Turning Passion into Product
We will be exploring the art and the craft of screenwriting. "Adrenaline" exercises to liberate the lurking beast of the writer inside you. Exercises and lectures on the crafts of scene writing and screen story structure and format. Reading and discussion of participants' material. Our goal: You will be better screenwriters at the end of the week than you were when you walked in.
Instructor: Hal Ackerman, screenwriting

Dreaming Fiction: Sources and Inspirations
Good fictions are less constructed than they are dreamed, and they invite the reader powerfully to participate in that dream. In this workshop, we'll undertake a series of exercises, readings, and thoughtful revision and editing of participants' own work, all designed to help the writer (novice to advanced) tap into the vast narrative potential of the dreaming mind.
Instructor: Pinckney Benedict, fiction

Suspense, Murder, Mystery: Permission to Enter the Genre
Explore the darker side of fiction. We'll examine the work of some of the finest writers working in the suspense genre and find out what it is about their work that thrills us so. Through in-class exercises and the discussion of participant manuscripts (up to 25 pages of short fiction or chapter sections), we'll sharpen tension-building skills and learn how to elevate the spine tingling factor of the work. There will be plenty of discussion about agents, publishers, manuscript preparation and magazine submissions, and participation in professional associations and conventions as well.
Instructor: Laura Benedict, thriller/crime/horror fiction

Wikis, Webs, and Wetware: Writing with New Media
This course is designed for writers, new media prrofessionals, closet bloggers, and anyone interested in writing with and about new technology. From author-avatars to "embedded" journalists, new technologies are transforming how we imagine creative and critical authorship. Topics and technologies include: Web writing, 3-D storytelling, hypertext, and interactive narrative. Through exercises and readings, we will consider how new media influences how we tell stories, report the news, and imagine new worlds. We will dabble in the serious play of gaming environments and avatar-characters, "environmental storytelling," animated and interactive poetry and art, virtual narrative, and interactive Flash fiction. Participants will have a chance to work with images and text in online immersive environments and to experiment with everything from simple hypertext to storyboarding for 3-D scenarios. Along the way we will also consider how online writing communities and journals are transforming the very idea of authorship and audience. No previous experience or training with technology required beyond some basic typing skills and a wildly vivid (virtual) imagination.
Instructor: Jen Boyle, new media

Introductory Poetry Course: Life Distilled
In the old days of IRCs, one hesitated before sending one's poetry to international journals because of the hassle. Now many of them accept electronic submissions, one of the great innovations that technology provides. As I was sending out my work to deaddrunkdublin.com, a journal that publishes "when the muses and fates allow," I was asked for a one line description of poetry. After years of writing it, I had never thought about a definition and settled on "Life distilled." In this course, we will focus on that mysterious process of distilling life. Most poetry that doesn't work suffers from being overly sentimental or too abstract. This class will seek to show examples of what works as a means of understanding your own poems and other literary work. In addition to a traditional poetry workshop, we will focus on new venues for publication such as electronic literary journals, blogs, and other forms of electronic media. Students will be expected to bring five to eight poems to class for workshop.
Michelle Brooks, introductory poetry

Picking up the Pieces: the Memoir-essay
Given clippings, a favorite artifact, those old photos, the mismatched anecdotes of relatives, and the warehouse of memory, how might we construct from and around these sources engaging personal essays? This workshop will focus on Annie Dillard's notion of "fashioning a text" by concentrating on such elements as voice, point of view, significant detail, storytelling, and form and language. Open to all levels, the workshop will offer examples, exercises, and finally, a sympathetic audience for your own writing as well as individual conferences. Whether you lean toward the "here-and-now" of a personal essay or the "then" of a memoir, we'll work toward fashioning a lively, thought-provoking experience on the page. Please bring a few old photos, an artifact or two, and one or two short examples (5-8 pages) of your work in progress.
Instructor: James McKean, creative nonfiction

Casting a Long Shadow: Dimensionality in Short and Long Fiction
In this workshop, we will devote ourselves to a deeper understanding of narrative craft, from strategies for the handling of time (horizontal as well as vertical) to ways of more fully developing characters by means of the interior and exterior worlds they inhabit. This intensive workshop is designed for novelists and short story writers who are committed to bringing their fiction to the next stage of development, where the mystery at the heart of the narrative pulsates as it does in those places we return to again and again. Participants should bring with them to the workshop a story or chapter (no more than 15 pages) that they would like to have critiqued. They should also expect short, fun reading assignments and exercises.
Instructor: Daniel Mueller, fiction

Shaping Drafts: An Advanced Poetry Workshop
Making successful poems requires the writer to read the drafts as mysteries. To shape a poem's energies, we must let its energies shape our shaping. It is a dance of proximity and distance, vision and blindness. This workshop invites poets with experience and a mature sense of aesthetic persuasion to explore the delicate art of tapping into a poem's urgencies, a kind of open heart surgery. We will grow more familiar with the anatomy and texture of poetry: image, word, diction, voice, syntactical configurations, rhetorical devices, and matters of form and tradition -- stanza, line, punctuation, and page. In addition to having our poems read and discussed, we will read widely and closely poems from across the ages as well as read essays on craft. To be considered, please submit no more than six poems and a two-hundred word description of what you hope to gain from the workshop to Thorpe Moeckel at tmoeckel@hollins.edu by May 15th.
Instructor: Thorpe Moeckel, advanced poetry

Hidden in Plain Sight: Stories from the Everyday
There's a wonderful lie about (and sometimes perpetrated by) writers, that they must live dangerously in order to write about danger; that all good writing comes from experience. In fact, good writing comes from the ability to recognize experience when you see it, and the confidence to apply your imagination to what you find. In this workshop, we will examine the fictional promise of found stories, public artifacts, and other slivers of the everyday, and develop daily strategies for seeing real life through the lens of craft. Bring an article of interest from your local newspaper and a piece of fiction in progress.
Instructor: Ashley Warlick, fiction

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