McMullan Writers Workshops Registration 2024 (High School Students)

We are excited to have several course offerings for MYWW 2024! We will fill courses on a rolling basis, so please indicate your course preferences in this section.

Mary Miller --  "Fiction in Brief Forms/Flash Fiction": Rita Dove said that poetry is "language at its most distilled and most powerful" and the same could be said of flash fiction. Each word in a piece of flash might be thought of as an ant, carrying ten times its weight. In this class, students will read and compose stories of fewer than 1,000 words with a focus on sensory detail, language that surprises, and emotional honesty. Assigned readings will include works by Garielle Lutz, Amy Hempel, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others. We will also discuss the roots of the form, which go back to prehistory, including fables and parables. By the end of the week, students will have at least two polished flash fictions, which we'll submit to one of the many online magazines dedicated to this flourishing genre. 

Shalanda Stanley -- “Hope, Despair & Memory: Making Connections in Reading and Writing through Works of Fiction”: In this course students will explore the concepts of hope, despair, and memory and how these ideas connect to their favorite works of fiction and in their own writing. Hope and despair are not mutually exclusive, but often coincide. How these emotions connect to our memory define our thinking, our perspectives, our living. All of this manifests in how we digest information and how this translates to our own writing. This course will focus on reading and writing as a transaction, a transfer of emotions. We will explore, through reading select works of fiction and in our own writing, how the concepts of hope and despair intertwine in our lived experiences and how those experiences impact our writing.

Richard Boada -- “Living Tensions: The City and Urban Environments”: In this workshop-style course, students will read, write, talk, and think about a diverse cross-section of 20th and 21st century poetic texts to and focus on the topic of The City and Urban Environments. In our course, we will read and write poems about cities where we have lived, places where we could never be from, cityscapes and landscapes, the movement of traffic or city rivers, or the crumbling foundations and infrastructure in order to understand who we are as poets and citizens. We will consider ways contemporary poetry takes place in what Jennifer DeVere Brody calls “an expanded field of writing” where language is embodied material that takes shape both on- and off- of the physical page. Throughout the course, we will continually attempt to re-define (or de-refine) what it means to read and to write within the context of how we understand our cities and urban spaces.

Jamie Dickson --  “How Metaphors Carry Us To Meaning": We all know what metaphors are, but this class will look under the hood and discuss the mechanics of how exactly individual and extended metaphors function. Students will look at samples of writing from Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Tim Gautreaux, and a host of others. Then, we’ll talk about how a well-placed metaphor can add spice to your own writing. Similes will be there too, tagging along like an adorable little sibling.  

Nadia Alexis -- "Inventing and Reinventing Myth, Folklore, and Fairytales: A Poetry Workshop": In this generative writing workshop, students will explore poetry that reinvents mythology, folklore, fairytales of the world, and poetry in which poets create their own mythologies. Engaging with a diverse array of poets and traditions, students will read, consider, and discuss how poets engage in mythmaking, retelling, and reimagining well-known and lesser-known global stories to create new narratives, pose new questions, draw connections to the present, and more. Students will also write their own folklore and mythology-inspired poetry using contemporary example texts, writing prompts, and class discussions as inspiration.

Catherine Gray -- "Brave Writing: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop": Bring your true stories of beginnings and endings, bodies and places, ancestry and dreamscapes. Bring yourself with your doubts, fears, obsessions, and love. In this course, we will write toward your most urgent questions to see what new vantage points emerge. How does writing creative nonfiction allow us to discover what is true about ourselves? Through reading mentor texts and playing with craft choices at the sentence and paragraph level, we will explore how life’s big or small events have altered the way you see the world and the people around you.