Instructor: Anya Achtenberg
Length: 1 session, $320
Saturday, April 7th,  10:00 PM - 6:00 PM

During this transformative day, you will be introduced to a reframing of the craft of creative writing across the genres, whether poetic or narrative. You will be offered tools to expand and deepen your writing, and enhance its power and beauty, while you simultaneously find ways into fuller expression of your urgent concerns in this politically charged and challenging world. The political dimension of this work, putting the craft in context, helps each writer make sense of aspects of craft that are often confusing, obscured by being taught through arbitrary “rules” and “conventions” rather than the sense of the work’s deepest heart and intention.

All writers grapple with the thorniness and complexity of writing narrators and characters’ voices that can hold and move their stories. Writers of conscience and consciousness often grapple even more with issues of voice and narration; with how to write poems, stories and articles that hit at the truth of more than their own experience, and yet are ethical and respectful. We aim to get back to what has been buried, disappeared, excluded, whether in the present, in history, and also within ourselves; to express, to investigate, to story tell.

This powerful day will offer writers tools useful in exploring how to truly speak for ourselves. We’ll work with how the gift of the voices of others comes to us, and how to encourage those voices to work through us. We will find ways to write about what can be very difficult, or simply seems too large to express. We will work with the very thorny issues of narration, and begin to explore narration in relation to the “sense of place” of the narrator, including the placelessness of many narrators.

And we’ll use our work around these issues of voice and narration in writing of witness, central to the work of many conscious writers. 

The writing tools we will use at this Saturday intensive, include:

More on microscopic truthfulness and imaginative knowing, for fuel to push story forward;

Use of the engine of language and fuel of repetition to reach what haunts us;

Bringing forward some of the many voices within, for developing narrators and characters;

Multiple narrators and points of view;

Expansion of voice to include our “opposites”;

The “give me back” demand;

Porch stories and the narrator’s location;

Using humor;

Use of concentric circles to expand context; and

The wandering narrator, and the angel of narration.

Come and experience this opening of your writing process and creativity, and learn how it links to the political challenges we face in our desire for a better world. Bring these tools home, along with many new writing explorations you’ve either begun during the day or can later work on and develop. Each participant is welcome to share some of this writing and receive useful feedback in the community we make.

The workshop offers some of the material of my Creative Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World Workshop (the 1st part of a 3-part series).

For full descriptions of the Re-Dream a Just World Workshop Series, please see https://thedisobedientwriter.com/courses-and-workshops/writing-for-social-change-re-dream-a-just-world-workshops/

Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning writer whose publications include the novel, Blue Earth; novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl; and poetry collections, The Stone of Language, and I Know What the Small Girl Knew. Her work has received prizes and distinctions from, among others, Southern Poetry Review; Another Chicago Magazine; Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story; New Letters; and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Recent poetry and prose has been published in Tupelo Quarterly; Malpais Review; Gargoyle; Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; Hinchas de poesia, Poet Lore; Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art; and,in the anthology, How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse, an essay focused on mixed and out-of-category identity, in relation to the deconstruction and expansion of the instruction to “write from a sense of place”. History Artist, a novel Anya has almost completed,treats a mixed-race Cambodian woman living in Boston, born at the moment the U.S. bombing of Cambodia began, and the intersecting stories of those around her. Anya has just finished a poetry chapbook, Advice to Travelers. Her nonfiction work includes articles on creative writing, and creative nonfiction on Cuba. (She organizes arts-focused and multicultural journeys to Cuba.) Anya teaches creative writing workshops around the U.S., and online around the world; conducts intensive critique groups in-person and online; and consults with writers individually. For more information, see her new website under construction, www.thedisobedientwriter.com, or her previous website, www.anyaachtenberg.com, both including short articles on craft.

Writing Institute Registration Process:

Step 1 - Registration Information: Complete this registration form in full.

Step 2 - Payment: Once you click submit on this form, a new page will appear in your browser with a payment link. Click on the payment link, complete the required information, and submit your payment. 

Payment is required for your registration to be confirmed. If we don’t receive your payment within 48 hours of submission of this form, your registration will automatically be cancelled. You will have to complete the form again if you wish to register for the class.
Step 3 - Confirmation: Once we receive your payment, your registration will be finalized and confirmed with an email. Please keep this email for your records.  Details about room assignment, parking, and any other information relevant to the course will be emailed to registered students the week before classes begin.

If you have questions about the registration process, please call us at 914-395-2205 or email writinginstitute@sarahlawrence.edu.