New creative writing standalone workshops For Writers of Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Multigenre and Hybrid Forms with Anya Achtenberg
Today, August 16, 2024:
I am very happy to announce the Fall 2024 Launch of a new series of single-event writing workshops coming in September
Say it! Dígalo!: The Standalone Workshop Series with Anya Achtenberg
Each single-event workshop, open to all separately (or in bundles), is meant to help each writer make leaps by focusing in surprising and expansive ways on a single craft concept or approach. Each standalone workshop holds a useful combination of craft discussion with evocative examples; richly generative suggestions for writing explorations; and the opportunity for follow through with in-class writing. I’ll close each workshop with a takeaway suggestion for a writing exploration inspired by the same vital concept—whether to continue a work-in-progress, or to start a completely new work.
The Standalone Series offers pathways to reach powerful and moving expression of the deep and difficult work we do each day, consciously and unconsciously, to process in our writing work the overwhelming tangle of the tragic, the threatening, the uncertain, and the hopeful. To liberate the voice, to be of use, to go beyond our own limiting boundaries in our work, to Say it!
I love these workshops, which both focus attention on these rich concepts, and—it’s important to note—are responsive to the vital signs of a world that defies rubber-stamp expression, and requires expression that is engaged, passionate, authentic; full of subtleties and associative power.
The overwhelm, dread, anger, and grief we experience have their place in our work. These workshops nourish the liberation of voices through craft with a great reach; craft that is layered, revelatory in the connections it arrives at, and always moving toward fearlessness.
Here are the titles of the first upcoming Standalone Workshops. Full descriptions coming soon.
1. Say it! Digalo!: Jumping the chasm between what we see and what we say— a multi-genre writing workshop to generate new work about the hard-to-say.
2. Working into Story through Simultaneity: a tool of story craft both reality-based and magically-fueled! — Where logic, imagination, reality, and magic—meet. Useful across the genres!
3. The Wandering Narrator’s Tour of Narration: the thorniest element of story— Nothing 1, 2, 3 about it!— but rather a vast and continually developing array of narrative choices, and kinds of narrators. Useful in any genre holding point[s]-of-view!
4. Writing Place and Placelessness: Reframe the static instruction to write from a sense of place—expand creativity, context, tension and truth in your writing. Let’s address place in a more contextualized way, beyond historical amnesia, in a world of diaspora, war, ethnic cleansing, gentrification, place as profit, the poisoning of the sacred, climate catastrophe. Let’s…place PLACE! not merely describe its costume.
Scheduling and fee information coming soon.
Anya Achtenberg 