Workshops embody the heart of the Juniper Institute. In these small workshops, writers focus on new work and/or work-in-progress. Workshops meet daily to actively interrogate larger issues of form, style, content, language, and process; and participants benefit from having their writing read by these thoughtful, careful audiences.
Fiction Workshops 2025
‘Pemi Aguda
Voice, Form, Mood
In this fiction workshop, we will discuss published work across a range of genres, focusing on craft elements—like voice, form and mood—that we might borrow to make our own work exciting and luminous. Please bring one story or chapter that you’d love new eyes on. You will be asked to articulate your own intentions for, and frustrations, with your submitted work—the goal being to guide and maximize the usefulness of our feedback for revision past our week together. We will also do in-class exercises or short assignments that break us away from our writing habits, and liberally share reading recommendations with each other to sustain and energize our practice beyond the workshop.
Jessica Anthony
The Unlikely and Obscure: Techniques of Estrangement
How does the storyteller create a sense of the new from the deeply familiar? What strange maps can be drawn from the people and places we feel we know as intimately as ourselves? What questions lead us into territories of the bizarre, the unknown? This workshop explores techniques of estrangement, excavating the oddest, most alien aspects of our characters, conflicts, landscapes, images, dialogues, and so on. Along with practicing writing exercises that can help us enter the obscure and esoteric, all writers will have a short story or novel excerpt workshopped by the group. Plan to submit a mss. of no more than 7000 words (15p.) in advance of the workshop. Written feedback on the mss. will be provided and expected. Finally, supplementary stories may be assigned for reading.
Jeff Parker
Lying & Language-Made Hallucination
In writing fiction, one must lie convincingly in order to tell the truth, and in order to conjure a vivid language-made hallucination, as the most transporting fiction does, a writer must attend to certain aspects of craft. Thus, this workshop will concern itself with techniques that improve lying and conjuration. As we discuss your pre-written work and other texts by great writers, we will zero in on the basic units of prose writing, the sentence, the paragraph, and the scene as well as the five elements of narrative: action, description, dialogue, thought, and exposition. We will also consider approaches to character and narrative structure. Participants will submit one to two stories or novel excerpts (10-18 double-spaced pages) prior to arriving at Juniper. (This should be work that you’re seeking feedback on, work that you wish to make better.) Each participant will prepare feedback including a one-page letter for everyone. When not workshopping participant work, we will consider outside prose and do several exercises.
Poetry Workshops 2025
Tiana Clark
“What You Wonder”
Lucille Clifton said, “So you come to poetry not out of what you know – but out of what you wonder.” In this workshop, we will be coming to poetry out of that sense of awe and surprise for a weeklong exploration into generative poetry prompts with packets and new approaches to workshopping our poems together. We will be examining and writing: Epistles, Employing Epizeuxis, Breaking the Boundary with Ekphrastic Poetry, Breaking the 4th Wall in Poems, and Making and Breaking Forms. I will give you the first prompt a week before we meet to get us started. Each day we will discuss the theme for the day with close reading explication, respond to the writing prompt, followed by a workshop that is centered around a community of care. I will also have a fun revision exercise for you on our last day together. In terms of feedback, we will be writing short letters highlighting our heart lines, praises, and suggestions for possibilities in your poems. I’m looking forward to our week of wonderment together as we trust and chase our wildest imaginations.
Safia Elhillo
Notes Toward Liberation
In the face of wars, conflicts, colonization, climate collapse, and the other elements of chaos plaguing our world, it can be challenging to confront the blank page and write poetry. After all, what can one even say? Sometimes all we can do is jot notes down amidst disaster to think and develop through later. In these workshop sessions, we will critique, interrogate, and celebrate participants’ new works and ongoing work-in-progress, thinking about the relationship between observation and notetaking, and the final poetic piece. How do we preserve the rawness of initial impressions, while honing and polishing them to a fully formed poem? Between feedback sessions, we will generate new pieces through a series of micro-prompts and list-making exercises designed to take the pressure off approaching a blank page. Students should submit a selection of new work/drafts (up to 5 poems, no more than 10 pages) for review, as well as an introductory statement about the status of the work, any questions they may have, things they are already working on, or feedback they have previously received.
Sam Sax
Obsession & Constraint
In this short and generous week together we’ll be excavating our obsessions across multiple inherited and invented formal strategies and writing strategies. Often, as writers, we fall into the false belief that we’ve exhausted what interests us most because we’ve written a single poem about it. In our time together, we’ll be generating new work and workshopping new poems with an eye toward how to expand or push a project or a writing practice. We’ll look at writers who explore their obsessions across multiple books or long poem sequences, and help each other find new angles, windows, and entry points into writing toward what we hold most closely.
Nonfiction Workshop 2025
T Kira Māhealani Madden
“The Self, The Selves: A “Nonfiction” Generative Workshop
Our lived experiences, and our memories, are rarely understood through a tidy, ‘traditional’ chronology. They seldom mirror a Western ‘hero’s journey;’ and they shouldn’t have to. In this generative space, we will investigate speculative structures, parallel realities, hypothetical What If’s? and honor every Self as Narrator in order to come closer to the story. We will focus on compression, syntax, and identifying narrative heat and emotional potency in our memories, our selves, and all the selves we’ve been, discussing strategies one uses to render characters inspired by real people, and the compromises and thrills that come with that responsibility. Writers should be prepared to experiment, play, share, and offer first impression oral feedback. Too, writers will leave with new work every day.