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“The craft sessions both affirmed my way and opened me to more ways of thinking about writing. They helped link together in my mind all the little “pockets” of experience and education, such as music, language, the possibility of research. . .”—’09 participant
“One craft session in particular was amazing. It will permanently change the way I write.” —’09 participant
Daily craft sessions provide contexts for faculty and writers in residence to discuss diverse issues of craft, process, and inspiration,  or to lead exercises exploring technique and imagination. They are an excellent opportunity for participants to engage with poets and writers other than their workshop leader.
Participants receive a schedule of 2010 sessions in May and sign up for the ones that interest them most. Here are last year's offerings:
Chris Bachelder
The Perpetual Relevance of Chekhov
Anton Chekhov is widely regarded as one of the best and most important story writers of all time, and there is little doubt that Chekhov's art radically transformed the short story. Whether they've read his work or not, most writers since Chekhov have been Chekhovian in both aims and technique. In providing a brief introduction to Chekhov's writing and his principles of composition, this session intends to demonstrate why he remains so important, useful, and relevant to the contemporary writer.
Holly Black
The Rules of Fantasy
Fantasy may conjure the delightful image of writers whimsically making things up according to their imagination, but writing fantasy can be quite rigorous. You must be able to create a world and populate it with beings and a set of rules that not only are internally consistent, but that feel intuitively true. Come talk about the special challenges of writing fantasy.
Charles D’Ambrosio
A Constant Problem
A look at the short story, organized around a quote from W. H. Auden’s great book The Enchafaed Flood: or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea: “A constant problem for the writer is how to reconcile his desire to include everything, not to leave anything important out, with his desire for an aesthetic whole, that there shall be no irrelevances and loose ends.”
Thomas Sayers Ellis
Something Patterned, Wild and Free: Toward the Widescreen Matrimony of Prose and Poetic Diction
A discussion of the ways to widen how lines and sentences behave in stanzas. We will look inside words, at their edges, utterances and sound engines in order to discover narrative and non-narrative ways of progressing in our work. All literacy (visual, emotional, literary, folk) will be considered so that the poem reaches for an “active” wholeness and not just a logical “flat, fixed and finished” destination. Some discussion, also, of how we ask our readers to enter stanzas (through which doors) and of the types of lines and words that govern perspective and “control” will also be discussed.
Noy Holland
Usage is More Powerful than Reason
“Now is the night one blue dew,” James Agee wrote in A Death in the Family. We are urged by many to choose the right word, but, having chosen it, where do we put it? This is a class about syntax and sound—it’s about the music of sentences, the visceral effect of the language. We’ll exercise a poet’s attentiveness to cadence, to where the stresses of syllables fall, to the beauties of repetition. Some of the most glorious sentences in the language are composed of humble and familiar words. Some of the most glorious paragraphs and pages in the language are composed of humble and familiar words. The labor, then, is in the arranging, in the rightly misplaced adjective, in the dissonance produced by concentrations of sound and stress as with “one blue dew”—which, while it describes the loveliness of twilight, surges with something terrible and portentous. The chemical affinities between words are greatly altered by distance and proximity; that is, we manipulate those affinities via syntax, and by this do our work on the body of the (bless you) receptive reader.
Paul Lisicky
Carhartt or Chanel? Musings on Prose Style
Why does prose style matter? How do the various elements of craft—syntax, figuration, tone, paragraphing, and anything else you can think of—contribute to content? Why do some writers dress in sturdy Carhartt work pants and others wear pink Chanel clamdiggers? In this session we'll examine the prose of a handful of notable writers and talk about the ways in which style furnishes meaning. We'll also try out an exercise inspired by these excerpts in an effort to become deeper, more generous readers, better attuned to the quirks and beauties of the prose we write and read.
Lisa Olstein
Engines, Alchemy, Divining Rods, Internal Weather & Magnetic Fields
Poems enjoy a nearly infinite range of finite ways to come to life, move, and move us. A form (inherited or invented), a verb tense, a particular syntactical challenge or repeated word, a pressing idea, a found phrase, a haunting image or sound-any of these might be the key that turns the engine of a poem and makes it go. Likewise the ways we navigate towards our writing, the habits, tricks, and tools we employ to find (or forget) what we want to write are many and varied. Staring at a blank page or a page full of diagrams or a certain painter's work, studying the Latin names of flowers, researching elephant communication, harboring a private obsession with honeybees or traffic patterns or space travel-any of these practices and a million more might prove to be our known or as yet undiscovered ways of finding the inspiration or mindset in which to write, and write newly, boldly.
In this session we'll examine several individual poems with powerful keys and engines and ways of making us move, and we'll investigate possible practices and means of imagining ourselves into new and different work. Prose parallels are abundant; writers as well as poets welcome.
Alex Phillips
Hands on the Teacup
Many poets and writers have described their writing processes as a kind of channeling of language from the unconscious mind or from someplace beyond themselves. Even Socrates claimed that poets are "god-possessed" when they write. Modern and contemporary poets from W.B. Yeats to Jack Spicer have been deeply influenced by their belief in a spirit world. Sylvia Plath and James Merrill experimented with automatic writing and ouija in their work. While one may or may not be inclined to accept a world of spirits and non-human entities, there is clearly a connection between such inclinations and the more readily accepted concept of muse. We will look at some examples of work influenced and produced via spiritualism and automatic writing as well as at an original, unpublished transcript of the Lake Pleasant artist Louise Shattuck's automatic writing communications with her artistic spirit mentor Charles Memling. We'll also have plenty of time to try a few automatic writing pieces of our own. No candles necessary.
Shauna Seliy
Location, Location, Location!
A look at place. Some novels seem to grow out of their surroundings, so rooted in a particular place that they couldn¹t happen anywhere else. At times, the setting is itself a character—alive, dynamic, memorable. We’ll look at the way authors use place to hold a story, tell a story.
Arisa White
Would You Wear My Eyes?
Breaking out of your comfortable subjectivity, into a place where you cannot rely on your usual ways of writing an experience, can awaken language. During this session, participants will complete a few exercises, read sample poems, and discuss what may be some of the challenges and benefits of a persona. We will work to identify from where in ourselves and with what tools—-be it empathy, one's social identities, or craft—-do we speak to convince the reader that we can render an honest understanding of what it means to wear another's eyes.
Dara Wier
This Reminds Me Of
As readers and as writers we often find ourselves being reminded of one thing or another. For good or ill, for naught or abundance. Our brains do us the service of finding paths between and among, of supplying us with a vast variety of combinations, collections, comparisons. It puts two and two or three or more together, it finds common ground, it relishes difference, it displays a wanton disregard of isolation, it plays into sound and sense associations, private and public, it practices an energetic pulling together of all kinds and sorts of logics: atypical, transportational, biased, brazen, bold, subtle, silent, strategic, inconsequential, coincidental, manufactured, juxtaposed, overlying, out of bounds, beyond limits, circumscribed, hallowed, hallucinatory, tranquilizing or shocking. And more. A simile is a visible sign of this tendency and talent. Like, as, as if, shall I compare thee, etc. Resemblance, similitude, equivalence, right mixtures, sets and arrangements. We'll find these everywhere and talk about their presence in poetry and prose. Bring along with you, if you have access to one, an extraordinary simile. Here are two:
Henry James in The Bostonians: It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.
Kenneth Koch in “To You”: I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut/That will solve a murder case unsolved for years/Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window/Through which he saw her head, connecting with/Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red/Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;/For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not/Inside a bottle, thank goodness!
Matthew Zapruder
Collaboration Strategies
Writing, as we all know, can be a lonely, even solipsistic, artistic practice. Collaboration with other writers or artists from other disciplines is one of the best ways of getting us out of ourselves, and into other spaces, where new and exciting things can happen. In this discussion/workshop, we will talk briefly about the history of collaboration, highlighting a few valuable examples (including surrealist practices, the translations of Ezra Pound, and "live" collaborative performances by Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg and Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer); discuss various types of collaborative practice (particularly with painters, as well as with other poets); and focus on practical advice and suggestions for collaboration. Time permitting, we will try one or two collaborative exercises.
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