An annual certificate program, the Attic Atheneum melds independent study under close faculty supervision, student receptions, public readings, and other special Atheneum events created around good food and great conversation, dialogue, and literary community.

Running for just under a year, the Atheneum is designed to advance your writing and seed literary life in the city. Atheneum Fellows form a unique community of literary artists and citizen

Led by a stellar faculty. 2011-2012 faculty includes: David Biespiel, Wendy Willis, Karen Karbo, Cheryl Strayed, Merridawn Duckler, and Greg Robillard.

Application period: May 1 - May 30.

Find out more

The ICG is the Attic Institute's program for writers to get one-on-one coaching, editing, and personal feedback to advance your writing efforts.

Whether you're in the middle of a novel, fashioning a memoir or other nonfiction, drafting a few stories, shaping a book of poems, writing for children, or looking for advice about agents, book proposals, and publishing, we have an experienced team of consultants, editors, and writing coaches to help you all the way through the process.

Registering below initiates scheduling a 15-minute free consult by phone with Attic Institute president David Biespiel to talk about your project and what ICG options might be best for you.

Learn more about the ICG

Great writing is actually a craft anyone can learn and get better at. Unfortunately, progress often stalls because writers often don't know how to effectively learn how to learn to write -- what got you to where you are won't usually get you to where you want to be. Learning how to improve your writing is the most crucial writing skill, but nobody seems to teach it. This class fills the void. It's the class I wish someone had told me about when I started out as a writer and the class I would want to take every year. 

Learn to write personal essays, memoir, travelogue, and lyric journalism using the traditional and experimental storytelling techniques of fiction. We’ll analyze creative nonfiction by contemporary authors, while discussing your work in progress. During  this in-depth workshop, your literary nonfiction will be transformed into art which is both intimate and universal in its appeal. No class February 29. 

They're what keep a reader from putting the book down and what draw a publisher to a work, no matter the genre. We discuss how to make these elements work together to produce a riveting read. 

Time for exploring with language in a directed and supportive atmosphere. Each session uses unique assignments to help you discover and develop your voice as well as create new material. Unlike a critique workshop, we’ll focus on the process, not the result, so that you’ll have many new pieces to pursue and revise. You'll also learn a variety of tips and techniques that will enable you to create writing time and space in your own life after the class is complete.

Develop your memoir muscle in the areas of scene, point of view, arc, plot, dialogue, setting and detail infusion. Also learn the skillful navigation of reflective writing and how to explore memory without being confined or limited. Writers bring their pages and read from their work as part of the teaching and each week a different aspect of craft is taught as part of the reading/critique experience.  

There are now five slots available each week for writers to conference one-on-one in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction with acclaimed writer, editor, teacher, and Attic Institute president David Biespiel. 

Here's what David says about the value of one-on-one conferencing:  

"The beauty of a workshop for a writer is that you're able to achieve accountability for your writing and create community for your literary life. The beauty of conferencing is you're able to be in a one-on-one conversation about your writing for a sustained period, even if it's just an hour, so that you can generate a unique rush of momentum that often helps push your writing immeditately to the next level."

David's conferences have been described as "life-changing." Over the years, many of the writers who are now outstanding teachers at the Attic Institute were once students of David's, including Ariel Gore, Merridawn Duckler, David Ciminello, Shanna Germain, John Morrison, and others.

"David has an amazing ability to find just the right places where your writing needs focus," Merridawn Duckler, now a Senior Fellow at the Attic, raved years ago after working with David.

How it works:

You can register for one, two, or three conferences with David to be arranged within a five week period. You send David up to 21 pages for each session, then you meet with him for 50 minutes to review your work. Says David: "It's like literary therapy!"  

Register today for a spot on David's weekly conference calendar and have your work read closely by a teacher who has influenced so many for so long.

We have all read or written work where the author’s agenda seems to drive the narrative and characters felt more like sock puppets than people we might meet. But this raises a question, where do we put all the intensity we feel about the world without ruining a work? One place we can ground passion and conflict is in narrative voice. Since many of us write, or start out writing first person narratives, this workshop will focus exclusively on voice and exploring the difference between your voice as an author, and the voice of your narrator. Over the course of the workshop we will work with what you bring and with exercises done over the life of the class. We will not be working toward a polished work so much as a deeper freedom with the medium. After all, when the world is too much with us, is when we want to be able write!

Good travel writing, Simon Winchester has suggested, might “alter the American cultural landscape, so as to transform the concept of overseas, and of overseas people, things, and places, into objects of popular desire once again.” With the U.S. waging endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conducting secret air strikes on Yemen, and meddling forcefully in Mexico and Latin America, might we writers use travel essays to foster a new curiosity and tenderness for cultures not our own? Whether your stories originate, as do Winchester’s, in Belfast, Calcutta or Hong Kong, or you’ve discovered a secret garden overgrown in Gresham, you are welcome. We will study models by Robert Neuwirth, Rose George, Winchester and others, meanwhile writing our fresh reports of the marvelous, maddening world. Guided discussions on technique; written exercises; assigned essays for study; informal in-class critique of student work; mutual support and encouragement. Students submit two short works and one revision. Workshop format, ten weeks (no class meeting May 9) and limited to nine students.