During Writing Labs, 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. Creative Writing Instructors will host a range of labs that address different themes or topics in writing, and participants will engage with writing prompts or exercises, producing work that is complex and at a college level. Throughout the lab, participants will dive deep into their own work and exchange feedback with one another on their creative writing projects.
Following the completion of the Writing Lab, Creative Writing 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.
Please note that Writing Labs vary between weeks, and that we offer different Writing Labs for our residential and online programs.
JIYW Residential Program Writing Labs
Here's a look at our 2026 Writing Labs:
Seriously Unserious: Play and Humor in Our Work
Instructor: Amelia Van Donsel
When: Session One
Poet John Ashbery has been quoted as saying, “My poetry is like a tube sock—one size fits all.” Our goal in this generative, multigenre writing lab is to explore how seriously we can take the unserious, including what humor and exercises in play can reveal about our creative practice. What do we laugh at in our everyday encounters, and what can humor ultimately do for our more serious work—our world-building, character development, or poetic tone? You will have the opportunity to practice your improvisation skills, write from new perspectives, and play with formal constraints on the page. To better understand how humor and play are utilized differently across genres, we will read selections from David Sedaris, Diane Seuss, CAConrad, John Cage, John Yau, Bernadette Mayer, Joseph Heller, David Foster Wallace, among others. We will begin each class with a review of what we’ve laughed at lately. Students can expect to leave the lab with tools to help combat perfectionism, encourage observation, loosen up their generative process when they’re feeling stuck, and thoughtfully incorporate humor into their creative work.
Formal Playgrounds: Bending, Breaking, & Inventing Form
Instructor: Sam Beal (he/they)
When: Session One
As a writer, the imposed rules of form can often feel limiting or daunting. Whether working in poetics or prose, form gives us structure for language through a set of expectations. But what might change if we approached form through the lens of play? How might we use form to find joy and innovation within our work?
In this multi-genre lab, we’ll explore form not as a rigid framework, but as a range of potential landscapes to play and mold our writing in. Collectively, we will read the works of contemporary writers such as torrin a. greathouse, Jericho Brown, Carmen Maria Machado, and Megan Milks, all of whom have pushed and played with form in their respective genres. We will scavenge ideas for how to escape the comfort zones of our writing, simultaneously learning traditional literary structures and the ways in which they might be meaningfully bent or broken. Using readings from this lab as model texts, we will embark on the adventure of creating formally playful writing and invented forms of our own, leaving with a deeper understanding of how experimental forms can spark creativity and shift both the perspective and impact of a piece.
Making Things Weird: Blending the Fantastic into the Everyday
Instructor: Clara Mundy
When: Session One
This world of ours is a weird place. People disappear, friends fall out of favor, first loves fizzle out. Nothing makes sense, and perhaps our stories don’t need to either. In this multi-genre writing lab, we’ll explore how incorporating fantastical elements—be they rooted in magical realism, gothicism, or folklore—into otherwise grounded narratives helps us reach a place of greater profundity. Whether your creative landscape embraces the fantastic already or not, we’ll experiment with stretching our narrative scope beyond the tangible. A massive snake winding its way through a school as the students take their exams? Great. A house where the walls whisper strange secrets into the narrator’s ear? Let’s do it. A crush that manifests as an inexplicable skin condition? Why not? The work we produce will not just be weird for weirdness sake (though that’s also cool). Rather, it will use the objectively strange as a way to jostle readers into recognizing the oddities that we have been conditioned to accept unquestioningly. Together, we will share our work and study writers who have employed the bizarre in their own writing, including Carmen Maria Machado, Mariana Enriquez, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Jorge Luis Borges, and others.
Writing Clichés and Writing Against Clichés
Instructor: Assemay Almazbekkyzy
When: Session One
Overused, boring, flat; I’ve seen this before; I know what’s coming next. Clichés are often associated with lack of experience, unoriginality and poor taste, yet they also contain collective and generational knowledge. In this multi-genre writing lab, we will read and write into and against clichés to find ourselves as both an enactor and a rebel of the universal human experience. We will read works that rely on both narrative and figurative clichés in different forms – poems, fairytales, genre stories and more – and works that abandon and deconstruct them, trying to grasp the thin difference between the collective and the individual, the human and the inhuman, between innovation and unoriginality. The reading list includes works by Mary Shelley, Kelly Link, Mary McCarthy, Getrude Stein, Chen Chen, and others.
Sensational Writing / Writing Reality
Instructor: Haley Harris
When: Session One
The writerly instincts of keen perception and close noticing often reveal the hidden, peculiar, and illuminated truths of being. Literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky writes, “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” Poet Alice Notley writes, “I don't believe that the best poems are just words, I think they're the same as reality…words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we're in all the time." Novelist Virginia Woolf writes, “Different lights fall, making the ordinary leopard-spotted and strange.” This multi-genre writing lab will center sensation as a tool for feeling the world and writing toward reality—an endeavor that, we will learn, often uncovers strange, lush, and multidimensional surrealities. In daily writing prompts and experiments, our senses— engaging vision, sound, scent, and texture—will serve as entry points into imaginative and perceptive locales (poems, stories, hybrid projects). We’ll read widely, discussing and learning from other writers—poets like Kim Hyesoon, Bob Kaufman, and Jack Spicer, among others; and prose writers like Karen Tei Yamashita, Jorge Luis Borges, and Sheila Heti, among others— who utilize acute sensory experience, sensitivity, and memory to construct alternate, mirrored, and lived-in realities.
Always Writing
Instructor: Nickolas Hedtke
When: Session Two
“Dust is watching life's talk show.”
― James Tate
Seeing the world as a writer doesn’t always mean putting pen to paper, it simply means appreciating the small details and artifacts of feeling that surround us and holding onto them. Sometimes those details are hard to find, they live in the background, but by taking a step back, and revising our focus, a world of inspiration will open up. In this multi-genre lab we will write a hearty sample of poetry and prose. In addition to reading published poetry and prose, we will be reading from Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews, our own text messages, Yelp reviews, YouTube comments, blog posts, interviews, and more, with the direct goal of witnessing the implementation of always writing, showing how we can always be ready to capture magic, even in the classically mundane. We will learn from models, but crafting our own creative vision, evolving our instincts, and defining ourselves as artists is the main focus of this writing lab. Always Writing will change how you see the world. You’ll learn how to find magic in the details. Let’s watch the world go by and hold onto it with words. Let’s have a blast.
On the Origins of Our Writing
Instructor: Edward Clifford
When: Session Two
Writing, Mary Shelley tells us, “consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested by it.” Enter the writing lab, a space to invent, to play with possibility, expression, and the malleability of language. We originate an idea, shape it, consider the possibilities. We blueprint our stories, prototype our poems, revel in bringing into this world something new and adaptive to our tests. We will become the Dr. Frankensteins to our living texts, helping them figure out what they are and what they could be, and for that, we need to know their so-called capabilities. Together, we will find what’s sensible, what’s fun and pleasurable to read, but also start to answer the question, “Have we tried everything?” To begin, we need to see what other originators have done. We will look at the work of inventors such as Madeline ffitch, Felisberto Hernández, T.C. Boyle, Vi Khi Nao, Deesha Philyaw, Danez Smith, CAConrad, as well as other excerpts from critical texts. How were their texts assembled to conjure voice, tone, and style in their own work?
Writing Into Place
Instructor: Vika Mujumdar
When: Session Two
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image,” writes Joan Didion in her essay collection The White Album. This writing lab will begin with the premise that place functions as a central component and not just as a backdrop for how our characters/speakers and language to come alive on the page. In this writing lab, we will consider how one writes into and within place and how we might make a place come alive in our work, and how writing a landscape shapes how we write and read our characters. Whether writing poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, place plays a central role in how readers experience a world. This lab will also consider how we might take strategies for writing place used by realist/literary fiction and poetry and apply them to other genres such as (but not limited to) speculative writing. Our reading will include work by writers including Aria Aber, Dur e Aziz Amna, Elif Batuman, Annie Ernaux, Elena Ferrante, Patrycja Humienik, Summer Farah, and Sally Wen Mao.
“A Foreign Anguish” / Sounding out the writing voice
Instructor: Sarah Ahmad
When: Session Two
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 the idea of “finding your voice” to instead playfully and intentionally looking at it as something we craft 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-periods, 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 and 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?
Fatally flawed: Make your characters do the wrong thing
Instructor: Maya Kuchiyak
When: 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, embellishments, conniving, delinquency, wilful amnesia, little white lies and full-blown madness, which 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 writing lab, we will not only experience the regretful cost of secrecy, but 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 be reading a breadth of poetry, essays and fiction (both traditional and experimental in form) written by authors’ from and across the USA, Korea, Turkey, Ireland, Poland, Nigeria, the UK, Japan, and Mexico.
JYWO Online Program Writing Labs
2026 Online Writing Labs will be announced soon.
Here's a look at our 2025 Online 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.
Fangs, Faeries & Future Tech: Writing the Fantastic & the Frightening
Instructor: Yvette Lisa Ndlovu
In this course, we’ll dive into the thrilling worlds of fantasy, horror, and science fiction—where magic is real, monsters lurk in the shadows, and futuristic tech can change everything. Whether you're dreaming up haunted forests, far-off planets, or secret realms ruled by the fae, this is your space to create bold, original stories that push the boundaries of reality. Through writing prompts and craft discussions, you'll build unforgettable characters and immersive worlds. No prior experience in writing horror or fantasy is required, just a willingness to explore the strange, the eerie, and the extraordinary!
Self-Obliteration
Instructor: S Coates
We have this idea of writers as solitary figures clacking away in the dark, slumped over crumpled tear-soaked manuscripts. But, once in a while, when we come out of the woodwork, collaboration sparks and we do things together that we couldn’t do alone. Writing collaboratively, working in concert with other makers, is like writing in a creative updraft. In this lab we will write and create in tandem with our peers. Writing alongside multiple voices and exposure to new forms or ways of making empowers risk-taking, lifting us out of the safety of our creative shells. Collaboration doesn’t mean that we’re all beholden to one plot, one arc, or one way, voice, form, or mode of writing. It just means that our writing will be energetically bound, reactive, thoughtfully tethered. The work we create could be a braid of poems and stories, it could be a novella with each writer penning a character, or it could be a multi-media genre-busting interdisciplinary collaboration that lives outside of normal long form terminology. In class we will ‘try on’ different collaborative processes including game-based play-to-create writing exercises, collective drafting, subtle impact, self-collaboration, and Frankenstein’s Monster. We will collaborate generously, ultimately writing a cohesive piece. Think of it as the mushroom blossom from the mycelium of our writing. We will experiment with prose, poetry, and hybrid forms. The end product might look like a large-scale (but necessarily short) D&D game, a type of variable narrative storytelling (like a choose-your-own adventure), or a compilation of intertwining individual pieces. Whatever we make, we make together.