Summer Writing Camps! (For Grownups)
The kids get to go to summer camp, so why not you? Left Margin LIT is offering a series of short summer classes designed to fit into your summer and rev up your writing practice. Dig deeper into your passion, or try something new. Each class is one week long, Monday through Friday, and meets for two hours every afternoon. At the end of the week, you will depart with inspiration, momentum, and many solid pages written and ready for the next step.
Days: Monday through Friday (see dates below)
Time: 1-3 pm
Ages: Adult
Price: $285 per week
POETRY CAMP | Rachel Richardson | July 9-13
This fun, generative, weeklong workshop will break you out of old habits and help you see your work more clearly. With daily optional prompts to get you started and a community of likeminded writers with whom to discuss the craft, every participant will be inspired to play, create, and push into new, deeper writing.
The 5-day intensive workshop model will ask participants to write a new poem each evening for workshop the following afternoon. We will meet for two hours to read and discuss your newly-created drafts and consider craft elements to support your writing. You'll depart each day with great feedback on your work as well as materials to help launch the next poem.
By the end of the week, every participant will have written five brand new poems, and found the momentum to keep going.
FICTION CAMP | Melanie Abrams | July 23-27
All writers want their characters to jump fully formed off the page, but how do we get them there?
In this workshop, we’ll use Janet Burroway’s four methods of character presentation to guide our time together. Each class session will revolve around one of the four methods: appearance, action, dialogue, and thought. We’ll look at stories by expert character builders, discuss the nuts and bolts of these four methods, then work on crafting three-dimensional people who are complex, believable, and compelling. Come to class with a character in process or spend the week creating one from scratch.
TIME TO BEGIN: MEMOIR CAMP | Monica Wesolowska | July 30-Aug 3
What are you waiting for? Whether you’ve written memoir before or not, this fun, generative, weeklong workshop is a chance to get a fresh start on your life story.
Each day in class, we’ll cover basic craft elements, analyze excerpts from successful memoirs, and experiment with different writing styles. At home, you’ll have a chance to revise what you’re working on and bring it back for valuable feedback.
By the end of our five days together, you should have written several brief scenes, identified a voice with which to start a memoir, and gained the momentum to keep it going.
Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poems, Hundred-Year Wave and Copperhead. She has taught at Stanford and USF’s MFA in Writing program and has been awarded NEA and Wallace Stegner Fellowships. Her poems have been published in the New York Times, Slate, and elsewhere.
Melanie Abrams is the author of the novel Playing (Grove Atlantic) and the recently completed Meadowlark. She teaches at UC Berkeley. She’s married to the novelist Vikram Chandra, and they live with their daughters in Oakland, CA.
Monica Wesolowska is the author of the memoir Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, named a “Best Book of 2013,” and a children’s picture book forthcoming in 2019. In addition, she publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of venues including The New York Times. A former fellow at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, she’s been teaching and editing around the Bay Area for over a decade.