Afternoon craft sessions offer participants a chance to join in conversations 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 enrollment. New to 2025, each 90-minute Craft Session will be offered twice during the week!
The sessions below will be offered at the 2025 Institute.
All in Good Time: The Craft of Time in Fiction
(with Shastri Akella)
Stay in-scene!
Don’t give it away yet!
You want to build the tension first!
Dialogue makes the story move faster.
How often have you, as writers, received such advice? The craft tool that brings these suggestions to life is time. Drawing on craft lessons from Joan Silber (Time in Fiction, Graywolf Press) and Mario Vargas Llosa (The Perpetual Orgy, FSG) and examples from published work, this craft session shows you five concrete kinds of time you can bring into your stories to evoke specific kinds of emotion in readers. I will show you how I ‘revised time’ in my debut novel by pointing to specific paragraphs in the draft and published versions. We will also practice short writing exercises to start making the craft of narrative time a part of our writing toolkit.
Chaos, Movement, and Perplexity
(with Noor Hindi)
In this craft session, we’re going to embrace nonsense. We’re going to break language. We’re going to slice open our hearts and enter with curiosity. We’re going to look at the mundane and call it spectacular. How can we infuse play into our everyday writing practices? Who are you when you enter the page with joy rather than seriousness? What type of moves do you make when you’re grounded in your body? This session will focus on helping you plunge into the page with movement rather than hesitancy, embrace the unknown with excitement, and access strangeness in your writing and your life.
Flash & Furious: Creative Nonfiction Bursts
(with Annie Liontas)
There may be no more potent form than short Creative Nonfiction, which “the writer’s experience of the world makes small and large at the same time.” Our excursions into short Creative Nonfiction ask us how real, how raw, how precise and unforgettable we can get in 2,000 words or less. What story or stories are you ready to excavate? What worlds exist within you, what discoveries might you make among your compatriots? How can you invite others to join you? In this generative workshop, we invoke the authorial stance of the lived experience to build intimacy with the reader, engaging in a friendship that—in the words of Philip Lopate—“is based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship” & “confides everything from gossip to wisdom.” And we do it all in a little over a page.
Our session offers scaffolded writing prompts, mentor texts, collaborative exercises, and opportunities for sharing. This workshop is designed for participants who want to play, as well as for those hoping to walk away with a draft towards publication.
A Form in All Things: Some Notes on Notes on Organic Form
(with Sam Sax)
This talk and generative workshop’s interested in considering some of the formal drivers for our creative practice. We as writers pull strategies from received poetic forms and the history of literature as well as from the living world around us. We’ll borrow our framework from Denise Levertov’s “Some Notes on Organic Form” to consider how some writers queer and corrupt received formal constraints as well as look to the world around us for containers to expand our creative process.
Let Me Give You the Zeit: On a Poetics of the Third Space
(with Safia Elhillo)
A poetics of the third space is a hybrid poetry that expresses the fluidity and tension of identity. What does it mean to write a migrant experience, an experience of two cultural identities imposed on one another? We will look at poems that combine Arabic(s) and English(es) and observe the ways they create specificity, use the untranslatability of their double languages to create tension, and imagine different “true readers” than the ones usually centered by Anglophone literature.
Off-Page with Abigail Chabitnoy
Let’s face it, we predominantly encounter and engage with poetry—as readers and writers—as a solitary activity. The closest to community we typically find ourselves is in the workshop or the reading, which for all its merits remains routine and predictable. But in these spaces, how is community fostered? How does the poetic gesture regain the dynamic lift of its origins as an oral tradition? How might we reconceive the work the poem can do on—and off—the page? In this craft lesson, we’ll explore possibilities for reconceiving how we encounter texts, how we arrive at our own texts, how to give those texts real breath, and how to communicate this energy to our audience.
Sound & Sight: The Possibilities of Rhyme in Contemporary Poetics
(with Maggie Millner)
In this craft class, we’ll consider the effects of various kinds of rhyme, from the obvious to the more obscure and slippery. We’ll investigate the possibilities of rhyme for the contemporary poet—and the ways that attending to the sonic, rhythmic, and visual dimensions of language can lead the mind in unexpected directions and toward new meanings. How can rhyme facilitate thought, invite play, enact erotics, nod to history, and even function as gay camp? How has the past century of “free verse” literary education helped scrub off some of the residues of political conservatism from formalist literary practice? We’ll explore how rhyme operates in situ in the work of both formal and seemingly antiformal poets, taking into account other aspects of prosody such as meter and syllabics. Then we’ll write a few stanzas of our own that follow, remix, or otherwise take inspiration from particular traditional rhyme schemes.
Tell-Tale Awareness
(with ‘Pemi Aguda)
In Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World, he asks, “What is your protagonist aware of? What forces shape their awareness?” In this craft class, we will discuss the overlap between description, character, and plot – How does what the character notices contribute to the reader’s understanding of their state of mind, desires, background, and where they are positioned in the world of the story? How does a character’s specific history influence their gaze? And how can this observational lens lay the ground for the story’s direction? We will read excerpts across genres and do writing exercises to demonstrate what we learn.
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.