Creative Writing Workshops

“According to Marquez, on one these occasions, he found his grandmother trying to shoo away a butterfly with a duster, saying, ‘Whenever this man comes to the house, that yellow butterfly follows him.’ “Sources of Magic Realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Shaibal Dev Roy

Shaibal Dev Roy goes on to talk about how many aspects of Marquez’s real life was an anchor for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Whether we are within the world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in the pages Maxine Hong Kingston’s, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood, in the scene of any Toni Morrison novel, encounter it in the world of Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits, or in a short story like Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” an argument is made for how real the magic becomes on the
page. Wendy Ortiz explores this by bending the genre of memoir in Bruja: A Dreamnoir, by making her dreams the narrative. The realness of magic is also encapsulated within the verses of poems like Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Alberto Rios’s “When There Were Ghosts.”

This course is about exploring magical realism through an introduction to the 80+ years of history while also engaging with it on a page. You are not expected to have encountered anything I’ve referenced. We will be exploring questions like: What is Magical Realism as a genre and what are some of the challenges of it? How can we engage in using material from the human experience to craft magical realism on the page? In what ways can we challenge ourselves to write about our lives – whether it is a short piece or a full memoir project – while using the very real elements of the magical?

Through a range of different exercises that will include some visual materials like short clips, written examples, and other kinds of prompts, this generative workshop will give individuals an opportunity to engage with this style within their own writing as poets and prose writers. Individuals will also have an opportunity to bring their own work to this experience and use this as an opportunity to edit through bending what they have written.

Shanta Lee is an award winning writer across genres, a visual artist and public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that has been widely featured. Winner of the Abel Meeropol Social Justice award, she was the creator and producer of Vermont Public’s “Seeing...the Unseen and In-Between within Vermont’s Landscape.” Shanta Lee is the author of several books and a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine and Art New England. Her books include GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, winner of the 2020 Diode Press full-length book prize and the 2021 Vermont Book Award. Black Metamorphoses which was named a finalist in the 2021 Hudson Prize, shortlisted for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Book Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Idaho Poetry Prize.

Shanta Lee’s latest work, This Is How They Teach You How to Want It...The Slaughter: A Field Guide for the Hunted & the Hunter, The Dead-Alive, The Live-Dead Ones, The...(Harbor Editions, 2024) is in direct communication with the ancient mythology of the wild hunt — Wilde Jagd, Wild Hunt, or Chase in German — in which supernatural/ghost riders are pursuing a target. Shanta Lee is the 2020 gubernatorial appointee to the Vermont Humanities Council’s board of directors. Her current multimedia exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, which features her short film, interviews, photography, and other items has been exhibited at the Bennington Museum, University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art, the Southern Vermont Arts Center. She has an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction and Poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, an MBA from the University of Hartford and an undergraduate degree in Women, Gender and Sexuality from Trinity College. To learn more about her work, visit her website external website.

With or without playwriting experience, all are welcomed to contribute to building a short play festival, either as a playwright writing a 10-page play or simply as an actor and/or respondent to the work. Using the craft book Shorts and Briefs: a Collection of Short Plays and Brief Principles of Playwriting, we will workshop via Zoom once a week for 6-weeks during an agreed upon two-hour block in the evening or weekend. The course will end with compiling a list of short play festivals around the country where your play can be submitted.

Gregory Fletcher has had 12 plays produced Off-Off-Broadway, with regional credits in Boston, P-town, Miami, and Moscow (Idaho). Five essays have been published, plus two short stories in the Night Bazaar series (Northampton House Press), a 2-book YA series Other People’s Crazy and Other People’s Drama, and the craft book, Short and Briefs, a collection of short plays and briefs principles of playwriting, He has taught with the MA/MFA Maslow Family Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University since 2007.

Place is where your memoir or novel happens – but it can be more. Also known as setting, it is where the action is inextricably linked to the story, telling us that “this couldn’t happen anywhere else.” Writers will explore ways that writing about place can reflect memory, develop themes, reveal characters, and communicate atmosphere.  

Vicki Mayk is a nonfiction writer and teacher whose work has appeared in the Brevity Blog, Hippocampus, Literary Mama, The Manifest-Station, and others. Her narrative nonfiction book, Growing Up on the Gridiron: Football, Friendship and the Tragic Life of Owen Thomas, was published by Beacon Press.

Vicki's website external website

During this six-week in-person course, you’ll learn how to mine real-life events, people and places in order to hone your narrative voice and add authenticity to your story. With truth as our guide, we’ll study and discuss professional samples of writing and apply their lessons through in-class prompts. Topics will include language and imagery, characterization, setting, point-of-view and theme. From beginner to expert, if you’d like to up your fiction game, this workshop is for you.

Born and raised in Scranton, PA, Barbara J. Taylor sets her novels in the hometown she loves and fills them with miners, evangelists, vaudevillians, nuns, gangsters, prostitutes, widows, musicians, dreamers and a seer or two. She is the author of Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night and All Waiting Is Long. Her latest book, Rain Breaks No Bones, is the final installment in her Scranton trilogy.