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 Workshops are fertile spaces for exploring the essential questions and many details we grapple with as writers. Workshop members do more than offer feedback about given pieces; each story or poem, line or sentence, can spark conversations about the larger issues of form, style, content, character, language, and process that are significant for all writers.
Every workshop has its own climate and conventions; some lean towards the generation of new work, some towards the honing of existing pieces, others towards a combination of both. Here’s how this year’s faculty describe their approach to their Juniper workshops. (Details are subject to revision.) Take a look as you consider what workshop might be the most fruitful for you.
Poetry Workshop with Dara Wier:
In our workshop you'll be invited to bring us your best poems, your most difficult poems, your poems in progress, your most questionable poems, your almost there poems, your inklings of poems. And with them your concerns, fears, risk-taking questions, and gut feelings, your instincts, your experience and your understanding of why poems matter, to you, and to us all. You will be invited to bring us poems by poets you admire so we can gain a collective reading experience we can talk about, refer to, and enjoy. You'll be given a chance to tell us about how you happened to come to be writing poetry and what you hope your poetry will be up to as it evolves. You'll be invited to ask questions, tell stories, direct our conversation toward subjects you feel significant to poets gathering over poetry, in order to love it, to question it and to further its life in the future. Your work is the heart and soul and brain of our meetings and it will be our main focus.
Poetry Workshop with Mark Doty:
This workshop is for poets who'd like to push their work a little further. Whenever we compose a draft, there are doors we haven't opened, avenues we haven't explored. By working with a series of writing exercises, we'll practice digging more deeply into the possibilities a poem-in-progress may contain. We'll also read some exemplary contemporary poems, examine some of the questions that are central to our art, and devote some time to reading and discussing work by each participant.
Poetry Workshop with Matthew Zapruder:
William Carlos Williams wrote that the poem is a small or large machine made of words. And Keats wrote that in a great poet, a sense of beauty obliterates all consideration. How can we analyze our own work, without destroying what draws us to poetry in the first place, our particular sense of beauty? To think of a poem as a machine may seem cold and uncreative, but it can actually be a useful and liberating way to step back from our own work, and to think about what exactly our small or large machines are doing, how we they are working, and what ultimately these machines are designed to produce in our readers. It is in fact the very attempt to analyze and understand what we have done, that can allow us to move forward and produce more beautiful work. During this intensive poetry workshop, we will be each other’s careful readers. We will think hard about what choices we have made as poets, and what effects those choices have on us as readers, and tell each other what we see and understand, so we can clarify what we have done, and how we can move forward in our new poems, in unexpected, strange and marvelous directions.
Poetry Workshop with Timothy Donnelly:
Ordinarily when we write a poem we give shape to what’s in our heads, drawing from the reservoir of what we’ve already experienced, thought, or felt, or else from the stream of what we come to imagine, think, or feel in the throes of writing. In this workshop we will experiment with imparting a sense of fixity and focus to even our most rambunctiously emergent material through the use of different kinds and varying degrees of formal regularity. While this won’t be a workshop in traditional forms and meters per se, we will acknowledge how traditional poetic practice has, at its best, served to gratify the mind’s seemingly opposite appetites for stability and surprise, sameness and variety, constancy and change. We will explore new ways of achieving the “unity in multeity” that Coleridge has, like so many before and after him, identified as “the principle of beauty”—but not without asking ourselves whether or not beauty is always our top priority. Perhaps most importantly, we will consider our work as a field of interplay for centrifugal and centripetal forces, as a site where chaos meets containment, and how the struggle to control and to rebel against control can become not merely a compelling formal property of our writing but also a crucial aspect of its significance.
Fiction Workshop with Charles D’Ambrosio:
We’ll operate as a pure workshop, so members will need to circulate manuscripts in advance of the conference. Manuscripts should be no longer than 20 pages. We’ll look at two stories per session, and I’ll consult with each writer after the workshop.
Fiction Workshop with Noy Holland:
Our time here is short and happily intense. I think you will use it best and hardest by producing new work while you are here, by internalizing—through the act of writing—the varied lessons that arise among us. My idea is to approach the work in units. We might spend a whole workshop, for instance, looking at adjectives and adverbs; another workshop looking at dialogue; another at the angle of perception; another at rhythm and syntax. After each workshop, I ask that you embrace what you’ve discovered by producing work that responds to those discoveries—in direct and meaningful and immediate ways.
Does this mean you are not invited to bring work with you? No, not really. If you are deeply engaged in a project, it may make sense to use your time in active revision; you may want to share not new work but newly revised work. But to get what you can from the workshop, you need to be open, in the moment, to deep changes, to seeing what you have brought as raw material, endlessly malleable. This can be difficult to do in as short a time as we have. Ideally, you will come to see everything you have written through the lens of what you learn while you are here, and this re-seeing takes time, often quite a long, welcome, wrestling kind of time that writers find in the weeks that follow.
Fiction Workshop with Rikki Ducornet:
I imagine an encounter within a safe space in which every aspect of inquiry is open to engagement. A space in which dogmatic systems are unveiled and overcome, and the full powers of the creative imagination released. A space for deep thinking and rigorous dreaming, for testing new territories and rethinking the old ones, for dreaming very high dreams!
Memoir Workshop with Paul Lisicky:
The ideal writing workshop is a place where a variety of forms are encouraged and respected, where we attempt to create a version of a model literary community: a thriving ecosystem, as Richard Powers might call it, rather than a monoculture. It requires an openness at every turn, a generosity, and a willingness to consider each piece on its own terms. We’ll look at a variety of outside work (Anne Carson, Nick Flynn, Mary Gaitskill, among others), but your writing will be our primary text. Please email a complete piece or excerpt (up to 12 double-spaced pages) to me at paul.lisicky@rutgers.edu by Friday, June 1st. We’ll make time for in-class exercises and relevant discussion. Along the way, we’ll work hard, have fun, and make sure delight isn’t an enemy to seriousness.
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