Please check back for details on our 2025 summer writing residency program.

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Here is a look at our 2024 workshops in memoir, flash nonfiction, fiction writing, poetry, healing narratives, writing about place, and family stories.

Melanie Brooks: “The Healing Possibilities of Writing: A Workshop on Stories of Health and Trauma" 

Charles Coe: "Effective Metaphors, Strong Images: Why They Work and How to Create Them" 

María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado: “poetry as memoir: creating narrative poems from your lived experience" for poets and memorists

Suzanne Strempek Shea: “It’s All About Me! A Workshop on the Flash Essay” and “Help! I’m So Stuck! Ways to Swerve Around Roadblocks" for fiction and nonfiction writers  

Tommy Shea: “The Talk of the Town: Finding Inspiration on Location”

MFA Director: Leanna James Blackwell

and Special Guests!

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Suzanne Strempek Shea 
"Help! I'm So Stuck!" (offered first half )

A traditional workshop aimed at helping writers through and beyond a piece, or a section of a manuscript, that's been proving difficult. Both nonfiction and fiction writers welcome as we put the microscope to the writer's work via pieces submitted in advance for reading and preparing suggestions. We'll also look at roadblocks - why they happen and how to swerve around them in future writing. **Maximum of six writers, fiction and nonfiction

"It's All About Me!" (offered second half)

A generative workshop focusing on the short essay and (most importantly) on you! Using examples of writing inspired by all elements of the self, we'll use the short essay form to create self-portraits, some of which might inspire future exploration of the many facets of who we are. Recommended for those who want to learn more about and practice the short form. Plan to leave with a clutch of completed pieces or starts. **Any number of writers allowed

Tommy Shea
"Talk of the Town" (offered both halves)

This generative workshop will inspire writers to see ideas everywhere. Get out and about with your notebook as you meet Tommy daily in a different part of a town on the North Shore. We’ll start with a brainstorming session to get your idea gears turning while taking in locations including a dock, a neighborhood, a business, and a community vibe. After meeting in one of those locations and generating ideas for pieces of writing, you’ll head off to soak up more about your chosen subject and then sit down to write on your own. Tommy and all participants will meet up the end of each session to talk about the process of what you found and wrote, and the poem, short story, magazine piece, or one-act play you might have started. Be ready to do some exploring, noticing, and using it all. **Maximum of six writers. Same locations to be visited in both halves, and will be announced as you board the van each morning of the workshop.

Melanie Brooks
“The Healing Possibilities of Writing: A Workshop on Stories of Health and Trauma” (offered both halves)

Stories of medical, physical, or psychological challenges and trauma will be the focus of this generative workshop. In a compassionate and supportive space, writers will engage in reading and writing exercises that begin peeling back the layers of their experiences and helping them uncover the powerful stories they have to tell. Participants will discuss the challenges of confronting the vulnerability, fear, and pain that inevitably accompany the journey to bring hard stories to the page and learn strategies for taking care of themselves in the process. **Maximum of six writers.

María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado
“Poetry as Memoir” (offered first half)

In this dynamic, writing-intensive workshop with multilingual Boricua poet and essayist María Luisa, writers will venture into their memories and experiences, not as excavators but rather as intuitive conduits. Timed automatic writing, free associative writing, and other creative exercises will enable participants at any stage in their writing to find new ways to enrich the expressive power of their voice, rediscover the joy of language, and shape their personal memories into artful poetic forms. Writers will generate a series of memoir poems or one long memoir poem for sharing and respectful, fruitful feedback. Open to writers working in all genres; no previous experience with writing poetry is required. **Any number of writers allowed

Charles Coe 
"Effective Metaphors, Strong Images: Why The Work and How to Create Them" (offered second half)

An interactive craft workshop, with exercises and prompts, focusing on how to create and use striking metaphors and indelible images that will take your writing to the next level (for prose writers and poets alike). Learn techniques to transform "competent" writing into writing that jumps off the page with vitality. Students will generate new work and also have the opportunity to bring in poems and short essays for feedback and revising. **Any number of writers welcome.

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Please visit the MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing program page to learn about the faculty, program options, and more.