TMWW Summer: Course Descriptions, Seminars, and Faculty

Available Workshops

• Advanced Novel – Fred Leebron, fiction
• Beyond Corsets and Dragons: World building in Historical Fiction and Fantasy – Amanda Cockrell, all levels
• Fiction Writers’ Retreat – Dan Mueller, fiction, all levels
• Historical Fiction – Rachel Beanland, all levels
• Radical Presence: Poetry as an Art of Attention – Rebecca Lindenberg, all levels
• Starting Your Writing Journey – Dorothy Hassan, multigenre, novice
• The Middle Place, a Workshop for Book-Length Works in Progress-Barbara Jones, fiction and memoir
• Write Now: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop – James McKean, all levels
• Writing Young Adult and Middle Grade Fiction – Laura Ruby, all levels
• CRAFT SEMINARS – open to all

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Fred Leebron

Advanced Novel

“A novel is really like a symphony,” Katherine Anne Porter once said, “where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.” Whether you’re working on conventional or experimental fiction, your novel is shaped by the instruments you choose: the scenes you select and extend, the voices in which you describe them, and your treatment of narrative time. In this workshop, we will examine your novel excerpt (of no more than 20 double-spaced pages) for both technique and the critical impulses that inspire a long work of fiction. What is your novel accomplishing in its narrative tracks, character arcs, and structural shape? And, just as important, what instruments are you choosing not to “play” that you might try to incorporate in the symphony that is your novel? For any writer who has completed several polished chapters or a first draft of a novel, this workshop will help you evaluate how your approach to the novel is working for you and your readers and offer you fresh ideas for development and revision.

Fred Leebron has published three novels, a novella, and numerous short stories, winning both an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize. He has founded and directed writing programs in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, and has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate level for nearly 30 years. His second novel, Six Figures, was made into a feature length, award-winning film in Canada, and he has worked on a number of film and television projects. He is coauthor of a Harcourt Brace textbook on fiction writing and coeditor of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction. A new collection of short fiction, The News Said It Was, was published in 2022.

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Amanda Cockrell

Beyond Corsets and Dragons: World Building in Historical Fiction and Fantasy, all levels

This write-now workshop will focus on how to be at home in another world — that of your historical or fantasy novel, because the first thing for both is world building. It’s tricky to create a fully realized world, but your book is going to depend on going beyond dragons and corsets. We’ll use prompts suggested by the nature of each participant’s work to write short scenes that put the reader in the complex setting of your novel without need of the dreaded expository lump. You’ll either research or design from scratch and then practice painting that world on each page for the reader. You can bring a work in progress or start something entirely new, and all levels of experience are welcome. You’ll write daily and respond to each other’s work. I’ll have handouts to give some examples. If you are inclined to read ahead, here are three books to dip into that exemplify successful world building: Hild by Nicola Griffith, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, and The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson. These are hefty books, and you don’t need to finish them, just sample one or some, and think about how their authors are doing it.

Amanda Cockrell is the author of numerous historical novels, among them Coyote Weather (April 2023), set during the years of the Vietnam War, and six novels of the pre-Columbian Southwest. Writing as Damion Hunter, she is the author of novels set in ancient Rome, including Shadow of the Eagle, which Simon Scarrow called “a brilliantly realised world.” During her tenure as founding director of the graduate program in children’s and adolescent literature at Hollins, she taught literature and creative writing and wrote the young adult novel What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay. She has been the recipient of an NEA literature grant and a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and lives in Roanoke.

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Dan Mueller

Fiction Writers’ Retreat, all levels

In this write-now workshop, we will focus predominantly on fiction and embody the practice of writing daily. During meeting times we’ll discuss matters of craft derived from reading a variety of pieces of contemporary fiction; read aloud to one another from our own newly written work and respond to it as a community of artists intent on helping one another find a larger audience; write from prompts; approach publishing as a part of the creative process; and address any and all concerns related to the writing life from writer’s block to sources of inspiration to submission strategies. While conventional creative writing workshops privilege the critique, the quality of them hinging upon the amount of time and thought outside of meeting times writers put into reading and responding to each other’s manuscripts, in ours we’ll honor the act of writing by putting the time, space, and camaraderie to use in the drafting of new work. For the first workshop, please come with a response no longer than 1,000 words to the following prompt: set a scene in a liminal space, i.e., a terminal, a store after it has closed, a sally port, etc., meant for people to pass through but not to stay. This workshop is open to writers of all skill levels and degrees of experience.

Daniel Mueller is the author of three collections of short fiction, Anything You Recognize, forthcoming from Outpost 19 Books in 2023, Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey (Outpost 19 Books 2013), winner of a Santa Fe Writers’ Project Book Award, and How Animals Mate (Overlook Press 1999), winner of the Sewanee Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Pithead Chapel, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Gargoyle, Story Quarterly, CutBank, Joyland, Booth Journal, Solstice, Free State Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Manzano Mountain Review, The Writing Disorder, Another Chicago Magazine, Mississippi Review, Story, Playboy, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of New Mexico and low-residency M.F.A. program at Queens University of Charlotte.

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Rachel Beanland

Historical Fiction, all levels

Megan O’Grady, writing for The New York Times, calls the era we’re living in a “golden age of historical fiction,” and argues that where we’ve previously leaned into dystopian literatures during periods of uncertainty, we now find ourselves searching the past for answers to what ails us. Look at popular recent works of fiction such as Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Lauren Groff’s Matrix, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, and you’ll realize that these works manage to both destabilize our ideas of the past and illuminate our present. In this manuscript workshop, we’ll read and analyze your historical short story or novel excerpt (no more than 20 pages, double-spaced). Not sure what counts as historical fiction? For our purposes, it’s anything that you’ve intentionally set prior to today. We’ll read each manuscript with an eye toward understanding and improving standard fictional elements such as character, plot, and setting, but will also leave plenty of time to consider how the narrative is informed by and interacts with the past.

Rachel Beanland is the author of the forthcoming novel, The House Is On Fire, which will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2023. Her debut novel, Florence Adler Swims Forever, was selected as a book club pick by Barnes & Noble, a featured debut by Amazon, an Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association, and one of the best books of 2020 by USA Today. It was also named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was recognized with the 2020 National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. Rachel earned her M.F.A. in fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, Virginia with her family.

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Rebecca Lindenberg

Radical Presence: Poetry As an Art of Attention, all levels

This write now workshop is designed to be generative, exploratory, and hopefully, empowering. We’ll do all sorts of writing activities ranging from automatic or “free” writing to carefully crafted aphorism, writing en pleine aire (inspired by the Impressionist painters) to creating “photo negatives” of published work (substituting each word with a seeming opposite to see what emerges). We’ll engage in poetic collaborations with each other, and with poets whose work we’ll read – a diverse array of North American and international writers across the ages, an inclusive host of voices bringing different subject matter, artistic strategy, and aesthetic style to our conversation. We’ll free ourselves from the pressure to “improve upon the blank page,” as Nicanor Parra has said, and let ourselves access some of our most primal lyric impulses, deep images and symbols, sensate speaking selves, so we’ll never again wonder (when we find it challenging to write), “What do I do now?” We’ll workshop, but in some new and nontraditional ways designed to teach us to be as spontaneous as readers as we can be as writers, responding not with our opinions but with our intuitions. Consider this an opportunity for serious whimsy, for meaningful play, and for personal and artistic discovery.

Rebecca Lindenberg is the author of two poetry collections: Love, an Index (McSweeney’s) and The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series), winner of the 2015 Utah Book Award. She’s the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, an NEA literature grant, a seven-month fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and other awards. Her work appears most recently in Tin House, American Poetry Review, The Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and in the Best American Poetry 2019 anthology, ed. Major Jackson. She is a member of the full-time poetry faculty at the University of Cincinnati, where she is also director of creative writing and the poetry editor of the Cincinnati Review.

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Dorothy Hassan

Starting Your Writing Journey, multigenre, novice

“I want to write my story, but I don’t know where to start.” “I’ve written a story, but how do I know if I did it right?”  If these dilemmas describe your predicament, this is the workshop for you. Whether you want to write fiction or nonfiction, learn some of the major building blocks of the craft, including character and setting development, sensory detail, and organization. Move your story from mind to paper without blocking your creative flow with stop-start hesitations or crippling early edits. In-class writing exercises will set participants on their way to producing pieces that may stand alone or become part of a larger work. In addition, learning to critique the work of others will teach you to effectively critique your own; guidance will be provided in daily review sessions of the previous day’s work.

Dorothy Hassan, writing as D. A. Spruzen, earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte and teaches creative writing in Northern Virginia. Publications include a historical novel, The Blitz Business, and a poetry collection, Long in the Tooth. In addition, her poems and short stories have appeared in many online and print publications.

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Barbara Jones

The Middle Place, A Workshop for Book-length Works in Progress, multi-genre, all levels

Please prepare 15-20 pages from a longer work in progress; this could be a story collection, novel, memoir, or collection of essays. We’ll read the samples from each work in advance, then spend workshop time considering which kinds of inspiration and which sorts of technical assistance might benefit each writing project now; that is, we’ll investigate how to nourish and sustain each of these projects to completion. And, overall, we’ll share the trials and joys of being in the sometimes vast-seeming middle of a book-length piece as well as the notable benefits of reaching the end.

Barbara Jones is a literary agent with Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, a leading, independent New York literary agency representing a distinguished list of bestselling and award-winning authors. Jones represents authors behind a range of fiction and nonfiction, from highly literary works to much more commercial fare, with an emphasis across all forms on voices from previously underrepresented communities and on durable talents and stories. Previously, she spent several decades as an editor, first in magazines (Grand Street, Harper’s, Vogue, Real Simple) and then in books (as editorial director at Hyperion Books and, most recently, as executive editor at Henry Holt). She has also led writing workshops for 30 years, at Yale University, New York University, Queens University of Charlotte, and elsewhere.

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Jim McKean

Write Now: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop, all levels

This write-now workshop will address looking at our own artifacts and physical objects (whether they be letters, scrapbooks, tools, or hand-me-downs) as sources and prompts for our personal narratives. After drafting moments, lines and images, scenes, portraits, anecdotes, and flashes of memory, we’ll explore how we might combine these fragments into more-finished work. Through readings and discussion, we’ll investigate elements of creative nonfiction such as dual-time frames, the narrative impulse versus reflection, character development, scenes, voice, rhythm, and effective prose. But the main focus of the workshop will be on your writing process, the material you generate, and sharing that material with a sympathetic audience. Class time will be dedicated to sharing work, discussing the art and craft of writing, and perhaps working on an exercise or two. Outside of class, you’ll be asked to write in response to prompts or wherever the muse takes you. In writing our lives, Annie Dillard says that we must “fashion a text.” The goal at the end of our week is to develop new material and new resources for fashioning your personal essays, stories, and/or memoirs. Open to all levels.

James McKean writes poetry and nonfiction. He has published two books of essays: Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports, and Bound; and three books of poems, Headlong (1987 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer Award), Tree of Heaven (1994 Iowa Poetry Award), and We Are the Bus (the 2011 X.J. Kennedy poetry prize from Texas Review Press). His work has appeared in magazines and collections such as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, the Southern Review, and the Best American Sports Writing 2003, and has received a Pushcart Prize.

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Laura Ruby

Writing Young Adult and Middle Grade Fiction, all levels

Want to write fiction for teens and kids but don’t know where to start? In this write-now workshop, we’ll discuss what makes YA, YA, and what makes middle-grade, middle-grade, and how to distinguish them both from fiction for adults. We’ll discuss the nuts and bolts of point-of-view, write from prompts, and share the results in a supportive environment. We’ll also discuss how to craft memorable characters, how character shapes plot, and touch on other vital aspects of craft such as structure, setting/worldbuilding, and pacing. And we’ll cover other topics of interest to any writer working in any genre or category: Where to begin. How to draft. How to revise. This workshop is open to writers of all skill levels and degrees of experience.

A two-time National Book Award Finalist, Edgar® Award Nominee, and Pushcart Prize Nominee, Laura Ruby writes fiction and poetry for adults, teens, and children. She is the author of 12 books, including Printz Medal Winning novel Bone Gap, as well as Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All, and the York trilogy. Her short fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, and Nimrod International, among others, and her poetry has or is forthcoming in Clockhouse #8, Poetry.Onl, and Sugar House Review. She is on the faculty of Hamline University’s Masters in Writing for Children and Young Adults program and makes her home in the Chicago area. Find her at www.lauraruby.com.

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