Fiction Workshops
Sybil Baker
In addition to workshopping each participant’s story or novel excerpt, we will also have mini-craft sessions, where we work on and discuss issues such as reading like a writer, dialogue, scene building, as well as short story and novel structure and development. We’ll also work on writing exercises and revision strategies to take with you after you leave YWW. Short stories and novel excerpts are welcome.
Jotham Burrello
Read, Workshop, Revise, Repeat. In this seminar writers will complete assigned craft exercises and read stories and their fellow writers’ manuscripts prior to arrival. During the first four sessions the group will discuss submitted manuscripts, journal, daydream, and dedicate time to revision exercises and craft discussions, with a special emphasis on characterization and structure. Writers will leave with a revision strategy for their manuscript, and a full toolbox of techniques. Short stories and novel excerpts welcome.
Trey Ellis
The core of this intensive fiction workshop consists of the fearless sharing of your work with the class. Everyone will submit either an excerpt or short story, so that when we meet in person in June, we will all be prepared to carefully give feedback. I will deliver short craft talks each day on a variety of subjects: character, dialogue, plot, etc. You will also meet individually with me so that you will have a clear plan of attack for next steps.
Molly Gaudry
For this workshop, you may submit a range of fiction forms—traditional short stories or novel chapters, stories toward a novel-in-stories, interconnected flash fictions, flash fictions that stand alone, even fragmented or braided narratives. You will leave eager to get back to work on your revisions, able to apply knowledge and skills developed at Yale to your future writing projects, and with a clearer understanding of the functional relationship between form and content.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley
In this short story workshop, group members will read contemporary short fiction, novel excerpts and craft essays that address memory, point of view, character motivation and plot. They’ll also share their work with peers and learn about revision strategies and new approaches to the short story form. Workshop members will hone their creative voices in a fun, productive and collaborative environment.
Lisa Page
Nothing exists in the intellect that has not first gone through the senses." -Plutarch. Fiction is a reflection of the truth as we know it, of story, of scene and character through the five senses. This fiction workshop will provide a safe space for novel excerpts, flash fiction, novellas, short stories, and hybrid fiction. It will include generative exercises designed to foster new work.
Non-Fiction Workshops
Mary Collins
TRUE STORIES IN COMPLEX TIMES A nonfiction workshop that taps into all the genre has to offer from humor to personal essay to compelling storytelling. What better time than now to study our own lives and society for material that might illuminate, entertain or surprise? Both students new to the form and more advanced students working on book-length projects are welcomed.
Mishka Shubaly
We understand fiction to be made-up and nonfiction to be true. But any linear narrative is a human construction, as life explodes constantly in all directions. To make it more confusing, Grace Paley's fiction and Lucia Berlin's autofiction overflow with truth while Mary Karr's and Harry Crews' memoirs seem too wild or too evocative to be true. This workshop will locate the emotional heart of your narrative, then amplify the truth that spills from it.