Current Class List

Excited about the Loft's upcoming Wordplay festival, but feeling a little overwhelmed by all the opportunities waiting for you? Don't sweat it—come spend the morning in this free information session with the festival's founding director Steph Opitz. She'll give you the lay of the land, help you navigate through all your choices, and explain all the different literary opportunities waiting for you over the weekend of May 11 and 12.

Constraints can open up our creativity and our subconscious in unexpected ways. Form allows us to play while being supported by shapes that have endured through ages of poets. Wednesday evening’s class (6:30-8:30 p.m.) will be spent exploring forms such as the Korean sijo and the Italian/English sonnet. During the Saturday class (1–4 p.m.) we will discuss time, space, action, and kinetics in poetry. Then we will workshop each other's work.

This class ushers the hesitant or rusty writer past stages of creative uncertainty. Participants are asked to take leaps of faith through workshop of existing poems and through generative writing exercises.

In this immersive, generative workshop, Dani Shapiro will lead students through a series of brief meditations and writing prompts designed to explore the intersection of memory and imagination.

This workshop will investigate what great literary beginnings prioritize; define that elusive certain-something to which all our openings seem to aspire; and explore the difference between what writers need to climb into their stories and what readers need to stay there.

The internationally-bestselling author of “Shotgun Lovesongs,” “The Hearts of Men,” and “Little Faith” will discuss the risks and rewards of rooting fiction in family and personal history.

We'll discuss the importance of verbs in our work because what a reader "sees" in a story’s movement, pacing, and plot, are determined by the verb choices the author makes.

In this generative workshop we’ll tackle this ethical and creative challenge, as well as the challenges of navigating other people’s memories (which may differ in important ways from our own), and how to overcome the fear many of us encounter when we commit to telling the truth.

Join novelist Lorna Landvik in a free-wheeling talk about writing novels — from inspiration, to excuse-making, to what works in getting the work done and what to do with the work when it is done.