Writing
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A Fiction Workshop: To Make it Memorable
Open to students ages 14–18
July 8–August 18
Three two-week sessions
Session I July 8-21
Course # YYWF Ø1-Ø2
Session II July 22–Aug. 4
Course # YYWF Ø3-Ø4
Session III Aug. 5–18
Course # YYWF Ø5-Ø6
Culmination: Student Reading
Saturday, July 21, 10 a.m.
Saturday, August 4, 10 a.m.
Saturday, August 18, 10 a.m.
This summer’s intensive fiction workshop will focus on expanding students’ awareness of their craft as storytellers. “To make it memorable” is both the goal of each narrator in a story and the yearning of the writer who chooses the words. This workshop is for young writers who savor the creative use of language and have an insatiable desire to learn more about how to make their stories convincing. Each student is expected to write or substantially revise stories or chapters of longer projects throughout the course of the workshop. In signing up for this workshop, each student acknowledges that she or he is capable of producing, on her or his own initiative, at least 500 words a day of writing.
Each two-week workshop will meet a minimum of four hours per day, Monday through Friday, with a shorter meeting on Saturday morning. Brief individual conferences with the instructor can be scheduled following the afternoon workshop. The annual culminating event of each workshop is the Saturday morning reading at the end of the second week, at which students will read a portion of their projects.
Morning and afternoon classes will include sustained discussion of the writing the students have produced during their writing periods. The tone of this discussion will always grow out of a respect for the effort required to produce well-written imaginative stories. Students are encouraged, but not required, to bring with them ten to twelve pages of creative writing they have done at some point in their lives. The emphasis in this workshop, however, is on producing as many drafts of new work as possible.
This workshop will also include the opportunity to expand the range of one’s daily reading, which is an essential part of the development of any writer’s capacity to grow as an artist. The instructor will recommend books far beyond the usual citations of writers such as Melville, Borges, Proulx, Stone, Flaubert, Wolf, Joyce, Zola and Hurston. The types of fiction explored in this intensive workshop will range from the popular genres to the kinds of stories rooted in classical as well as experimental approaches to literature. No matter which direction students end up taking as writers, this workshop will provide groundwork for the exploration of the reality of the imagination. Throughout the meetings, the instructor will interweave his knowledge of the methods by which a young writer turns the aspiration to become a writer into an actual career.
Tuition, room and board: $2750 per session
Enrollment limited to 10 students.
Bill Mohr
Lehua Taitano
Graphic Novel
Open to students ages 14–18
July 22-August 4
Course # YYWN Ø3-Ø4
Two-week session
Culmination: Student Reading
Saturday, August 4, 10 a.m.
From Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Maus to Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, graphic narratives and comics have a unique capacity to tell complex stories through the simple combination of rich visuals and text. They have become synonymous with bold, innovative storytelling far beyond the superhero genre to encompass memoir/autobiographical work, historical fiction, journalism, and more.
This course offers a balance between the hands-on and the theoretical, and will begin with discussions of several key graphic novelists and their work, as well as an overview of this hybrid literary form. Students will then learn the necessary writing and artistic skills to turn their non-fiction story ideas into a realized graphic novel extract.
Welcoming both newcomers and those with experience, the course will examine each step of the creative process: scripting and narrative arcs; thumbnailing; pencilling; inking; scanning; and production using the adobe creative suite. The students’ work will then be collected into a graphic novel anthology complete with color cover, that they will be able to take with them in both hard copy and digital format.
Tuition, room and board: $2750
Enrollment limited to 10 students. Dan Archer
Poetry Workshop - One Train May Hide Another
Open to students ages 14–18
July 22-August 4
Course # YYWP Ø3-Ø4
Two-week session
Culmination: Student Reading
Saturday, August 4, 10 a.m.
“In a poem, one line may hide another line. As at a crossing, one train may hide another train,” wrote Kenneth Koch. Young poets already know that writing is a process of inspiration, passion, discovery, and understanding. This workshop, for beginning and advanced young writers, is a place to trade challenging new ideas about what poetry is and what it can be. We will discover new ways of looking at poetry, deepen our understanding of craft and technique, and dare each other to write to the height of our hearts and minds. The only prerequisite is a fascination with the written and spoken word, a love of language in all its strange and wonderful possibilities.
The goal of the workshop is to help each student discover his or her own poetic voice and sources of personal inspiration. Students will read and listen to a wide range of poetry contemporary and traditional from around the world. Students will produce at least one new poem per day, and in an informal workshop setting, receive intelligent feedback from the instructor and other students.At the end of the workshop, students should be able to perceive how to keep writing at a high level and find resources and opportunities for further development.
The class will meet five hours a day, six days a week. At the end of the two weeks, students will produce an anthology, and present a reading for the school community. Everyone should bring notebooks, writing instruments and a few books of poetry they have enjoyed. Participants will have access to the Idyllwild Arts computer lab, to prepare drafts of poems for class critique.
Tuition, room and board: $2750
Enrollment limited to 10 students.
Ed Skoog