Effective Songwriting
This casual workshop invites songwriters of all levels to come together and discuss what makes songwriting effective—and by contrast, what makes it ineffective. There will be a focus on organization, figurative language, and authenticity, and particularly on how these ingredients can work together to create lasting impressions. Participants will collaborate with others and perhaps even with the untapped part of themselves. Come with questions and comments, and we’ll do our best to send you off with answers and suggestions.
led by Jeremy Gerrard
A Home for Your Memoir: Humanities Journalism and the Community Conversation
You have a personal story to tell. Maybe it’s a story of trauma and survival. Maybe it’s a story of adventure and travel. Or maybe it’s a story where you’re just sitting still and something amazing happens.
You want to tell it—you need to tell it. But you’re not sure where your story might “fit.” One likely home is Humanities Journalism, where writers connect their told experience to issues and controversies of interest to their communities. Come explore how many different memoirs—maybe even yours—connect to a bigger public conversation—and to an audience eager to read them.
led by Ruthe Rhodes, Lydia Leonard-Rhodes, and Emily Leonard-Rhodes
Journal Wild!
We will explore ways to free and expand the world of our journals so they become central in our writing life. We will write rich and wild journal entries that may become seminal to our stories, essays and poems. We will discover the perfect journal form and style for us, and promise ourselves to always carry our journals with us-available for our notes on the world and ideas that come forth for our writing (and lives).
led by Susan Wooldridge
Step Out of Your Box and Into Ours
Sometimes the inspiration to write just falls flat. Our goal is to get you out of your writing funk and help you discover inspiration to create new characters, scenes, images, or plot lines in whatever style of writing you do. Through sensory exploration, we take the pressure off your imagination in this interactive workshop that won’t keep you tied to your chair. Looking to get motivated? Want a technique you can take home? Not afraid of collaboration? Then come play with us.
led by the Yuba College Literary Arts Club
In Brief: Short Forms in Creative Nonfiction
Can you tell a story in 750 words? The online literary magazine, Brevity, answers this question. With examples ranging from lyric essay, memoir, and other hybrid forms, we will take a closer look at how writers of creative nonfiction take on the task of creating narrative arc, developing characters, and capturing their lived experiences in a small space. Prompts will be provided as we try our hand at crafting big stories into their most essential parts on the page.
led by Sarah Pape
Some stories and experiences cannot be told through one mode of writing. When the complexity of a story demands a two-pronged approach, mixing genres can be a creatively challenging and fulfilling endeavor. Come to this workshop with all of your tangled adventures and hard to describe incidents, where you will get hands-on experience in cross-genre writing and exposure to several models. While I will focus on the memoir-poetry combination that I used to tell the story in Hive-Mind, we will open ourselves up to other new and perhaps surprising connections between genres.
led by Gabrielle Myers
