If you would like an infusion of creativity (with accountability) in a dynamic, but safe environment for positive critique, here are my current course and workshop offerings. Open to writers of all levels—instruction focuses on developing your voice as well as your writing skills such as POV, plot, tense, structure, pacing and rhythm, figurative language, believable dialogue, sensory detail, narrative strategies, poetic forms, experimentation—and more.

SUMMER 2021 COURSES — OTIS COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

MEMOIR, FICTION, OR PROSE POETRY  

Mine life experiences and ignite your imagination to transform raw material for a memoir, work of fiction, or prose poetry. Discover your voice and stimulate your creativity. Develop strategies to shape your story or prose poems, achieve clarity and hone the craft of nuanced language. Acquire skills to render complex characters, distill believable dialogue and incorporate sensory detail. Like contemporary art that breaks down boundaries between art and life, experiment with points of view and tense, invent and reinvent from memory. This dynamic course focuses on the art of compelling narrative. Finished works may be a short story, chapters of a memoir or novel, a collection of prose poems, or hybrid.

10 Meetings: Wednesday 7 – 10 pm, June 2 – August 4, 2021

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MICRO STORIES & POEMS: MACRO IMPACT 

Works of extreme brevity go to the heart of human experience with intensity and clarity. Learn to distill language to create urgency and depth – with elements of the unexpected. Acquire narrative skills to compress stories to moments, transform fragments to tales, and shape the impressionistic to lyrical landscape. Compressed prose forms include Flash and Sudden Fiction (less than 1000 words), Micro-memoir (200 – 250 words), Drabble (100 words), Mini-saga (50 words), Vignettes, Hint Fiction (25 words), and 6- Word stories (made famous by Ernest Hemingway). Poetry forms include Haiku, Tanka, Acrostic, Lune (American Haiku), and Nonet (Disappearing Poem). This course serves as a perfect introduction to Creative Writing or an ideal way for Intermediate or Advanced students to learn to whittle their long form writing for more intense impact.

6 Meetings: Tuesday 7 – 10 pm, June 15 – July 20, 2021

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