We are pleased to announce another Image Intensive, an opportunity to dive deeper into your craft, guided by faculty from our community who understand the unique impulses and challenges facing artists at the intersection of art and faith.

From our facilitator, Mary Margaret Alvarado:

There is dignity in each person, and, somehow, in each place. How might we best attend to that, and write it, brilliantly, and strangely, with nothing saccharine, or cheap?

This class will encourage writers to take “a long, loving look at the real.” In this practice, the default subject is not the self, but the other, and the world. We will sidestep hot-takery and the equating of violence with narrative. We may have nothing to say at all, but by listening, and that long look, which is attending, we will have a great deal to write.

Writers will read variously—in long-form and literary journalism, in mixed-genre lyric reportage, in oral history, autobiography, and autofiction.

Students will have generative prompts (including a few from the visual arts), weekly readings, and workshops, and can expect to leave the course with a strong working or near-final draft of a narrative essay.

Our material will teach us what it demands. To be worthy of that material, we will practice using some of a writer’s many tools: ekphrasis, and form (obituary, for example), the interview, the nonfiction equivalent of third-person close and other points of view, syntax, scene, found text, fact checking, and the mot juste. If fiction demands an allegiance to the waking dream; and poetry, to the song; then nonfiction demands an allegiance to what is. We will give that allegiance, and honor it by learning to best choose, weigh, and place what we gather and find along the way.

In a small-group setting capped at 12 students, participants will experience:

• 90-minute sessions once a week over eight weeks.
• Each class will include warmups (the writerly equivalent of playing scales); a generative writing prompt, begun in class and continued throughout their week; close reading work; a main lesson; and reader responses whether in a full or partial workshop.
• In-depth feedback and editorial notes on one manuscript (up to 3000 words each).

This workshop is for nonfiction writers of all levels. If you are yearning for a compassionate writing community, seeking to learn more about yourself, hoping for a thorough review of your work, or wishing for a supportive place to grow in your craft, this workshop is for you.