associate producer on several award-winning, nationally and internationally screened documentaries, among them Stranger with a Camera  and La Ofrenda:  Days of the Dead.  He is emeritus professor at the University of Arizona and serves on the faculty of the creative writing program of Spalding University. 

We’ll look at several ways to stamp your poems with signature, to upend expectations and obsess your reader, to approach discomfiting or overworked subject matter in ways that will make your poems impossible to dismiss. For the first session, bring one poem that was difficult for you to complete, either for technical or psychological/emotional reasons. All other work will be generative.

Patricia Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Feb 2023); Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson.  Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. She is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Patricia is a Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York, a visiting professor in creative writing at Princeton University,  and a faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.

There are a thousand (or more) ways to tell a story, but we are often funneled down one or two overused paths. In this creative lab we will explore a variety of dazzling storytelling arrangements. Shared work, discussion, generative feedback, and writing ourselves back to life in these weird times. Manuscripts limited to 5,000 words. 

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Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. The Misfit's Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was published by TED Books, and her new collection of fiction, Verge, was released in 2020. Lidia’s new novel, Thrust, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books on June 28th, 2022. She has also had writing appear in publications including Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Corpse, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil), Forms at War (FC2), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press), and Representing Bisexualities (SUNY), as well as online at The Rumpus. Writing by and through the body, one workshop at a time. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland Oregon, where she teaches both in person and online. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.