National Book Award winner Joan Didion once famously shared, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means." This holds true for many writers, yet often we forget that writing is a discovery process. In this workshop, we'll write from prompts and read aloud to begin the process of finding our stories and the meanings within them. What surprised you on the page? Where were the emotional "hot spots" that invited you and your listeners to sit up and lean in? What is your story about? Or, equally interesting, what about what your story is about? Expect to leave this interactive session with plenty of insights into the creative process, as well as narrative tips and techniques for developing your personal stories into powerful prose. This workshop welcomes beginners and seasoned authors. Bring something to write on/with and leave all self-doubts at the door.

How do writers use images of the intimate to transcend the immediate and capture the universal? Flannery O'Connor wrote of "a sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality." O'Connor breaks through the grotesque and the shocking to expose grace. In poetry, too, "the particular and the strange can," according to Jorie Graham, "storm the walls of mystery." Both fiction and poetry reach toward what exceeds them: toward the unsayable, the luminous, the transcendent. 

This relationship between Finite and Infinite, Mystery and Reality will guide our time together. In this workshop, we will examine how literary texts move from particulars to universals, and we will attempt to draft our own poems, prose, or flash fiction that lean into the ineffable. 

The written word has the power to preserve history, reveal truth, build understanding, and connect people through shared experiences. This hands-on workshop explores how strong research and skillful interviewing can transform ordinary information into compelling stories. 

Participants will learn the techniques professional journalists and nonfiction writers use to uncover meaningful narratives, conduct insightful interviews, gather rich details, and verify information. Topics include finding the hidden story, asking questions that reveal character and emotion, building trust with sources, and organizing research into a narrative that engages readers. 

Through examples, discussion, and practical exercises, writers will discover how to move beyond surface facts to create stories that inform, inspire, and leave a lasting impact. 

Suitable for journalists, memoirists, nonfiction writers, and anyone interested in using the power of storytelling to deepen understanding and bring important stories to life. 

A number of literary genres, including historical fiction and memoirs, weave together authentic details about the past while simultaneously sharing timeless stories about the human condition. Where historians are limited by historical record, historical novelists and memoirists are free to employ imagination in plot and character arcs within well-researched historical context and factual timelines. Authors can also be deeply inspired by en plein air writing in historical settings (like the Fells!). Reading and writing HF and memoirs is an exercise in empathy. The characters are impacted by their surroundings and time period, but their universal feelings and expressions of love, hate, jealousy, pride, and fear are timeless. Such works can also provide a powerful lens to give voice to the voiceless. Our ultimate responsibility is to help the reader and ourselves make sense of both the past and the world we live in today. This workshop will include discussion, a case study, and a historical artifact writing activity.

Discover the profound intersection of mindfulness and written expression in this workshop designed for memoir and fiction writers, journalers, and anyone seeking to know themselves better through writing. The workshop will offer a sanctuary to quiet the mind and unlock your authentic voice. 

Through guided meditation and self-compassion practices, you will learn to calm the inner critic and access material waiting to be expressed. We will use reflective writing prompts tailored to open creative channels and gently translate your inner experiences into narrative form. This interactive workshop offers a safe space to harness the therapeutic art of creative writing while connecting with others on a similar journey. No prior writing or meditation experience is required—just an open mind and a willingness to explore. Please bring a laptop or notebook and a pen. Leave this session with practical tools to integrate healing mindfulness practices into your creative writing and daily life. 

In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore how writers shape the reader’s experience through structure, setting, genre expectations, and emotional movement.  

A story is more than a sequence of events: it is a carefully guided journey that influences what readers notice, anticipate, feel, and remember. Whether you write romance, mystery, historical fiction, fantasy, or literary fiction, the choices you make about pacing, world-building, conflict, and revelation determine how fully readers enter your story and how eagerly they continue.  

Through discussion and hands-on exercises, participants will examine their own works in progress, identify the experience they want to create, and consider how individual craft choices support—or undermine—that goal. 

The difference between a story that pulls readers forward and one that loses them isn't plot — it's pace. In this workshop, writing coach and author Seth Harwood draws on Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode to explore the variety of speeds available to fiction writers: when to slow down and linger, when to compress and skip, and how to read your own work to find where the pace is working and where it isn't. 

Through examples and hands-on exercises, you'll learn to recognize the difference between scene, summary, and gap — and how to use each one intentionally to build momentum, deepen character, and keep your reader fully engaged. Whether you're drafting or revising, this session will give you practical tools to make your story move.

There are few things as powerful as what we feel. We are driven by emotion, which can be a welcome joy or a cause for suffering or struggle, or even both at the same time. Perhaps the most amazing thing about a piece of writing is its ability to capture and translate that untranslatable emotion. In this workshop, we will examine how writers use concrete images to convey experiences and emotions that often evade description. To capture the unsayable. To render the moments that feel beyond language. We will also explore the ways that these pieces connect us to others—and allow us to read with the "instinct" rather than the "intellect." When we can express our most complex feelings truthfully and genuinely in a raw, real way, we invite those who also have experienced those feelings to enter into our work—and thus to feel less alone with those feelings. Together in this workshop offered for writers at any level and working in any genre, we will look at works driven by feeling, then write our own feelings through concrete image and incisive detail, so that we might join one another, push into the extremity of emotional reality, and, as Federico Garcia Lorca says, "fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression."