Courses

Join us as we develop our creative writing skills and support each other in creative writing projects that emerge from each author’s imagination. We will be using the mentor texts in Writing and How C by John McInnes et al. along with activities drawn from each of the “Writing to Find Out,” “Tools and Techniques,” and “Writing for an Audience” sections to guide us this year.

As always, we will work together to ensure that everyone is comfortable with the balance between free choice writing and writing with a focus on something in particular. For example, a free choice week might be inspired by “Writing to Find Out: Writing a Monologue,” which presents a mentor text as an example of a character’s monologue and then asks each author to create a monologue for a character. Author’s will be invited to write a stand-alone monologue or to include one in a scene in a larger piece. On a very focused week, we might use something like “Writing to Find Out: Personification in Prose,” which has a mentor text with a conversation between a child and the wind and then asks each author to create a similar conversation with a personification of fire.

Most weeks, authors will be asked to read and think about a few pages from the book before class. Additionally, to prepare for class each week, every author will share their writing a few days before class, read each other’s work, make a few notes on the feedback they want to remember to share, and come ready to discuss everyone’s work.

Authors are requested to keep their submissions to no more than 2-3 pages per week so that everyone has time to read everything. However, those can always be 2-3 pages of a longer work or parts of an ongoing work!