SLC.edu / Continuing Education and Noncredit Programs / The Writing Institute / Summer Session Workshops

2012 Summer Session Workshops

Fiction
Five-Week Courses

Novel Writing Workshop

Instructor: Patricia Dunn
Thursdays, noon – 2 p.m.
May 31 – June 28
5 sessions; Tuition: $285
Register online»

Are you in the middle of a first draft? Second, third, or when-will-this-be-over draft? Or are you just starting to think about writing a novel? Wherever you are in the process of writing an extended piece of fiction, this is a course that will challenge and support you. Along with group feedback, you and your work will receive a great deal of one-on-one attention from the instructors.

Patricia Dunn (MFA, Sarah Lawrence College) was managing editor of America's most popular Muslim online magazine Muslim Wakeup!, with over 200,000 monthly readers, from 2003-2008. Her fiction has appeared in Global City Review, Salon.com, Women's eNews, The Christian Science Monitor, The Village Voice, The Nation, and L.A. Weekly, among other publications. Her work is anthologized in Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, Kent State University Press. She blogs on the writing life at shewritesbutwhy.blogspot.com. Her essay "Love at Third Sight" will appear in the anthology "Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women," published by Soft Skull Press on Valentine's Day 2012. Her novel, Rebels by Accident, is currently under submission.

Jimin Han (BA, Cornell University; MFA, Sarah Lawrence College). Her nonfiction and fiction can be found in The Nuyorasian Anthology, Global City Review, The Asian American Pacific Journal, on NPR, KoreanAmericanStory.org, and EssentialMom.com, among others.

The Fiction Writer’s Essential Selves

Instructor: Steven Schnur
Thursdays, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
May 3 – June 7
No Class May 17
5 sessions; Tuition: $285
Register online»

We write in white heat, easy fluency, or with paralytic torpor, then reconsider our efforts and revise, rewrite, or begin anew, and finally bring the hard-won wisdom gleaned from this solitary struggle to the workshop table, allowing it to inform our response to the work of others. Each of the fiction writer's essential selves—inventor, refiner, assessor—is critical to the ultimate success of the enterprise. By engendering a sense of audience and offering supportive, constructive criticism that focuses on richness of language, originality of thought, succinctness, and narrative cohesion, this workshop fosters each of the fiction writer's vital personae, enabling participants to quickly identify their strengths while providing the tools necessary to address their weaknesses. Through weekly presentations of work in progress, students hone both their writing skills and their critical faculties as they respond to each other's stories.

Steven Schnur (BA, Sarah Lawrence College; MA, Graduate Center, City University of New York) has published numerous books for adults and children, including Days of Awe, Sanctuary, Father's Day, The Koufax Dilemma, The Shadow Children (winner of the Sidney Taylor Award for outstanding juvenile fiction), and The Tie Man's Miracle: A Chanukah Tale (which aired as a PBS animated special in 2005).

NEW! Writing for Children: From Where We Dream

Instructor: Wendy Townsend
Mondays, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
June 4 – July 2
5 sessions; Tuition: $285
Register online»

Joan Didion said, “The picture in your mind tells you what’s going on in the story … it tells you, you don’t tell it.”

Of stories, some say they’ve already been written; that is, they live inside us and we only need to write them down. In this course on writing for children, we’re going to practice writing what we see in our mind’s eye and also what we feel about it. Some writers call this writing “in the zone”; others say they are writing “with the muse.” Robert Olen Butler calls it writing “from where you dream.”

The writing prompts we will have at the beginning of each class are set up so that you can write either from your own memories or from the point of view of your story’s character. They’re a great way to get you up and running with the beginnings of a story, or with a new scene, or to revise one that’s not working. Writers will read their work aloud and receive group feedback. Rather than criticize, we will support and elicit each writer’s vision through an ongoing discussion about elements of craft, including creating tension, going from general to specific by shaping scenes, making our characters more authentic, and making our readers want to read the whole story.

Whether you want to tell a story but aren’t sure where to begin, or you already have a story written—whether it’s a picture book or young adult novel—our goal is for each writer to see his or her story more clearly and to generate a satisfying work-in-progress.

Wendy Townsend (BS, Empire State College; MFA, Vermont College) has taught workshops for children's writing at Empire State College for the last six years. In 2008, she published her first young adult novel, Lizard Love, which received a Booklist Starred Review. She also co-authored and illustrated Iguanas: A Guide to Their Biology and Captive Care in 1993. Her second novel, The Sundown Rule, released in March of 2011, has received a Bulletin starred review and has been named one of the Kirkus top-10 children's book of the year. Her third novel, Blue Iguana, has been accepted for publication. She is also a regular contributor to Reptiles magazine.

Nonfiction
Five-Week Courses

NEW! Humor Writing: Punch Up Your Prose

Instructor: Dan Zevin
Tuesdays, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
July 10-August 7
5 sessions; Tuition $285
Register online»

Your friends think you're funny, your family thinks you're funny, and your sensibility is more Seinfeld than Sartre. So why does your writing often wind up so dry? In this cordial workshop setting, you'll learn to inject humor into your prose by connecting with your comic voice. Reading and discussing the work of legendary wits including James Thurber, P.G. Wodehouse, and Dorothy Parker, as well as contemporary humorists such as Nora Ephron, David Sedaris, and Dave Barry. Writing assignments will help strengthen your voice across four basic forms: the comic essay, the comic novel or short story, the topical news column, and the parody piece. In-class exercises are designed to shake off preconceived notions of "serious" prose, and help you find the funny in the characters, dialogue, and situations you create. Whether your goal is to write a Shouts and Murmurs piece for The New Yorker or to begin a book-length humor collection, the first step is the same: take your sense of humor seriously.

Dan Zevin, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, is the author of four humor books, including the forthcoming Dan Gets a Minivan: Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad (Scribner, May 2012). He has been the humor columnist for Boston Magazine and The Boston Phoenix, as well as a comic correspondent for National Public Radio's WBUR. A featured speaker at the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop, Zevin has written for print and digital publications including Rolling Stone, Details, and The Huffington Post. He has taught writing at NYU and Emerson, and writes his own blog, The Minivan Diaries at danzevin.com.

Getting Personal: Workshop for Personal Essayists

Instructor: Steven Schnur
Wednesdays, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
May 2 – June 6
No Class May 16
5 sessions; Tuition: $285
Register online»

If there is a broader canvas than the personal essay, it is life itself in all its infinite particularity. Fiction writers may be constrained by little more than their imaginations, but their creativity must hew to the conventions of storytelling; that is to plot and character. The personal essayist enjoys a freer hand. The constraints are fewer, the subjects limitless, the form as elastic as one’s focus. Every instance of human consciousness possesses the potential heft to sustain an essay; all that is required is voice (that subtle song of the self) and an instinct for the dramatic. But danger lurks in a “too personal” presentation, one that lacks a sense of audience or sufficient animating energy. In this workshop students will present brief weekly essays impelled by whatever fragment of emotion, thought, or observation captures their imagination, seeking in the process to convey richly, succinctly, and dramatically what it means to be human.

NEW! Writing Memoir: Which Self Will Speak?

Instructor: Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
Tuesdays, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
May 29 – June 26
5 sessions, $285
Register online»

What is it about a life that merits giving it voice and shape on the page? How do we navigate the rush of detail, the flow of time, the demands for truth-telling in order to narrate a readable story whose value lies in authenticity? What tools are needed to create scenes and how can they be reconciled with memories that are missing many details?

In this five-week course, participants will work on a piece that is projected as a part of a larger or longer story. Through intensive class dialogue the most complicated issues in memoir will be approached and writers will make decisions about how they will be handled in their memoir. By the last session, participants may expect to have a chapter or piece that is polished and vibrant with a voice to lead readers to the direction ahead.

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s memoir, The Other Side of the Tiber, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, fall 2012. Mother Tongue, an American Life in Italy, North Point Press, appeared in hardback 1997, 2003 in paper. Her essays have appeared widely from Best Spiritual Essays to Agni, Granta, Notre Dame Review, Southwest Review, and Kenyon Review. Fifteen were recently published as a book in Italian. Her work has appeared in five languages. She runs writers groups in Parma, Milan, and Bologna, Italy, is part of the faculty for the Geneva Writers Group in Switzerland, and has taught creative writing for Boston College, Montclair State, and narrative medicine for the University of Parma. She has lived in Parma, Italy for thirty years and now spends some time each year in New York City.

Writing Process
Five-Week Courses

Triage for Your Writing: Saving Your Story

Instructor: Marek Fuchs
Thursdays, 10 a.m. – noon
May 31 – June 28
5 sessions; Tuition: $285
Register online»

You can admit it: You have a halfwritten article or book buried alive in a drawer. You were going along nicely and then—bam! It wasn’t working. Open drawer. Insert manuscript. But what wasn’t working? Reality is, many articles and books hit a point at which they need triage. It happens to the best of them. Sometimes the structure is off; other times the perspective is all wrong. Still more times, you have a good short piece that is thinning out because you are trying to force it into a larger format. The upshot? What you have is probably fixable. Take it out of that drawer. Revival might be only a single suggestion away.

Marek Fuchs (BA, Drew University) is currently a guest professor of nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College and a guest lecturer of journalism at Manhattan College. He wrote the “County Lines” column for The New York Times for six years and is a daily contributor to TheStreet.com, with his articles and videos syndicated on Yahoo! Finance. Fuchs published A Cold-Blooded Business in 2009, a book called “riveting” by Kirkus Reviews. He cofounded Better Business Through Writing, a business editing firm, and was serving as the editor-in-chief of Fertilmind.net, a financial Web site, when the site won two consecutive “Best of the Web” awards from Forbes Magazine. Fuchs has also won multiple awards, including the Silver Award in 2007 from the League of American Communications Professionals, and was named the best journalism critic in the nation by Talking Biz Web site. When not writing or teaching, Fuchs serves as a firefighter in Hastings, New York.

NEW! Writing About Families

Instructor: Marek Fuchs
Wednesdays, 10 a.m. – noon
May 30 – June 27
5 sessions; Tuition: $285
Register online»

There is nothing trickier than writing a narrative—fiction or nonfiction—about a family. That’s because the story of a family (any family) has no natural story line. It’s circular. People come, go, are born and die. How do you superimpose a narrative structure on a family story so that you have more than a collection of aunts, uncles, and words? Too many writers see attempts at writing family stories snap off or fizzle, but that need not happen. This course looks at how to write family stories that move and sing.

Writing from the Chaos of Our Lives

Instructor: Alexandra Soiseth
Fridays, 11 a.m. – 1 p.m.
June 1 – 29
5 sessions; Tuition: $285
Register online»

Vivian Gornick calls the life you have lived The Situation, but for her, it’s The Story that counts. The Story is what we, as writers, make out of the chaos of our lives. The Story is how we interpret our experiences and make sense of it all. In a supportive and non-competitive environment, we will explore YOUR story. We will help you find a way to tease it out from your day-to-day life—in essence, help you learn to see the world as a writer. We will then help you tell that story by exploring the craft of writing, through exercises, both in class and at home, as well as through a close reading of your work and published memoirs, personal essays, and short fiction.

Alexandra Soiseth (SLC 2000 –) (BA, University of Saskatchewan; BAA, Ryerson University; MFA, Sarah Lawrence College) is the associate director of the MFA writing program at Sarah Lawrence. She has taught writing to a variety of students, including high school students, seniors, and men and women in prison. She is the recipient of a Canada Arts Council grant and an Ontario Arts Council grant, and is the former managing editor of and communications director for Global City Review, a New York City-based literary magazine. Her work has appeared on babycenter.com, literarymama.com, and in McGill Street Magazine, The Ryersonian, and on the radio program LifeRattle, among others. Her memoir, Choosing You, was published in 2008 by Seal Press.

Writing Process
Short-Session Workshops

NEW! Five Days, Ten Thousand Words

Instructor: Steve Lewis
Monday – Friday, 9:30 a.m. – noon
July 9 – 13
5 sessions; Tuition: $325
Register online»

Based in part on the weeklong retreats Steve facilitates on Hatteras Island, NC, the intention behind this intensive is to gather serious writers already at work on—or about to launch—fiction or nonfiction projects of their own choosing and to give them the space, time, encouragement, community, and kick in the butt to write a minimum of 2,000 unedited words a day. We will meet each morning, Monday through Friday, to share and discuss the previous afternoon/evening’s output; then everyone will return home or to their own creative spaces and proceed to produce another 2,000+ words for the next day’s session. The real challenge of this workshop will be to trust the intuitive voice and refuse to edit oneself. At the end of the week every writer should have at least 10,000 good words on paper—and be profoundly tired and inspired.

Steve Lewis is a mentor at Empire State College and a longtime freelance writer whose publication credits include The New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Christian Science Monitor, and a biblically long list of parenting magazines. His more recent books are Zen and the Art of Fatherhood, The ABCs of Real Family Values, The Complete Guide for the Anxious Groom, Fear and Loathing in Boca Raton: A Hippies’ Guide to the Second Sixties, and a collection of poems, A Month on a Barrier Island. A microfiction collaboration with photographer Norman Seider is due out in the spring 2012.