The best short stories, despite their brevity, leave readers inspired, questioning, changed. In this workshop, we'll dive under the hood to see what makes good short stories tick.
If I teach nothing in my writing classes, I teach this: do not outline your memoir (or novel or novella or short story or essay). Do not think out the plot, the narrative arc, the protagonist’s journey, whatever you want to call it. Instead, try to find the story through an honest excavation of the characters’ total experience of the situation at hand. Do that, and I promise the story will begin to write itself, with little help from the godly, intelligent, well-read, and ambitious author. But how, precisely, does one go about this “excavation”? And how, technically speaking, can we ignite a story into “writing itself”? Come to this workshop, and I will seek to demystify those writerly tools and skills that time and time again, if they are sharp enough, and if the writer can summon enough daily faith and nerve, can penetrate the mystery of story itself.
This class is built for the new poet, or for someone returning to poetry after some distance. Participants will have an opportunity to create new work from writing prompts and discuss different avenues into writing poetry. An overview of poetic tools, styles, and strategies will give way to the center of poetry: emotion, story, and breath. Participants will also gain an understanding of the workshop model and its alternatives, find ways to build their community of fellow creatives, and discuss how to stay self-motivated to keep writing.
Join 2018-2020 San Antonio Poet Laureate Octavio Quintanilla for a one-day poetry workshop designed to have you see poetry-making with a fresh set of eyes. Discover new inroads into the poetry process through three distinct approaches led by Dr. Quintanilla: lyric, visual, and form. In this workshop, there will be an emphasis on process and generating new work. Keywords: blank page // first word // first image // first line // first doodle // first draft. Take away from this class innovative ideas on how to kickstart your future poems.
Comedy has been described as “tragedy plus time,” and what a year it’s been. Jokes are often written to make light of situations ranging from matters of the heart to politics. They’re what breaks the tension in horror films, giving the audience a chance to both catch and lose their breath. In this course, we will analyze elements of joke writing, and performance. Utilizing key elements of the Socratic method, prewriting, and revision, this course is designed to help you write, rehearse, and deliver your first five minutes of comedy in a voice all your own.
In this class, you’ll explore a family anecdote of your own with a fiction writer’s imagination. You’ll learn how to pursue essential details; add character, setting, sequence and thematic elements; and amplify color, action, and motive as the characters move through the world you build. Come to class with 1-2 anecdotes you want to reinvent as your next fiction project.
Whether you're headed to the beach with its sand and sun or want to learn about new poetic voices from the shores of your couch, join Gemini Ink’s Executive Director Alexandra van de Kamp on an exploration of new or newly-discovered titles and her recommendations on recent “Best Reads!” lists. We'll discuss sample poems from a wide range of poetry collections including Natalie Diaz, Morgan Parker, Urayoán Noel, Barbara Ras, Donika Kelly, Reginald Gibbons, and more. Poets of all levels welcome!
Want to demystify the path to traditional publishing but don’t have the time and money to attend a full-scale writing conference? Learn about traditional publishing through sequential steps beginning with vetting a literary agent and a publisher, writing the query letter, mastering the synopsis, and formatting a manuscript to industry standards. This hands-on approach to traditional publishing, including the university press system, will guide you through industry standards, ensuring better opportunities for your manuscript or future writing projects. Bring your questions and projects to class and take that next step in your writing journey!
In this month-long workshop, we’ll study the masters of short-form writing, as well as prose poems and narrative poets, who bring us to the action quickly and hold us there with carefully honed, emotive language and images that resonate. Students will leave with four drafts of stories and plenty of ideas for generating new pieces.
This four-week generative workshop aims to encourage all us “Zoom’ed out” poets to zoom out in another sense: to embrace a broader view of what poetry can be on the page, the screen, and beyond. The workshop assumes that we don’t have to choose between print and digital (we can dig it all!), and that we can grow, innovate, and heal by bringing our writing closer to our everyday lives. For inspiration, we will examine work by a range of poets (artists’ books, smartphone poetry, hybrid forms of storytelling and collaboration), with special attention to diasporic and border-crossing poets whose work stresses the complex intersections of embodied space, writing, and technologies. We will work with 1-2 prompts per week, with the option to keep generating new pieces or to experiment with and reimagine existing ones. Our focus will be on solo work, but we will also try to daydream collaborative projects beyond market expectations of an atomized productivity.
Most of us understand that making a scene is not what you want to do when you’re in a grocery store or on an airplane. But in both fiction and nonfiction writing, good scene-making is fundamental to good storytelling. But what is a scene, and how do you make or write one? In this generative class, we’ll study a simple formula for scene writing, and practice it toward the completion of one or more stories or essays, novels or books of nonfiction. Come prepared to write dialogue, description, action, and your characters’ deepest darkest thoughts.
Tuesdays, November 16, 23, 30, Dec 7, 14 & 21. 6:30-8:30pm CST, via Zoom Instructor:...
