At the heart of the online program are Writing Labs, where participants explore creative styles, forms, subjects, and modes of writing. The lab sessions meet daily for interactive instruction with a cohort of passionate young writers from all walks of life. Labs are synchronous, dynamic, and participatory. The work is complex and at a college level, allowing participants to dive deep into developing their own work and exchanging feedback with one another on their creative writing projects.
Following the completion of the Writing Lab, instructors provide each participant with a written summary of their work, an evaluation of their progression toward writing goals, and future considerations for their writing.
Writing Labs are offered during week one of the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, and for the full week of Juniper Young Writers Online.
Please note that offered Writing Labs vary between weeks, and that we offer different Writing Labs for our residential and online programs.
Residential Program Writing Labs
Fatally flawed: Make your characters do the wrong thing
Instructor: Maya Kuchiyak
When: Session One and Session Two
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” tells us Joan Didion. Sensible. If only the characters in our stories would heed her advice... But they don’t. Fatally flawed, their inner and outer landscapes are fraught with conflict, self-deception, evasion, embellishment, conniving, delinquency, willful amnesia, little white lies, and full-blown madness. These are the qualities that drive the stories on our reading list. Homes have shaky foundations. Marriages ooze with unspoken resentments. Repressed desires and self-censorship pop up in the toilet bowl and speak back to us.
In this lab, we will not only experience the regretful cost of secrecy, but will hone in on the craft of suspense and the nuanced art of subtext: tension and release; restraint and abandon; absence and overbearing presence. For inspiration, we will read a breadth of stories varying in extremes of plot, structure, points of view, and sanity. Our texts will span the Gothic, horror, mystery, picaresque, and suspense genres, and are written by authors from and across the United States, Korea, Ireland, Poland, Finland, Nigeria, the UK, Canada, Japan, and Mexico.
The Art of Invention
Instructor: Katerina Zadé
When: Session One and Session Two
Creative writers are known for invention. But does invention mean making everything up? In this multi-genre lab, we will learn how to cross the boundary between our real lives and the invented world. In this lab, our “real lives” will be composed of two aspects: what we see, and what we remember. Writers will keep a daily journal to both observe the physical world, as well as to track and trace recent and not-so-recent memories. From these real observations and memories, we will compose our “invented world.” Through craft lessons and daily prompts, we will learn how the “real” is simply the key that opens the door to a wild and free imagination. A song you heard in the supermarket? That’s the soundtrack to your next short story. What about the color of your bedroom wall when you were six years old? That’s the color of the wall in your next poem. This is how we will think in this lab. We will learn from each other as well as masters of the craft—those writers who exist precisely at the mid-point of invention and biography—such as Richard Siken, Joan Didion, Akwaeke Emezi, Ocean Vuong, Marguerite Duras, and more.
Of Calendars and Collages / the magic in forms of the mundane
Instructor: Sarah Ahmad
When: Session One and Session Two
We are surrounded by forms and scripts —advertisements, planners, headlines, calendars, to-do lists, receipts, recipes, instruction manuals—the list goes on! In this multi-genre lab, we’ll experiment with how these traces of the everyday can be sites of creative possibility for our own writing. We will look at writers who have transformed colloquial forms into imaginative vessels for their storytelling, including Lorine Neidecker’s calendar poems, Wisława Szymborska’s postcards, Maira Kalman’s My Favorite Things, and Sara Midda’s travel sketchbook, amongst others, to imagine new forms for our own stories and to forage the everyday paraphernalia of the world to construct our wunderkammer. What are the possibilities of such an attention-making practice for our own projects and processes? What kinds of stories are we able to tell through the textures of noticing? How can upending the expectations of these forms by transforming them into creative shapes and vessels enrich our writing and world-making?
Writing the Imagination: Dreams and Inner Worlds
Instructor: Megan Friedman
When: Session Two
Poet and essayist Anne Carson writes, “sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.” This statement provides a guide for our writing lab— one that interrogates how creative writing provides us with a means to explore our dreams, thoughts, and inner worlds. In this writing lab, students will deepen their relationships with their imaginations and dreamscapes through writing and workshopping poems, prose, and hybrid pieces. Moreover, students will be encouraged to experiment in their writing after receiving feedback from peers and engaging in workshop writing exercises. Outside of the writing lab, students will be asked to pay close attention to their nightly dreams and daily imaginings — daydreams and wishes — and be asked to keep a journal reflecting on their imagination each day. This writing lab will expose students to writers interested in the imagination including William Carlos Williams, Anne Carson, and C.S. Lewis, among others. Students should come prepared to question how their imagination works and explore how their daily imaginings influence their writing. Together, we will realize how our imaginations influence our everyday lives. In the words of William Carlos Williams, “the only realism is in the art of the imagination.”
Fictionalizing Yourself: Self-Exploration and Self-Distancing
Instructor: Assemay Almazbekkyzy
When: Session Two
How do we keep finding stories within ourselves? How do we turn mundane into exciting? In this multi-genre writing lab, the students will be invited to dig into their personalities and stretch the most exciting traits, quirks, and memories into a plane of fiction. Every lab will start with a “get to know yourself” prompt — a personality test, a trivia game, a meditation, a CollegeBoard application, an immigration questionnaire, and others — which we will investigate to find a new, peculiar thing about ourselves. Then, taking distance from our real identities, we will amplify or skew that quality or memory and turn it into a passage of prose or a verse of a poem in class. Students will read their works out loud in each lab. We will draw inspiration from the writing of Sayaka Murata, Annie Ernaux, and Audre Lorde, among others by reading excerpts from their work in class and discussing the writing techniques and characters they employ.
Nature as Craft
Instructor: Nathaniel Pinkham
When: Session Two
The natural world is often treated as a mere backdrop for humans. Nature can be too easily dismissed as an obstacle, something to look at while in the car or to fly over on your journey to somewhere else. But the natural world is more than just a setting. How can we, as writers, depict the natural world in our technologically saturated lives? This generative writing lab will focus on the representation of nature — both how to write about it, and how to appreciate it. We will read poems by William Wordsworth, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and prose passages by Stephen Crane, Cormac McCarthy, and Richard Powers to examine not only how each writer describes the natural world, but how they turn nature into more than just a backdrop. By the end of our time together, we will have explored the theory behind nature writing as well as practical techniques that we can apply both inside the lab and beyond.
Online Program Writing Labs
Life Forms
Instructor: Riley Jones
We might understand a poem or a story as a container for life. A piece of writing might be a form to carry life or itself a form of life. In this Writing Lab, we will use the concept of ‘form’ as an entry point for our own individual and collaborative creative practices. We will think of ‘form’ as both noun and verb: the shape or configuration of something, the act of shaping or configuring something, the act of bringing something into being.
In this Lab, we will take inspiration from various texts including Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Bernadette Mayer’s writing experiments, Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences, Hoa Nguyen’s innovative sonnets, and Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón’s life containing and transforming poems, among others. We will work thoughtfully and playfully to shape our own forms for holding life as we think and feel it. Ideally, the forms we imagine together will not restrict life, but will instead take on its changing and unwieldy shapes — forms with ears and heartbeats, minds and guts.
"A Foreign Anguish" | sounding out the writer's voice
Instructor: Sarah Ahmad
In writing, the term voice has been used to describe that sense of a unique presence on the page —an unmistakable something that becomes the mark of a writer, a way of saying things that is the writer's own. In this multi-genre lab, we will think about what finding our “voice” as a writer means. What do we mean when we talk about a memorable “voice,” a convincing one, and how can we think about our own writing voices as rooted in what we do with language? Together, we will shift focus from “finding your voice” to instead playfully and intentionally looking at one's voice as something crafted through words in order to tell a story. We’ll think about how questions of voice are complicated and enriched by questions about identity, authority, and authenticity. As part of our exploration, we will read work by writers such as James Baldwin, Garth Greenwell, Natalie Diaz, Dionne Brand, Emil Ferris, and others—ranging across genre, time period, and form to try to understand how these voices work.
Our writing exercises will focus on experimentation, figuring out what is most compelling to us, the things we are obsessed about or drawn to, and how we disguise, reveal, expose, celebrate, and exacerbate ourselves on the page. What do our words carry with them across our multiple projects and creations? How can we make those choices thoughtfully, and more importantly, what do they tell us about our singular relationship to text?
4 Genres: From Draft to Publication
Instructor: Marcella Haddad
Many working writers today have found sustainable success and constant inspiration by exploring multiple genres. This lab will take writers through four different literary genres; poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and creative nonfiction. For each of these genres, we'll not only draft a new creative piece, but also learn about what a career in each of these genres might look like. We'll study examples of interesting work, write to templates and writing prompts, and then learn about the processes for publishing poetry, books, and finding success with screenplays. Writers will share feedback with each other in small groups for each daily genre, and on the final day, choose one of the pieces from their favorite genre to workshop. Writers will leave with new drafts, a revision, and a foundation of industry and publishing knowledge with which to continue exploring multiple genres for their writing career.