In this mixed-genre prose workshop we will look at narrative structure and how the order and shape of a piece changes and creates meaning. We will study the natural world for shape and pattern and arrange and rearrange our own stories or essays based on the ecosystems and emotional landscapes within the pieces, and in the world around us. Classes will be a combination of workshop and generative prompts and projects. Manuscripts are limited to 5000 words.

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Ramona Ausubel grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of three novels and two story collections. Her new novel, The Last Animal, was published in spring of 2023. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, she has also been a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, California and Colorado Book Awards and long-listed for the Story Prize, Frank O’Connor International Story Award and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award and New York Times Notable Book selections. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine where she won the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The New York Times, NPR’s Selected Shorts, One Story, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, The Oxford American, and collected in The Best American Fantasy and online in The Paris Review.   She has been a finalist for the Puschart Prize and a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Ramona has taught at Tin House, The Community of Writers, Writing by Writers, the Low-Residency MFA programs at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Bennington. She is an assistant professor at Colorado State University.

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This course will be an intensive and advanced prose 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 fiction workshop, we'll look at how to center your writing around place—how to infuse that place into character, dialogue, and even the storyline. (I'm not a fan of the word plot; we can talk about why in session). Wherever you set your story, novel, essay, memoir, that's home. At least for the next 15 to 1500 pages. And so it's the place the story lives and rests and seeks solace. The place where the story comes alive. We'll workshop, do writing exercises, laugh, cry, revise, start fresh, whatever the event requires. Manuscript are limited to 5000 words.

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Leigh Newman's collection Nobody Gets Out Alive (Scribner 2022) was long listed for the National Book Award for Fiction and The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories 2020, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, One Story and Electric Literature, and have been awarded a Pushcart prize and an American Society of Magazine Editors’ fiction prize. Still Points North (Dial Press), her memoir about growing up in Alaska, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard prize. In 2020, she received the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura. Newman's essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Vogue, O The Oprah Magazine, and other magazines. She teaches at New York University’s MFA program and serves as an editor-at-large at Catapult Books and Zibby Books. When not writing, she looks after her two dogs, two chickens, two kids, and her beloved, disgruntled cat.

In this generative workshop, we will look closely at a single poem each day and use the methods of that poem (its patterning devices) to create drafts of our own. I’ll provide the four discussion poems ahead of time. We’ll also look at ways to mine existing poems for ideas that can be used to revise stuck drafts. By the end of our time together, you will have produced four strong drafts, at the very least, and perhaps four actual poems! For our first meeting, please bring a poem of yours (no more than a page) that you feel represents who you are as a poet, and please be willing to share it with the class.

Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Guillotine, published by Graywolf Press, and Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He's the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.

The unsung hero of storytelling is, in large part, detail, what writer Francine Prose calls “the building blocks with which a story is put together” and “the clues to something deeper.” Precise, perhaps even unexpected, details make plots riveting, characters compelling, and sentences elegant. In this fiction lab, we will examine the multitude of ways authors incorporate details into their work and explore techniques for finding the perfect detail to make a story come alive on the page. For the first half of each session, we will workshop submitted manuscripts, paying close attention to the author’s use of detail. During the second half, generative work will hopefully reveal the untapped magic of our stories. Manuscripts (optional) limited to 2,500 words. 

Laura Warrell is the author of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Golden Poppy Book Award through the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. Named a ‘best’ or ‘must-read’ book by Vanity Fair, People, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Apple Books, The Root, The Millions, Hollywood Reporter, Bustle, Today, Debutiful, and elsewhere, the novel was also chosen as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and an Indie Next List Pick. The novel was published by Doubleday in the UK in February 2023. Laura, named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly, grew up in Ohio. She graduated from the Creative Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and she has attended residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop where she taught in the online Winter Workshop in 2023. She has taught Creative Writing and Literature through the Emerging Voices program at PEN America Los Angeles, at Writing Workshops Los Angeles, and at the Berklee College of Music and other academic institutions in Los Angeles and Boston. Laura’s writing has been published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Writer, and other publications.