Classes at the Attic

Often just a little extra focus is all you need to keep the fiction train on the track & running on time. You'll send work to the instructor the week prior the two-day class, & she'll organize and distribute the manuscripts by email. A chance to bring in a story or chapter, get readers and teacher feedback, plus some tech talk on the essentials of craft, revision, & community.

Turn the memories and notes from your summer trip into a narrative suitable for newspapers and magazines. This class will focus on research techniques, story structure, and marketing tactics as it points students toward seminal works of travel journalism.

For writers interested in fashioning events from your life into powerful, meaningful stories. Emphasis on jogging your memory & on finding the structures & patterns to tell your real-life stories. Special focus: locating your personal voice.

Learn to write personal essays, memoir, and literary journalism with creativity and delight! We’ll explore traditional and experimental storytelling techniques of fiction to convey “what really happened.” You’ll create and review work in class, so come ready to write & talk.

It’s one of the first pieces of advice we all learn about writing, but what does it really mean, anyway? Learn why and how to do it, and find out when it’s okay to just tell. (fiction & nonfiction)

In the early days of the Attic's history, this was the seminal class for many students. For the first time in seven years, director David Biespiel will reprise this popular and powerful class. Looking to spark your writing, re-tool, re-boot, develop new approaches, refine traditional and experimental habits...and do you want to write freely in a way that generates new pieces of any genre? The "Inspiration and Imagination" workshop is for you. Join in and rediscover why you love to write.

Summer is the ideal time to renew your interest, start one, and fall in love with the thrills and spills of writing in traditional forms. We'll spin the wheel for multiple formal ideas, draft various poems in fixed and nonce forms, and focus on how writing through the looking glass of form frees your imagination, intensifies your poems, challenges you to grow as a poet, and gains authority for your voice. An ideal intensive for free verse poets, formalists, versifiers, & crooners, too.