Examples of Classes Taught

"Creative Nonfiction in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico"
One-week intensive workshop
Casa Chepitos
San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico
offered the last week of June 2008
May be offered again in 2009, please inquire.
10:00 am to 2:00 pm each day
Delve into the fine craft of creative nonfiction in the town of San Miguel de Allende. Our base will be Casa Chepitos, a charming home on a hillside overlooking the spires of Mexico’s most famous colonial town. In this one-week intensive writing seminar, we’ll explore the essential elements of nonfiction prose. Daily four-hour sessions will be devoted to short lectures, writing exercises, group discussions, and manuscript review. We’ll focus on a different element of craft each day: character development, the first-person narrator, story arc, theme, and voice. With a maximum of ten participants, each writer’s work will receive ample attention. Partial scholarships available.

"Special Seminar in Prose”
Tuesday evening workshop
Columbia City, Seattle
offered September 2007 through May 2008
For a group of six writers who have taken other classes or workshops with Wendy, this seminar will offer both fiction and nonfiction writers a small-group setting for honing their narrative nonfiction, essays, memoir, and short stories. During each workshop session, short excerpts from four writers' work are reviewed. Wendy reads and comments on fifty manuscript pages (ten per week) from each writer during the session.

"Six Keys to Nonfiction Prose"
Six-session class
Richard Hugo House
Capitol Hill, Seattle
offered Spring 2008
Six weeks, six keys. In each class session, we'll explore one essential element of creative nonfiction: the first-person narrator, strong character development, the narrative arc, true-to-life scenes, compelling theme, and that elusive thing called “style.” We’ll dissect great examples from masters of the genre – including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, George Orwell and David Foster Wallace, looking at the gorgeous rooms they unlock with these six keys. In each class, we’ll also roll up our sleeves and get to writing, putting our new skills to work in our nonfiction prose.

“It's Not About You: Writing Other People's Stories”
Six-session class
Richard Hugo House
Capitol Hill, Seattle
offered Spring 2007 and Winter 2008
Let’s go out and find the story. Reporting needn’t lead to dry journalism. In fact, it’s the raw material of the very best creative nonfiction, from Ernest Hemingway to Susan Orlean. We’ll learn through practice the basics of “immersion reporting” – sinking into someone else’s world, taking it all in, then writing it all down. We’ll focus on the basic tools of reporting and rendering scenes on the page, and we’ll also read great examples and wrestle with the challenges (ethical and otherwise) of displaying private lives on public pages. This course requires “reporting time” outside of class time.

“Contando Cuentos Verdaderos” (Telling True Stories)
Two-day intensive seminar
a.m. Newspapers
León, Guanajuato, Mexico
offered August 2007and December 2007
This fifteen-hour intensive seminar, conducted entirely in Spanish for twenty emerging and mid-career Mexican journalists, includes a comprehensive overview of storytelling techniques in daily journalism. Through a combination of preparatory readings, lecture, group readings & discussions, and writing practice, we will focus on reporting techniques, story structure, and four key elements of narrative writing: use of dialogue, scene-setting, detail, and action.

"Fifty Ways to Tell the Story"
a seven-hour writing marathon
to benefit Hugo House
part of Write-o-Rama!
Richard Hugo House
Capitol Hill, Seattle
Saturday, December 1, 2007
10 am to 5 pm
In honor of Hugo House's biannual Write-o-Rama fundraiser, I will devote seven consecutive hours to a writing marathon. (OK, actually I'm going to take a ten-minute bathroom/refueling break each hour.) We’ll zoom through fifty multimedia writing prompts -- questions, answers, lines of poetry, images, sounds, even smells – helping you find the best way to get words on the page. Drop in for ten minutes, come for an hour, or stay for the whole gory, glorious day. Here's the whole plan:

10 am • Get the Juices Flowing
Seven writing prompts will get you started for the day.

11 am • Climb up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction
Give your writing more specificity and deeper meaning.

12 pm • Smell O Rama
all nontoxic, but not for the chemically sensitive…..

1 pm • Hora Bilingue
Write in response English-Spanish bilingual prompts.

2 pm • Thanks, Dick!
Richard Hugo himself will be our muse.

3 pm • Have Writing Prompts, Will Travel
We'll get out into the Hugo House environment.

4 pm • Merge the Mundane with the Metaphysical
Life is what happens while we’re busy making other plans.

“Master Class in Nonfiction Prose”
Ten-week class
Richard Hugo House
Capitol Hill, Seattle
offered Fall 2007
7 to 9 pm
Bring that long project to fruition. If you have a memoir, history, essay collection, biography, or sheaf of true travel stories that you’ve been slaving over, this class will help you (re)consider your manuscript as a whole. We’ll focus on two of the biggest challenges in writing book-length nonfiction: building a sound structure and developing a compelling narrator. In class, we will consider short excerpts of one another’s work as well as examples from nonfiction literature of the last century. The instructor will hold two individual conferences with each participant, at the beginning and end of the ten-week term.

"Writing Where We're From"
One- or two-hour workshop
Youth and Adult Detention Centers
San Antonio, Texas and Red Wing, Minnesota
offered August and September 2007
In this short workshop (first planned and co-taught with poet Yael Flusberg), we introduce poems built around the theme of "where I'm from." Each participant writes his or her own poem, and then shares them with the group if they wish. Freewriting techniques are also introduced.

“Creating an Artist's Journal”
Two-session class
Columbia City, Seattle
offered Spring 2006
Delve into the world of artist's journals. In the first class session we will begin making our soft-bound journals: measure, cut and fold paper for pages; prepare pages for binding, and sew the folios together to create a book block. We'll also learn a bit about the history of the book, with examples of traditional African, Asian and European binding styles. We'll finish sewing our book blocks at home. In the second session we will choose endpapers, closures, covers; prepare the book block and covers for final assembly; and attach the covers. We'll talk a bit about journals and look at examples from well-known writers and other artists.

Read about my teaching philosophy.