Classes & Workshops

"Something Lost, Something Gained:
Translation and Multilingualism in a Globalized World"
Split This Rock Poetry Festival
location TBA in Washington, DC
Saturday, March 24, 2012
9:30 am
In this writing and translation workshop we will each explore our relationship to language loss–from the global to the personal levels. Linguists predict that half of the approximately six thousand languages currently spoken in the world will be extinct by the end of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, many of us have lost the languages of our grandparents, because of racism and other forms of oppression in this country. Literary translation offers a positive response to these colossal losses, allowing English-only readers to appreciate literature produced in one (or more) of those other six thousand languages.  Experiments with translation–whether we consider ourselves multilingual or not–can expand our personal understanding of language diversity. Most of our time together will be devoted to individual and collaborative writing and translation exercises.

"Twenty Ways to Tell The Story"
Get Lit! Festival
9:30 to 11:30 am
Riverpoint Campus, Phase 1 Building
Eastern Washington University
Spokane, Washington
In this fast-paced morning, we zoom through twenty writing exercises, searching for the best way to get those words on the page. If there’s a story (factual or otherwise) you’ve been itching to tell, or a narrative poem prowling your mind, this is your chance to anchor those words to the page. Multimedia writing prompts — questions, answers, lines of poetry, images, even scents — will help us open the dusty drawers of memory and empty them out. Each participant leaves with the raw material for a rough draft. All writers or wannabe writers age 13 and over are welcome! Please register at the Get Lit! website.

"Make a Scene!"
The Muse and the Marketplace Conference
presented by Grub Street
Boston Park Plaza Hotel
50 Park Plaza at Arlington Street
Boston, Massachusetts
Saturday, May 5, 2012
2:15 to 3:30 pm
Thanks to the great honor of having won Grub Street's 2011 National Book Prize for Nonfiction, I will give a reading and teach a craft class at Grub Street's 2012 writers' conference. Craft class: In this fast-paced exploration of scene-setting, nonfiction writers will learn a twelve-step process (except this one is FUN) to make the events we (re)create on the page fuller and deeper. First, we’ll look closely at the work of two master scene-setters. Then, we’ll become playwrights, giving our characters their lines. We’ll be directors, too, moving our characters about the stage. Finally, we’ll work as stagehands to our stories, creating the backdrop that will transform our nonfiction prose into a rich experience for our readers. The craft class is open only to participants in the Muse and the Marketplace Conference. You can register for the conference here.

Check back later for details on these summer 2012 workshops:

• at the Chuckanut Writers' Conference in Bellingham, Washington, June 22 and 23

• a week of workshops at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference at Centrum, July 8 to 15.