Teaching

FICTION WORKSHOPS

Expose & Compose: Photographic Prompts to Ignite the Subconscious

Author Donna Baier Stein said that writers can use photography to “expand… meaning—not in terms of enlarging [an] original work, but in terms of offering more possibilities.” In this workshop, we use a combination of professional and amateur photography, including our own family photos, in conversation with poems and short prose to generate creative new work. We’ll use the unconscious subtexts of these photos, the befores and afters, and the memories they evoke. We’ll also take a look at the objective properties of the photographs, including composition and the objects within them to inspire us. The workshop will include 4 prompts, so come to this class ready to write. What creative possibilities are lying in wait in these photographs? Sign up and find out! All genres welcome.

Summer Nights / Summer Writes 

This workshop series is designed for writers of all genres to generate a ton of material over the course of June. Using examples from short fiction, nonfiction and poetry to guide us, we’ll move through a succession of writing prompts that employ both informal and formal prompts (i.e. photographs, abecedarians, found forms, the senses, ekphrasis, mad libs and more). By the end of June, you’ll have a boatload of new work to finesse over the rest of the summer.

Ditch your comfort zone and let’s write some weird and wonderful stuff together! If you miss a week, that’s okay. Sessions will be recorded and shared weekly.

AN ADDED BONUS! The series includes written editorial feedback on one piece of writing written over the course of the month as well as an individual 20-minute meeting with me during the first week of July to discuss your work and answer any questions you may have about writing and publication.

OMG ANOTHER BONUS! The series will conclude with an Open Mic in mid-July for those wishing to participate. You’ve done the work, now share it with the world!

Fireflies at Night: A Flash Fiction Workshop Series

Writers from Grant Faulkner to Molly Giles have described flash fiction with metaphors ranging from a coyote appearing in your yard at night, making the world a little more feral, more dangerous, to a firefly flickering on a summer’s night, captivating and fleeting. They’re called flash, microfiction, short shorts. They’re the love child between a short story and a poem. Etgar Keret says they’re like Kool-aid, a partial story that only becomes real once it mixes with a reader. I’ll stop there. You get the point: flash fictions are things of beauty—short, maybe, but powerful, otherworldly even.

In this class, we’ll study some of the best flash fictions around, from Amy Hempel to Venita Blackburn. We’ll write one to two flash fiction pieces each week and share our work for feedback in small groups. There will be optional homework and extra prompts for each week. The point of this class is to GENERATE, to have fun, to learn something new about stories and ourselves, but mostly to create new work. Currently, I’m working on a large project and I’ve found small flash prompts, both fiction and nonfiction, to be rejuvenating, reminding me of the joys in small work, the pleasures in a good line, or even one word that can turn a whole story on its head.

It’s a busy time. While these classes do build on one another, it’s also possible to attend only one, two or three, skipping those that fall on inconvenient nights.  Whether you’re stuck in the middle of a big project or just want to practice writing in this form, join me, and let’s write some fireflies.

Interiority: A Heart Pounding Breathtaking Workshop

When it comes to writing fiction, Kurt Vonnegut said to “Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” Got it. We can do that. But as we do, it can become difficult to show readers how characters think and feel about all of these awful things happening in their lives. In first drafts, “thoughts” and “feelings” can often be written involving the heart and lungs, focused on heartbeats, breathing rhythms and all sorts of skipping, palpitating, throbbing, panting, catching and swallowing.

In this class, we’ll work on engaging with a character’s thoughts and feelings in ways that move beyond these cliches, using specificity and deepening character. This will be a generative workshop. Using your own characters and their harrowing situations, we’ll look at, discuss and practice Rebecca Makkai’s four techniques to writing interiority: Action, Thought, Specific Physical Interiority and Tangential Thought. Come to this workshop ready to write, and maybe laugh at some of the ridiculous clichés we’ve all leaned on in the past.

Caves and Cathedrals: Writing a Novel in Dark and Daylight

Herman Melville compared writing a novel to building a cathedral. Virginia Woolf described it as digging caves—at a certain point, the caves would connect, and daylight would finally appear. But how to get from that first stone, or idea, to the cathedral of your novel?

In this workshop series, we’ll try out some cave digging exercises and explore strategies for drafting and outlining. As part of our discussion, we’ll touch on narrative promises, structuring scenes and chapters for momentum, and revision tools used by well-known contemporary novelists. This will be an interactive class. Bring your novel-in-progress—and your struggles and triumphs while writing it. If you’re just starting, that’s okay, too. There’s something here for everyone, no matter where you are in your novel-writing journey.

Making Messes: How Character and Plot Thrive on Mistakes

Fiction often relies on bad behavior and making messes. In an interview about writing his movies, Ethan Coen said that many of his stories begin when he takes a situation or problem and gives it to a character who is incapable of dealing with it. Mistakes are then made, and they pile up, moving the narrative forward. In this class, we’ll look at the movie Raising Arizona and a few pieces of literature where characters create difficult problems for themselves and then have to solve them.

Come to this workshop prepared to write! We’ll be doing some exercises in character development with bad behavior and mistakes in mind. Problems in fiction often stem from interactions between characters. We’ll pay close attention to what kinds of interactions might create the best problems for your characters, and how these can relate to the broader narrative within a story.

Repetition and Evolution: A Tool for Structure

In this workshop, we take a close look at the children’s book There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, and the Marc Richard short story, “Strays,” to see what they can teach us about how to structure a story. We discuss the natural progression and repetitions in these narratives and how each story resolves itself through evolving the repeating element.

Workshop attendees take a close look at their own works in progress to see how they can apply these principles to their own stories. We discuss strategies in implementing this structure in ongoing work.

PUBLISHING WORKSHOPS

Beating the Numbers Game: Submissions Strategies

In this workshop, we discuss what it’s like as a literary magazine editor moving through the slush pile: sins we’re willing to forgive, and those we’re not. We’ll also look at tools to finding literary magazines that are a best fit for your work, how to rate them, and when to submit to what. We’ll also look at strategies for submitting to contests. If it’s in part a numbers game, then this class is about figuring out your best odds.

WRITING CONVERSATIONS

February through October of 2021, I co-hosted a weekly Zoom series supported by SC Humanities and the South Carolina Writers Association called Writing Conversations. In it, I discussed craft and publishing topics with published authors and industry professionals.

SOUTH CAROLINA WRITERS ASSOCIATION CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS DIRECTOR

For five years, I was conference director for SCWA, planning their virtual and in-person conferences, designing workshops and educational series on craft and publishing topics, interviewing industry professionals and moderating numerous panels of publishers, agents and authors.