I am a big believer in geographic cures. Nothing opens us up more than a new vista, it is a glorious gift for the senses AND for our writing. 

In this generative workshop, we will indulge each of our senses and put them into living words. The wonder of being in a beautiful place with beautiful people doing a beautiful thing is that every sense can be drenched and satisfied. Our task is to collaborate with our experience and make words of light and shadow. What we are after is finding our inspiration and EVERYTHING counts. 

Each day of this workshop, we will focus on a different sense. Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, whatever you want to craft is up to you. You have a special way of seeing and experiencing the world and I want to help you saturate your work with your senses working overtime. You may have a work in progress already, I promise you this experience will change how you approach it. Bring a notebook, an open heart and a sense of wonder.

If I teach nothing in my writing classes, I teach this: do not outline your novel or novella or short story or essay or memoir. 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 in which they find themselves. Do that, and I promise the story will begin to write itself, with little need for the controlling hand of 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. Fiction, as well as creative non-fiction is welcome. We will be doing in-class writing exercises, and anyone who’d like to workshop their writing will be given a 25 page (double-spaced, 12 point font) limit. Thank you and see you soon!  – Andre Dubus III

THE SHORT ANSWER AND THE LONG ONE - First Half

The French have an expression, “l’esprit de l’escalier,” for the apt remark that occurs only after you are on the escalator. A great example comes courtesy of the writer, Roland Merullo, who was once asked in an interview about the disconnect between his working class ethnic urban roots in Revere, Massachusetts versus his elite education at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire: “What was that like?” Put on the spot he gave a quick dismissive response and only later did he explore the depth of his feelings on in his essay “My Two Heavens.” Anytime a question fills you with a similar rush of ambiguity and confusion, you have, at least potentially, entered rich territory for your writing. I call these episodes of misgiving followed by the clarity brought about by reflection “Merullo moments.”  

Please plan to share up to three of your short responses with a draft of one long answer (between 500 to 2000 words) to share with the group when we meet in person. Our goal is a renewed sense of our own rich options as writers. Let’s, as Emily Dickinson put it, “dwell in possibility.”

NOTHING HAPPENS NOWHERE - Second Half

Readers crave latitude and longitude. If not tethered, we feel adrift in the ozone and begin to suffer a kind of vertigo leading to the worst fate possible for a writer: we lose interest.  Anchoring the reader is an absolute necessity.  Even an imagined setting has to feel like a real one. All effective writing is travel writing, saturated with time and place. Yeats once wrote, “I shall arise and go now,” and if it was good enough for him, surely it is good enough for us.

In Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is a tribute to the lifelong hold the Paris of his youth had over his psyche. Yet, you do not have to love a place to have strong feelings about it, as evidenced in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes in the way he describes Limerick, Ireland.  

We will conduct our own spirited sense-driven inventory of places that get under our skin, good or bad, with exercises designed to make this process second nature in our future work.  Please plan to bring a piece of between five hundred to two thousand works to share, in response to one of the following prompts: the place I call home, the place I live now, a place I wish I never left.

Whether we are healing from illness, coping with grief, navigating caregiving, experiencing family disfunction, recovering from addictions, surviving abuse, or reckoning with other challenges (either personal or global), writing can be a pathway to understanding those circumstances in a profound way. By re-entering the experience, taking it apart, and then putting it back together again on our own terms, we can build resilience that enables us to move forward despite the struggle. In the compassionate space of this workshop, we’ll explore the intersection of storytelling, health, and trauma through writing exercises, readings, and reflective discussion. We’ll tackle the realities of confronting the vulnerability, fear, and pain that inevitably accompany the journey to bring hard stories to the page and learn strategies for taking care of ourselves in the process. Together, we’ll uncover the value that narratives of lived experiences of health and trauma have for creating community with readers.

Though this workshop is primarily generative, participants will submit a brief pre-workshop piece of no more than 750 words that answers the questions: What story or stories of health and/or trauma do you want to write or do you hope to write? Why are you the person to write this particular piece or pieces? What is your motivation? What does the world not know about your subject that you might want to remind them about? How do you feel as you consider this story and bringing it to the page?

What to Make of What Happened:  Turning Experience into Story

Life gives us plenty to work with: the people we’ve loved, the places we’ve gone, the dysfunctional families we’ve survived. Maybe you married the wrong person (twice), run away to sea, joined a cult, left a cult, or simply made it through a childhood of your mother’s meatloaf. But having something happen to you—even something astonishing—doesn’t automatically make it a story. The art and magic are found in what you make of what happened.

In this generative four-day workshop, we’ll explore how to turn the glorious mess of lived experience into compelling narrative. We’ll start with the essential distinction between the situation—what happened—and the story—the deeper emotional preoccupation that makes us want to write about it in the first place. We’ll consider ourselves as characters (often an alarming prospect), work with scene and reflection, figure out what belongs and what absolutely does not, and investigate the distance between the person who lived the experience and the person who understands it now.

We’ll read wonderful memoirists, respond to daily prompts, discuss one another’s pages, and look for the story beneath the events—the questions, contradictions, obsessions, and uncomfortable truths that give memoir its juice. Come with a memoir underway, a personal essay, a handful of pages, or simply something you can’t stop thinking about.