A new year means new writing resolutions—and the start of a new quarter of classes here at Hugo House in which to start checking them off. Whether you’re hoping to sharpen your poetry or storytelling skills, try a new genre,…
Plan your 2018 reading with these picks from the writers and readers of Hugo House. These books are what kept them up late, turning pages, all year long. Which will you start with? Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay…
The passages that follow are excerpts from a ten-minute in-class free write from the prompt Why do you write? Afterwards, we read aloud in a round and the energy in the room was palpable. I feel so grateful each time…
In addition to yearlong courses, we’re now excited to offer a track of classes in Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction. These classes are designed to help you feel confident when progressing through your writing, equipping you with the appropriate tools,…
Our voice as poets is a mix of who we are, what we think and feel, and a summation of everything we’ve read in our lives. Voice is the result of both experience and influence. In her book Black Lightning:…
At this turbulent time in our country and globally, many poets feel summoned to write about events that pose grave threats to justice and endanger our common humanity. We turn to poetry in order to find a language that provides…
Aimee Bender is a fan of both magical realism and surrealism, meaning that she likes to put magical characters into mundane and even boring situations. The key to making this move work for readers is languaging the “quotidian,” or every…
This is the Hugo House “How-To” series, where Hugo House instructors share tips related to the writing life. This week’s post comes from writer Cara Diaconoff, whose six-session course, Fanfiction and Other Transformative Writing, explores the concept of “transformation” of…
Writing poetry in your own language is a kind of translation—you put your thoughts and feelings into words and music on the page. Nothing gets to the heart of that process faster than comparing actual English translations of the same…
This is the Hugo House “How-To” series, where Hugo House instructors share tips related to the writing life. This week’s post comes from Waverly Fitzgerald who is teaching Deep Novel Revision, which will help writers with a rough draft (maybe…
This is the Hugo House “How-To” series, where Hugo House instructors share tips related to the writing life. This week’s post comes from writer Anne Liu Kellor. Her ten-session course, Memoir as Collage, will explore personal narratives as told in…
Writers often ask how to get a story started—but just as important is the question of how to keep one going. There’s quite a distance between the first and final pages of a novel or memoir—and it’s not just the…
Last fall, I met a pair of reclusive military veterans at a house that lay down a leafy, mossy backroad of the Quinault Valley. I told them I wanted to hear their thoughts about noise pollution—the rattling Navy jets that…
Jeff Bender teaches Short-Short Stories and Vignettes, an online course beginning February 11 that allows you to move at your own pace through the lessons. The four-week workshop will guide you through the stages of drafting original short pieces. …
We’ve all experienced it—the dreaded writer’s block. According to Wikipedia, “many famous writers have suffered from the affliction, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, British songwriter Adele, and even Herman Melville, who stopped writing novels a few years after completing Moby Dick.”…