Afternoon craft sessions offer participants a chance to join in explorations with guest writers about process, style, revision, audience, reading, books, publication, and more. Participants have the opportunity to sign up for four of these sessions at the time of Juniper Institute enrollment. Each 90-minute Craft Session will be offered twice during the week! Ocean Vuong’s Craft Talk will be offered only once.

Writing with the Dream

(with Aria Aber)

An exploration of how dreams underlie fiction and poetry, moving outward from Anna Karenina to more contemporary fiction texts, and adumbrating my own craft relationship with the oneiric.

Writing History into Fiction

(with Dur e Aziz Amna)

There is a particular thrill to reading fiction that is attuned to the broader currents of history. Using templates such as Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, we will consider how writers can effectively weave in a particular zeitgeist in their writing. How can we make history a main character without the dreaded allegation of deus ex machina—i.e. a contrived solution to a plot problem? How do we allow our characters to breathe and live fully, while still revealing them as trapped within the constraints of time, place, and politics? Through discussion and writing exercises, we will try to get helpful answers.

Authorship Against Authority: Crafting Insurgencies

(with Sarah Aziza)

In what ways are our writing practices captive to disciplines of legitimacy and legibility? How do our craft choices reflect internalized hierarchies of acceptable experiences, languages, and points of view? Are established practices of “good writing” and “credibility” actually forms of silencing? What would we excavate, what would we liberate, if we rebelled against the tyrannies of “correctness” and “fact”? 

Combining lecture, discussion, and prompts, we will consider how we might subvert ideas of “authority,” creating new, insurgent forms. We will ponder the ways silence may be enacted in the form of language, and what secrets our own silences might hold. We will return to the body, the intuitive, and the non-verbal as frontiers where we might discover our writing again, anew. 

Participants will be encouraged to come to class with a draft or idea which feels stymied; together and privately, we will consider what mutinies our page might need. 

Sonic Atmospheres of the Poem

(with Desiree C. Bailey)

What gives the poem its incantatory power is its particular use of sound. Whether a poem coheres, disintegrates, or mellifluously haunts, its manipulation of the sonic creates a distinct atmosphere, setting it apart from mundane uses of language. In this craft session, I’ll share my interests in the poet’s engagement with music, regional dialects and other sonic iterations to express or interrogate notions of the self. I’ll also share my own explorations with sound, with attention to the genres of jazz, dub and calypso, along with the Brathwaitian concept of nation language. This is a lecture-based craft session, with room for conversation and in-session readings.

Say Less: Writing the Short Poem

(with Leila Chatti)

We live in a time of great excess of information. It is easy, during the course of an ordinary day, to be overwhelmed by the seemingly endless onslaught of language. What happens when, on the page, we consciously pare it down? In this craft class, we will explore the power found in saying less—the power of the short poem. We will look at examples of masterful itty-bitty poems and discuss techniques for maximizing impact in minimal space, employing these in both generating new work and whittling down older poems-in-progress. The class will consist of slides and in-class readings, as well as exercises for generating new work and techniques for revising previous work.

HOLD ON, MAYBE THIS IS A NOVEL? Strategies and Companionship for Short Story Writers Going Long

(with Madeline ffitch)

For many fiction writers, our first love is the short story. The short form is often where we cut our teeth, and it can be delectable and forceful in its economy, range, and room for experimentation. But! There may come a time when we write a novel! What then? Can the craft values we’ve honed be sustained over hundreds of pages? How do we maintain our style, rigor, play, and deep affinity for language when we go long? What is structure and why do we care? This craft session is for the novel curious, the novel skeptic, and the novel weary, fiction writers and readers in all phases of vexed relationship to length.

Water as Method

(with Patrycja Humienik)

What can water teach us about craft? In this generative session, we will explore approaches that bodies of water offer for considering image, subtext, and syntax in our writing across genre. We will look at excerpts of published work and try out generative writing exercises, including (optional) embodied experiments. Whether you seek to deepen an understanding of image, subtext, and syntax; want to explore water as method in your writing process; have a connection with a specific body of water to write into; seek tools for writing into grief over a changing climate; or are simply hoping to generate new material—join us.

Multi-Species Poetics

(with Craig Santos Perez)

The theme of this lecture-based craft session will be “multi-species” poetics, referring broadly to poetry about human-animal relations. To me, this is an urgent topic for writers because we are currently living in the midst of a sixth mass extinction—a period of geological time during which a high percentage of biodiversity dies out. 

Humans have been writing about our relationship to animals for millennia. Animals have been our pets and companions, our predators and prey, our food and resources, our totems and gods. We have written about our encounters with animals in the wild, zoos, aquariums, domestic spaces, the ocean, and even in our dreams. 

Being from the Pacific Islands, I have witnessed first-hand the devastating species loss of native birds. Throughout my seven books of poetry, I have written many poems exploring our complex relationship with the more-than-human world. In this craft session, I will share several poems from my ouvre that utilize various forms and techniques to show the aesthetic diversity of multi-species poetry and poetics. I aim to engage the audience in a question and answer session after my lecture and reading. 

Note: There will be no in-class writing prompts. I will provide the attendees with a handout for in-class reading and additional sources.

Finish It! Taking Your Manuscript from Draft to DONE

(with Khadijah Queen)

Working on a long poem, story, essay, play, or book? What will it take to finish? This craft talk will provide solutions and strategies for identifying the themes in your book, tracing the narrative arc, determining what might be its mission, in the form of planning sessions. We will have time for clarifying writing exercises in class related to the work you intend to do, and there will be digital resources you can use beyond our craft session.

Write Like Nobody’s Reading

(with Yasmin Zaher)

So many things inhibit us while writing. Perfectionism, ambition, religion, grammar, political correctness, shame, tact, and logic… We self-censor without even realizing it, sometimes too much so, causing the writing to emerge as predictable and stale. How do we neutralize the inhibitions? How do we insist on our creative freedom? How do we write like nobody’s reading? In this craft session, we will read short excerpts from writers who, each in their own way, are masters of the intuitive, the subconscious, the candid or the unrestrained. We will look at short texts by Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Michel Houellebecq, and Percival Everett. Some of these texts are surprising on the narrative level, while others are surprising on the line level. Alongside the texts, we will do several writing exercises, in hope of discovering a way of writing that has been thus far hidden from us (and of course, nobody will be reading.)

Craft Talk

Memory Landscapes: thought, place, and history as liminal creative force

(with Ocean Vuong)

Often in workshop we engage with the finished draft of a thing, but this session will focus on the circuitous, fraught, nebulous, and often protracted space of a poem’s impulses, tracking symbols, dead ends, breakthroughs, associative leaps and familiarizing ourselves with their potency. We will deliberately leave the session, not with a poem, but just three lines of a potential poem, emphasizing a robust and enriched relationship with process over product.