Writing Workshops
The goal of our writing workshops is to help individuals grow either creatively or professionally. We do this through traditional creative writing workshops and through professional writing workshops that are focused on topics like publishing, grant writing, and business plan development. Our primary audiences are Veterans and victims of and witnesses to war and geopolitical violence—individuals whose experiences may not have afforded them the opportunity to yet learn these skills. However, we also offer plenty of classes to general audiences, though the class topics gravitate toward our themes.
Upcoming Workshops
Witness to History: Oct. 28th-Nov. 18th
What: In this interactive nonfiction workshop, writers will choose an event related to war or geopolitical violence they have witnessed or participated in first-hand. These events can be anything from being in combat to participating in a conflict-related rally to growing up in an environment with a relative who is a refugee. We will begin with oral story-telling of personal recollections and then seek out primary material, such as interviews and archival material, before drafting a personal essay. Then, in a gentle and trusting workshop setting, each draft will be commented on and discussed, so that the writer will have a better understanding of what needs to be revised in future drafts. The goal by the end of the four sessions is for each writer to leave with a solid initial draft and a strong sense of what to do next.
Beginning and seasoned writers are welcome as the only required tools are memory and a willingness to share observations.
Who: Carol Bergman was an Adjunct Associate Professor of writing at NYU, College of Applied LIberal Arts until Covid, and a founding faculty at Gotham Writers Workshop. She is a prize winning, much published author, and the co-owner of Mediacs, a small press.“Objects of Desire,” appearing in Lilith and Whetstone Literary Review was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in nonfiction. “Another Day in Paradise; International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories,” with a foreword by John Le Carré, a great humanitarian, was nominated for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her articles, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications in the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia. www.carolbergman.net
When & Where: The class will meet online every Monday for four weeks starting on October 28th and finishing on November 18th. Each class will run from 7p to 9p ET.
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $200
Book Reviews Workshop: Oct. 12th & Oct. 19th
What: These interrelated classes will focus on learning the basics of writing a critical book review—a review, that is, concerning itself with close reading and critical analysis instead of being solely a vehicle for sales. This goal becomes complex when writing reviews that deal with war, conflicts, and the far-reaching effects of their violence, so these classes will pay close attention to representation, appropriate language, and general practices when analyzing and writing about such complicated subjects.
In each session, we will discuss various readings (especially translated work since an understanding of diverse cultures is essential), conduct in-class writing exercises, and exchange work to benefit from crucial peer feedback. Each session’s primary goal is to provide the student with the understanding and practical knowledge necessary to write a compelling and judicious review.
Each session is designed to be its own class, but both sessions will work to amplify and refine the other.
Who: Dr. Fathima M. is the Assistant Translations Editor at Consequence. She has a PhD in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her reviews have been published in Wasafiri, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Kathmandu Post, The Daily Star, World Literature Today, and Minola Review, among others.
When & Where: The class will meet online on Saturday, October 12th and Saturday, October 19th. Each class will run from 11:30a to 1:30p ET.
Class Limit: 10
Cost: $40 for one session (either one) or $75 for both
Disruption, Disorientation, and the Slip-Slide into the Surreal (or: how best to write about the dark): Oct. 8th-Nov. 12th
What: When trying to navigate darkness, looking at a thing head-on will do you no good. You have to look away, slightly, from what you want to see in order to be able to see it at all—because when it comes to vision in the dark, all the power is in the peripheral. And so it is with writing about the dark. A head-on approach is rarely the best way to help the reader see, much less feel what’s there, lurking.
So, in this workshop series, we’ll investigate disruptive craft elements (like lists, fractured narratives, splintered syntax, unconventional punctuation, and sonic patterning) as force-multipliers. That is, we’ll explore together how some of the best modern war poets leverage disruptions in craft to wobble the ground beneath the reader’s feet—to disorient, to provoke, to confound, and ultimately, to reveal.
In each of six workshop sessions, we’ll investigate a different formal device called upon by our best modern war poets to evade the reader’s defenses and communicate something about conflict, about violence, that’s viscerally affecting, and—for all its surreality—real. We’ll seek out the access-hatches, the pressure points, the trapdoors to the psyche. And then we’ll work to apply what we’ve learned to the page.
Who: Margaret M. Kelly holds an MFA in Poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, where she studied cross-genre in fiction as well. She also holds an AB with Honors in Political Theory from Princeton University and a JD from Virginia Law, where she co-edited and co-authored an anthology on the Law of War—Lifting the Fog of War: New Thinking about War and War Prevention.
Her first poetry collection, Unbalancing Act, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Her poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in the Asheville Review, the Jabberwock Review, and Quarter after Eight, among others.
When she’s not writing, Margaret works as an admissions specialist at Backcountry Academics; she volunteers as a crisis worker for 988 (the National Crisis Lifeline); and she partners with Ukraine Global Scholars, helping high-achieving Ukrainians earn scholarships and admission to excellent schools abroad.
She lives on a farm in Virginia with her shepherd dog, Huck.
When & Where: The class will meet online every Tuesday for six weeks starting on October 8th and finishing on November 12th. Each class will run from 7p to 9p ET.
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $100
Recent Workshops
What: This generative, experimental poetry course will explore transmutations, a cyclical conversation between written and visual, auditory, and tactile art. Poems will become audio compositions, artwork will become poetry, and then these conversations will be reversed, fracturing and reconstructing individual and collaborative work.
Working with themes of geopolitical violence and war is neither a prerequisite nor a requirement for the course, but much of the suggested reading and source material will be centered on war and depictions of it. The purpose of this course is not only to create original work, which, on occasion, we will discuss in class, but also to find artistic and literary peers with whom to collaborate.
Required Reading: During this course, we will consider a range of visual and literary material, including the poetry collections The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey and Spectral Evidence by Gregory Pardlo, selected poems by Victoria Chang, Cythia Hogue, and Danez Smith, and depictions of war and geopolitical violence by Otto Dix, Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi, Mona Hatoum, and Bukta Imre.
Who: Christianne is a poet, visual artist, and composer from Michigan. Oracle Smoke Machine is Christianne’s ekphrastic art-and-poetry collaboration with painter Stephen Proski. Christianne’s work is published by Arts Fuse, Consequence, Burningword Literary Journal, Fahmidan Journal, Panel Magazine, Rust + Moth, and The Lakeshore Review, among others, and she writes book and culture reviews for Tupelo Quarterly, HarperOne, and Hungarian Literature Online. She is a graduate of the Boston University MFA program, the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow.
What: This introductory six-week workshop aims to create an engaging, generative space of exploration and experimentation for writers at all levels. Amongst topics of discussion will be point of view, place, and language. Readings may include works by Saidiya Hartman, Jo Ann Beard, Jesmyn Ward, Emily Bernard, and Jaquira Díaz. Students will be expected to read all assigned materials and actively engage in class discussions.
Who: Stephanie Cuepo Wobby is a Filipino American writer and a former US Army combat medic. Her work has appeared in The Point, Off Assignment, and Guernica, amongst other publications. A graduate of Columbia University’s Writing MFA program, she’s received support from the Columbia University School of the Arts and the de Groot Foundation towards her work. She currently lives in Vermont with her husband and their two dogs.
