During Craft Sessions, Creative Writing Instructors go in-depth on a particular element of craft, allowing participants to expand their writing knowledge by exploring different topics and prompts. Each session offers a lecture period and time for writers to put elements of craft into practice.
Participants will have the opportunity to choose several Craft Sessions as electives, selecting different sessions based on their interests and areas in which they wish to grow as writers.
Please note that Craft Sessions vary by instructor, and that we offer different Craft Sessions between our residential and online programs.
JIYW Residential Program Craft Sessions
DIY Mad-Libs
Instructor: Amelia Van Donsel
When: Session One
In this playful, fast-paced craft session, we will be collaboratively creating and then filling in our own versions of Mad-Libs. After a few examples are shown, students can expect to draft a short piece of prose in response to a generative prompt, then erase select words. Partners will then trade drafts and start filling in the gaps, resulting in a unique, polyvocal start to a piece! This daring exercise in trust and teamwork will force us to carefully consider how we utilize certain craft elements, including tone, voice, diction, and context, in our drafting process.
Linguistic Cartography: The Poetic Potential of Lexical Association
Instructor: Sam Beal (he/they)
When: Session One
As poets, language is the primary tool we use in crafting our work. It is important, then, to consider the ways in which language is unique to each of us. How do we interpret or associate words differently from those around us? What connections do we make between words that others might not make?
In this craft talk, we will examine how personal word associations can provide a lens into our own unique inner worlds. Meandering through lexicon, we will practice creating word-maps and word-bridges to uncover poetic destinations and thematic paths we might’ve otherwise missed.
Moving Images: Generating Ideas through Paintings
Instructor: Clara Mundy
When: Session One
Oftentimes, a story comes to us first as an image: a lone character reaching into the darkness, a family huddled together for warmth, a child blowing onto a window so they might draw in the condensation. In this session, we’ll use American regionalist paintings—such as those by Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and John Steuart Curry—as a baseline for creating our own evocative pieces. We’ll draw inspiration from these painters’ works as both independent and interconnected entities, recognizing how the rearranging of images generates new and exciting narrative possibilities. Together, we’ll come up with multiple outlines for potential stories or poems, with writers having the chance to expand upon one of these ideas at the very end.
The Interview
Instructor: Assemay Almazbekkyzy
When: Session One
In this generative craft session, we will investigate The Interview – what are its conventions and how do people break out of them? Reading excerpts from and watching different interviews, we will then proceed to draft our own interviews – what are the questions you have never been asked? What are the answers you are looking for? What fiction elements – such as description and setting – do you think will add to the experience? At the end of the session, the participants will have mock interviews with each other, either as individuals or their characters.
Fallen Fruits, Semicolon Trees: Accumulation & Pruning as Craft
Instructor: Haley Harris
When: Session One
Paul Valéry writes, “the opening line of a poem is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before...the poet’s task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall.”
Mary Ruefle writes, “you might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart.”
In this craft session, we will begin by generating a word bank of “fallen fruits”— miscellaneous ponderings from your day, fragments of dreams, literal fruits, objects you’ve seen on the sidewalk, a listing from a Craigslist post, intrusive thoughts, jotted handwriting in your notebook that you now forget the context of, your most precious keepsakes, a phrase from a billboard, a song lyric that haunts you, etc. We will then group our “fallen fruits” into clusters: lists held together by semicolons. What unifies or holds each cluster of fallen fruits together? What kind of tree could this be? Semicolons will eventually be replaced by connective lines and sentences (branches!), moving our writing from the realm of speculative gathering to the realm of intentional building and/or trimming.
Parataxis: Train of Thought
Instructor: Nickolas Hedtke
When: Session Two
Merriam Webster defines parataxis as: “the placing of clauses or phrases one after another without coordinating or subordinating connectives.” To put it more simply, parataxis could be compared to the way children speak. They speak their ideas as they come to them, one after the other, without logically connecting the ideas together. Some of the most famous phrases in cultural memory are written paratactically, including Julius Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici, or “I came; I saw; I conquered.” In this craft session, we will utilize paratactic writing in form, along with exploring the technique from a critical standpoint.
By Its Cover
Instructor: Edward Clifford
When: Session Two
What is your favorite type of book cover? Colorful and busy? Sleek and minimal? From the medieval manuscripts and vellum to the ancestral codices and contemporary mass market paperbacks and zines, studying the artwork of book covers and antique illustrations can lead to a better conceptualization of our prose and poetry. Together, we will talk about the history of the book, look at trends in publishing, debate the commercialism of art, and ultimately design and create covers for our own work from prototype to finished product.
First Impressions: Writing a Compelling Opening
Instructor: Vika Mujumdar
When: Session Two
The opening of any piece of writing, whether fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, is often what draws a reader in; this craft session will consider how we might write compelling openings to our work across genre. We’ll consider work by Dur e Aziz Amna, Elif Batuman, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Patrycja Humienik, and more in order to fully explore questions of attention, alongside how to jump in to the heart of what we want to say, and will examine questions of clarity, depth, and emotional engagement in relation to first impressions of any text, both from the perspective of writer and reader.
A List of Possibilities
Instructor: Sarah Ahmad
When: Session Two
Umberto Eco said, “The list is the origin of culture.” In her diaries, Susan Sontag made endless lists: things I like, things I dislike, places I have been, and so on. Nabokov stated that there are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter.
In this craft session, we will travel to merge through these ideas of lists: a list as a place of possibility, a list as a place where we can enchant through cataloging, a daily cultural product we can be creative with. Working to list generatively and intensely, we will look at lists by Nazim Hikmet, Chen Chen, Linda Pastan, among others, and see if we can rethink the marginalia as a space of possibility.
Haunted Hotel, Group Novel & Mystery
Instructor: Maya Kuchiyak
When: Session Two
You are on holiday in a big, isolated mansion.
You are awoken by a mysterious noise at 5am…
Haunted Hotel is a thrilling craft session that will be structured around a quick-fire exchange of anonymous letters in order to collectively create a world and...solve a mystery. Participants will first fill out a fictional character-sheet handout. Then, after the character bios are exchanged through a daisy-chain link network, the participants will be shown a series of generative writing prompts. The first, is to write a letter of complaint from the perspective of their character to another participant’s character, in a fictional situation where they are neighbours. Eventually, after exchanging letters with three different characters, students will see that narratives—even ghosts!—will begin to materialise out of their letters.
JYWO Online Program Craft Sessions
Speaking the Character
Instructor: Zahra Lahiji
When: Online Program
Consider the sounds and styles of your voice and that of those around you. What are words or conversations that you lean on, phrases or topics that come more naturally to you than others? How does this translate to the way you write and how characters in your stories manifest their voices?
Voice is central to any story and comes into play in most - if not all - genres. While we think of it as the way a character speaks, an indication of their age or place of origin, crafting a strong voice goes beyond the surface and reveals who a character or narrator really is. This craft session will examine the ties between character and voice and what it means to bring forward what is unsaid into a character’s self expression through their internal thoughts, dialogue, and actions.
ITERATION
Instructor: Riley Jones
When: Online Program
We might consider the act of writing as the act of making an attempt. Often a writer may need to make many, many attempts. While we are sometimes taught as writers to seek a final, perfect end for our writing, in this Craft Session we will focus our attention on the endlessly repeatable gesture of attempt. Working with a short excerpt of writing (of your own, of a favorite writer, a random or found text) you will practice a series of guided attempts to refigure, recontextualize, reword, revive, reimagine (...) existing writing. The goal of these various iterations or repetitions will not be to arrive at a final, ideal version, but to begin to reveal to us the infinity that is contained or might be contained in the finite form of language.
Form and Container
Instructor: Danielle Bradley
When: Online Program
In this craft session, we’ll think about both form and container in experimental works. We’ll begin the craft session by reading a short story together, considering how the story’s content informs its shape. How are these two components in conversation? How can the shape of a story impact rhythm and guide one’s reading? We’ll then try our hand with a short generative exercise inspired by the reading and our conversation, sharing our experiences and observations as a group. Participants will leave this craft session with a list of generative writing exercises to guide their own continued creative work.
The Turn
Instructor: Rachelle Toarmino
When: Online Program
Every piece of good writing—whether a poem, short story, essay, novel, or TikTok—requires setup and payoff. The moment the text begins to pay is called the turn, and we rely on these shifts in tone or thought to surprise our readers and keep them engaged. In this craft session, we’ll study different kinds of turns, from the sonnet’s volta to the essay’s pivot, and discover how they work to open up a piece of writing by allowing it to change its terms.
Keep Running
Instructor: Matthew Litman
When: Online Program
From the moment we are handed a pencil, we are warned against writing “run on” sentences. For newscasters, this is a wise rule. But for us writers, run on sentences are excellent devices for creating form, building tension, traversing space and time in the span of a few words and imbuing our work with resonances that swell and snowball. In this generative craft session, we will read “run on” work by Jamaica Kincaid, Rick Moody and Eka Kurniawan, and run to our hearts content, exploring new registers and voices, examining the beauty of the semicolon and em-dash, and discovering how to weave a single thought and extend it into a complex, singing tapestry.