Creative Writing Workshops

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.