Summer Prose Playground
An 8-week, MFA-style collaborative writing workshop welcoming of genre-defying (and genre-ambiguous) works-in-progress
Thursdays 4:30-6:30pm PST July 21st - September 8th, 2022
Enrollment is closed
Have you been carrying around an idea for a writing project for years, but can’t get past the first 15 pages? Not sure what to do with the chaotic 150 pages you did draft? Looking for structure and community in your writing practice, without giving your own idiosyncratic style and voice?
This collaborative, eight-week workshop (modeled after those found in creative writing programs) is for writers seriously working on a prose (or prose-ish) project—who are also seriously playful in their approach to form.
Your work might take the form of fiction, auto-fiction (or auto-ethnography!), a collection of literary essays, narrative nonfiction (such as memoir), a hybrid prose/poetry project, critical nonfiction with a creative element, or some combo of the above.
While there may be a wide range of forms and styles in our writing, what we will share is curiosity, openness, and care in our approach to craft—a critical interest and ethical investment in exploring our work’s possibilities.
By the beginning of the workshop, you should be prepared to:
Share 10-25 pages (double-spaced) of a single project you are working on, and generate another submission (10-25 pages) from this same project during the workshop term
Read 1-2 submissions every week (which will range from 10 to 25 double-spaced pages each), using the workshop annotation guide to prepare for discussion
Plan to miss no more than one or two sessions of during our eight weeks together (of course emergencies may arise!)
Between the attention you receive on your work (from both your peers and from me), as well as your engagement with others’ work, you should leave this workshop with:
A solid outline of your next steps for revision or further drafting
A deeper understanding of the craft of prose writing, and familiarity with literary techniques (especially ones you can apply to your own work)
Greater confidence in your own style and approach to craft
In order to facilitate in-depth project attention for all participants, enrollment will be capped at six participants (total).
Course format and calendar
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Meetings will be held via Zoom on Thursdays from 4:30-6:30pm PST, July 21st - September 8th.
You will have access to a shared course site, where workshop submissions and other resources will be shared. (Workshop sessions will not be recorded.)
Two writers will be workshopped weeks 2-7. They will submit their pages the Sunday in advance of our Thursday meetings. You will be expected to have thoughtfully read these submissions before we meet. Our conversation will be collaborative (with writers included in the conversation). See section below entitled “Weeks 2-7” for more about the workshop structure.
In addition our workshop sessions, each participant will have two 45-minute one-on-one coaching sessions with Siloh to use during the workshop term, for private and more in-depth feedback. There will also be the option of adding on two additional one-hour-long coaching sessions.
Tuition is $444, or $644 for the workshop plus two additional hour-long coaching sessions. Payment plans will also be available (2 payments of $222, or 4 payments of $111). -
Our first meeting will lay the groundwork for the weeks ahead. We’ll introduce ourselves and our work and establish the format we’ll use in workshop. I’ll introduce you to some approaches to giving and receiving feedback I’ve found helpful, and outline the expectations for the feedback you’ll provide. (Hint: there will be a worksheet!) I’ll also hold some structured space for you to hone in on where you’re at with your project and what kinds of feedback might be the most helpful for you at this juncture.
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In our second through seventh meetings, we’ll workshop (or give thoughtful attention to!) a maximum of two writers. You (and each workshop participant) will receive project attention at least twice during the course, in the form of a collaborative but structured discussion exploring your peers’ reading experiences as well as your own intentions/goals. (In other words, you will be able to participate in the conversation about your piece.)
I will also fold in discussions of craft (including making unconventional use of conventional techniques) into our workshops throughout the term, according to the form and content of the specific writers/writing being workshopped.
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Our final session will bring closure to our work together, by gathering up your take-aways and outlining your next steps for revision. We will hold space for capturing the key lessons we’ve learned together, and talking through the work that lies ahead.
Here’s the plot of Prose Playground
Writing prose is challenging.
It is especially challenging when we side-step expectations around structure, perspective, or form. The work of translating our intentions into someone else’s reading experience is all the more complex when we’re making up our own rules about how a piece should function. We have to get our hands messy with the work in order to figure that out—we have to play around and see what happens! While in principle a creative writing workshop can help us tease out a work’s structure and strengths as we go, in practice the writing workshop is often a site of intolerance towards experimental, unconventional, and gestational writing.
In this workshop, experimentation and unconventional works-in-progress are welcome. The workshop will function as its own kind of experimental space, as we critically (and playfully) explore the many ways that a prose project can “work”—and consider strategies for adjusting our approach when it doesn’t feel like it is.
Our workshop discussions will draw on our individual reading experiences—the classic stuff of workshop. (What do we experience as readers, and why?) But we will also position ourselves as collaborators in puzzling out the focus and trajectory of our peers’ projects, while also honoring their intentions as writers. (What arguments are made through form as well as content? How does the piece function, and how can it become stronger while still working within the terms it sets?)
Through this generous, generative engagement with each others’ works-in-progress, we’ll explore the role of voice and poetics in prose, techniques for staging critical thinking in story—or story within criticism—and potential applications of conventional literary devices in experimental work.
Because we’ll be reading longer portions of these works-in-progress, we’ll also be able to delve into questions of structure and sequence—that durational and architectural quality of prose that makes it so difficult to work with!
We’re going to be diving right in.
You do not need an MFA or a specific educational background in order to participate. However, this is not an introductory writing course. We’ll be learning together through sharing and reading from our works-in progress. The short application for this course is there to ensure that your project is a good fit for this workshop, and that you’re prepared to engage with the workshop format—basically, that you know what you’re getting into! (No writing sample is required.)
This workshop is not for you if…
You have multiple projects which you’d like feedback on during our time together (as we’ll be working to collaboratively develop a single project per participant)
You only want feedback on your work (and are not interested in sharing feedback on others’ projects)
You only enjoy reading work in one specific genre (whether overtly experimental or otherwise) and are not interested in exploring work in a range of genres, styles, and aesthetics
You have obligations which will regularly conflict with our meeting time
(If this is you, you might find the support you’re looking for in for one-on-one coaching or Writing in Unknown Shapes.)