Class Catalog

Instructor: Jonathan Escoffery. This generative intensive prompts students to create story-worthy characters and explore how craft elements can help determine the contours of the worlds we create.

Instructor: Tina Tocco. This generative class offers a low-stress, supportive environment for those eager to experiment with fiction writing, with imaginative prompts such as music, sounds, images, and more.

Instructor: Eugenia Toledo, Carolyne Wright. Poets and translators Eugenia Toledo and Carolyne Wright will share translations from several Chilean poets and present poems from Eugenia’s award-winning bilingual volume, Map Traces, Blood Traces. 

Instructor: Marguerite Harrold. This class will dig into the cultural aspects of imagery and how our heritage influences our perceptions and observations. We will practice writing poems using visual symbolism, descriptive language, and the vernacular of our various communities.

Instructor: Kimberly Dark. In this workshop, we'll cover how to identify themes, outline, and write essays about single issues (750-1,000 words). We'll discuss different forms, finding publications, and how to tailor your writing to publications you admire.

Instructor: Deborah Woodard. Explore your writing with four Seattle museums—the Frye Art Museum, the National Nordic Museum, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the Henry Art Gallery. 

Instructor: Shankar Narayan. This class will take a deep dive into line breaks, not so much to determine the right way to do them—there isn’t one—but to reimagine together the choices poets have in deploying them. 

Instructor: Tamara Dean. This workshop explores techniques for expanding the dimensions of creative nonfiction, including speculation, research, structural invention, and stylistic innovation.

Instructor: Kaelie Giffel. This class will examine Sara Stridsberg's Valerie, with discussions and prompts utilizing Stridsberg's techniques, such as play-like dialogues, abecedaria, court records, and history to jump-start our work.

Instructor: Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet. In this workshop, we'll use guided meditation, visualization, and writing exercises to identify and soften our own particular versions of resistance and to reconnect with the parts of us that use language to create. 

Instructor: Emily Wolahan. The elements earth, air, fire, and water will form a foundation for writing poetry addressing climate change and climate crisis. 

Instructor: Corinne Manning, Jay Aquinas Thompson. With discussions and generative prompts, this co-taught class will adopt feminist and queer explorations of George Eliot's Middlemarch. 

Instructor: Susan V. Meyers. This class offers the chance to try out several genres in creative nonfiction—from memoir to lyricism, nature writing to travel writing. 

Instructor: Holly Day. This class will offer a variety of generative prompts, from basic character formation and development exercises to creating vivid scenes and scenarios for your characters to live and participate in. 

Instructor: Charles Mudede. This class will be about death, writing about death, and the history of thinking philosophically about death. 

Instructor: Beth Slattery. This class will use Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing as a guide to crafting polished, successful prose. 

Instructor: Shankar Narayan. In this part-generative, part-analytical course, we'll examine the diverse voices of South Asian bhakti poetry—a centuries-old movement of devotional poetry that finds divinity in the beloved.

Instructor: Peter Mountford. In this generative course, students will read and examine short stories with an eye toward craft and apply those skills in refining two of their own pieces (one short, one long). 

Instructor: Darien Hsu Gee. In this six-week generative workshop, we'll write micro prose using prompts inspired by the body to discover the stories that are waiting to be told. 

Instructor: Judith Skillman. This class will explore writers’ obsessions as prompts for a sequence of poems centered on a person, myth, place, or another subject. Using Keats' concept of negative capability, we will "entertain uncertainty." 

Instructor: Amanda Montei. This class will explore theory and literature by writers like Roxane Gay, Melissa Febos, and Katherine Angel that elaborate on limited legal and cultural definitions of sexual violation and that make various forms of interpersonal and social control in the wake of #MeToo more explicit.

Instructor: Kelly McWilliams, Wendy N. Wagner. With examples from literature and film, students will explore and examine the concept of "beats" in building an outline for a horror novel.

Instructor: Geraldine Woods. This class examines writing techniques that connect reader to writer (point of view, voice), idea to idea (parallelism, sound), emotion to experience (sensory detail, figurative language), and more.

Instructor: Melanie Figg. This class will closely examine and explore craft elements of the villanelle: rhyme, repetition, line breaks and enjambement, and building narrative through repetition, as well as discuss revision tips.