ABOUT THE WRITERS STUDIO WORKSHOPS

The Writers Studio welcomes beginning and advanced students to a unique workshop environment whose sole purpose is to help fiction writers and poets discover and nurture their own voices. We offer a supportive environment and community to beginning students who learn how to turn autobiographical fragments into successful narrative or poetic pieces. We also provide technical guidance and professional criticism to more advanced students who are working on longer pieces.

The Writers Studio focuses on a writer's development as well as on the crafting of individual pieces. This process encourages students to develop a critical frame of reference supportive of each writer's ability. Comprising five distinct levels of workshops, The Writers Studio addresses the needs of both the serious and casual writer. Students may take either one 10-week session or continue through a series of progressively demanding classes.

“The Writers Studio is a wonderful and necessary place: it offers both aspiring and accomplished writers a community and a place to try out new material, to explore and push the limits and their abilities to the fullest.”

- A.M.HOMES, author of Safety of Objects (HarperCollins 2003)

The Writers Studio Method

At The Writers Studio students are encouraged to "try on" different narrative voices or personas, often different from their own personalities. As they engage in more challenging exercises, they discover how to use different persona narrators in their own work. As their understanding of craft deepens, so does the emotional power of their writing. Exercises are used even in the Master Class (Level V) where students are writing novels, poetry and short-story collections.

Workshops are held in informal classroom settings, where teachers, trained by The Writers Studio, create exercises appropriate to each level. In addition to the creation of a persona, various other elements of craft, such as mood, tone, dialogue and poetic techniques, are taught through literary examples. Students are urged to expand these short exercises into publishable works.

“Dynamic, Inspiring, invigorating, supportive. The Writers Studio seemed to me to have all the qualities one could possibly wish for in a writing school.”

-JAMES LASDUN, who teaches poetry and fiction at Princeton University, New York University, Columbia University and The New School, author of The Horned Man (W.W. Norton 2002).

Learn about the different levels at The Writers Studio.