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A
Fiction Workshop • To Make It Memorable"
Open to students ages 14–18
July 6–August 16
Three two-week sessions
Session I July 6–19
Course # YYWF Ø1-Ø2
Session II July 20–Aug. 2
Course # YYWF Ø3-Ø4
Session III Aug. 3–16
Course # YYWF Ø5-Ø6
Culmination: Student Reading
Saturday, July 19, 10 a.m.
Saturday, August 2, 10 a.m.
Saturday, August 16, 10 a.m.
This summer’s intensive fiction workshop will focus
on expanding students’ awareness of their craft as
storytellers. “To make it memorable” is both
the goal of each narrator in a story and the yearning of
the writer who chooses the words. The emphasis will be on
daily writing exercises that explore the dynamics of character,
plot, and dialogue. Particular attention will be paid to
facets such as subplot and theme.
Each two-week workshop will meet four hours per day, Monday
through Friday, with a shorter meeting on Saturday morning.
Individual conferences with the instructor can be scheduled
following the afternoon workshop. Every student will be
expected to write or revise their stories throughout the
course of the workshop. In signing up for this workshop,
each student acknowledges that she/he is capable of engaging
in a vigorous creative challenge, and is committed to producing
at least 500 words a day of writing. This workshop is for
young writers who savor the creative use of language, and
have an insatiable desire to learn more about how to make
their stories convincing. The annual culminating event of
each workshop is the Saturday morning reading at the end
of the second week, at which students will read a portion
of their projects. Preparation for the reading will begin
midway through the second week.
Morning classes will begin with a short craft lecture, and
students will then plunge into a work-in-progress. Both
morning and afternoon classes will include sustained discussion
of the writing the students have produced during their writing
periods. The tone of this discussion will always grow out
of a respect for the struggle required to do good work and
the desire to help young writers improve their stories.
Students are encouraged, but not required, to bring with
them ten to twelve pages of creative writing they have done
at some point in their lives. The emphasis in this workshop,
however, is on producing as many drafts of new work as possible.
This workshop will also include the opportunity to expand
the range of one’s daily reading, which is an essential
part of the development of any writer’s imagination.
The instructor will provide a lengthy, comprehensive and
eclectic reading list that will go far beyond the usual
citations of writers such as Melville, Borges, Proulx, Stone,
Flaubert, Woolf, Joyce, Zola and Hurston. The types of fiction
explored in this intensive workshop will range from the
popular genres to the kinds of stories rooted in classical
as well as experimental approaches to literature. No matter
which direction students end up taking as writers, this
workshop will provide new groundwork for their exploration
of the realm of the imagination. Throughout the meetings,
the instructor will interweave his knowledge of the methods
by which a young writer turns the aspiration to become a
writer into an actual career.
Tuition, room and board: $2350 per session
Enrollment limited to 10 students.
Bill Mohr
Ed
Skoog
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Creative Essay
Open to students ages 14–18
July 20-August 2
Course # YYWE Ø3-Ø4
Two-week session
Culmination: Student Reading - Saturday, August 2, 10 a.m
Every teenager has witnessed and participated in enough
life, and its attendant joys and miseries, to be able to
say something worth hearing, and this course will encourage
its young writers to write something about personal experience
worth reading. To find models to adapt or diverge from,
we will read a number of short essays by authors such as
Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, George Orwell, Joan Didion,
James Baldwin, Jamaica Kincaid, Ian Frazier, Barry Lopez,
John McPhee, Dave Eggers, John Hodgman, Sarah Vowell, David
Sedaris, and Wells Tower to extract some principles about
the structure and development of prose that observes and
comments on the world as seen by the writer. As distinguished
from our fiction and poetry workshops, the essay session
will be part journalism, part memoir, part philosophy, part
exercise in prose style, and part investigation; we will,
however, borrow the lyric intensity of poetry, and the narrative
draw of fiction, to write the kinds of personal essays that
can be meaningful, profound, hilarious and heavy. We’ll
focus on the artfully presented sentence, the emotionally
charged paragraph, and the ways ideas, feelings and stories
move through a whole work. Each day will begin with a discussion
that leads to a writing exercise, each day’s writing
will build toward an essay draft, about which the writer
will be given feedback by the instructor and peers through
workshops and individual conferences. Time and support will
be provided for multiple revisions of several essays. At
the end of the session, we’ll compile the best of
the workshop for publication, and give a public reading.
This session will be particularly helpful to students preparing
to write college essays, and to any student looking to challenge
and expand their writing abilities.
Tuition, room and board: $2350
Enrollment limited to 15 students.
Ed
Skoog
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Industrial Poetry
Open to students ages 14–18
July 20-August 2
Course # YYWP Ø3-Ø4
Two-week session
Culmination: Student Reading - Saturday,
August 2, 10 a.m
Paul Valéry suggested that poetry was a “language
within a language.” Kenneth Koch, poet and pinoeer
in bringing poetry to American classrooms, added that everyone
who uses this language well changes it slightly. By learning
the “second language” of poetry, students can,
in essence, double their available vocabularies, their first
means of self expression.
Industrial Poetry is a poetry workshop developed originally
for professional authors to help maintain a steady “flow”
of ideas and inspiration. Enhanced here for young writers,
the course begins with an introduction to modern poetry,
the traditions that shaped it, and the “uses”
of poetry both artistic and practical. This orientation
will not, however, be achieved with long lectures, but with
fun writing projects, lively debate and discussion, poetry
games and a few surprises.
The latter part of the course examines recent trends in
poetry such as Slam and Performance Poetry, Neo-Formalism,
and other hybrids and then moves on to explore the future
with emphasis on engaging students to invent “new”
poetic forms. Students will begin writing from day one and
will be expected to maintain collections of their work.
There will also be “stress free” projects to
help students with performance of their work utilizing easy
techniques for public speaking. The course culminates in
an on-campus reading given by the class.
Materials: Students should bring a fresh
notebook and plenty of pencils and pens.
Tuition, room and board: $2350
Enrollment limited to 10 students.
Brandon
Constantine
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Poetry
Workshop - Power of the Word
Open to students ages 14–18
August 3–16
Course # YYWP Ø5-Ø6
Two-week session
Culmination: Student Reading - Saturday,
August 16, 10 a.m.
A stimulating workshop for anyone with a serious interest
in writing poetry—from beginning students to those
experienced young writers who wish to hone their craft and
technique. The only prerequisite is a fascination with the
written and spoken word, a love of language in all its strange
and wonderful possibilities. We’ll read and discuss
contemporary poetry, explore what poetry is and where it
comes from, and experiment with different styles and various
methods to “jump-start” the creative process.
The goal of the workshop is to help each student discover
his or her own poetic voice and sources of personal inspiration.
Students will be exposed to a wide range of poetry, with
an emphasis on the American idiom—poetry written in
the language we speak. They’ll be encouraged to write
from their own experiences and perceptions, to use poetry
as a tool for self-expression and discovery. A series of
writing exercises will be employed to get the creative juices
flowing and provide a focus for the writing—imagery,
memory, dreams, personal history, metaphor, etc. While the
emphasis will be on the creative process, students will
produce at least one new poem per day. In an informal workshop
setting, these poems will be read aloud and critiqued by
the instructor and the class, giving students the opportunity
to respond to one another’s work and receive constructive
feedback from their peers.
The class will meet four hours a day, five days a week,
with time in the afternoon for writing assignments and conferences
with the instructor. Other activities may include an afternoon
picnic/hike. At the end of the two weeks, we’ll produce
an anthology of student poems and present a reading for
the school community. Everyone should bring notebooks, writing
instruments and one collection of poetry they admire. Participants
will have access to the Idyllwild Arts computer lab in the
afternoon, so that they can prepare assignments and revisions
of poems for class critique.
Tuition, room and board: $2350
Enrollment limited to 10 students.
Cecilia Woloch
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Screenwriting Workshop
Open to students ages 14–18
August 3–16
Course # YYWS Ø5-Ø6
Two-week session
Culmination: Student Reading - Saturday,
August 16, 10 a.m.
Every memorable movie or play starts with the same ingredients;
great characters, specific well written dialogue and a strong
conflict. In this two week workshop we will touch on it
all–using writing techniques, exercises, and in-class
feedback. Students will read short plays and movie scripts
and WRITE!! The goal is to complete a ten minute play or
a short film script, and have it performed by actors for
the culmination.
The first week we will read and discuss your favorite styles
and how they are done. We will search out what kind of story
you would like to tell. Find out how one knows if a story
idea is a movie or a play. We will learn about structure,
character development, and flushing out story ideas. We
will talk about the difference in format and structure between
films and plays. But always knowing what is at the bottom
of all good pieces of writing–a good story.
In the second week we WRITE–and read works in progress
daily and discuss. There will be time to for individual
meetings with the instructor as well.
Students should bring their imaginations and their favorite
plays and movies to share, also writing utensils would help.
Tuition, room and board: $2350
Enrollment limited to 11 students.
Laurel
Ollstein
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