We are pleased to announce our latest 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.

Why do we feel compelled to read and write reinventions of stories from Torah, the Bible, folktales, myths, and other central sacred and secular texts? How does our current moment affect the way we understand and (re)write these stories? How do we navigate the tensions between sacred and worldly, craft and free invention, writing for ourselves and writing for readers? Together, we will find inspiration from a variety of traditions and selections from contemporary fiction. We will combine craft study with processes for freeing our writing as we explore our complex relationships with the holy, the numinous, and the unknowable.

Week One | Lineages: How do we retell, reinvent, and allow ourselves to be inspired by the stories of our own traditions? How do we free ourselves from old ideas and archetypes in re-addressing what’s most familiar to us?

Week Two | Voyages: How do we ethically and respectfully interact with the stories and ideas of other traditions? How can we learn to read and write across all kinds of differences?

Week Three | Our Own Lives: How do the great stories intertwine with our own? Where and how do we incorporate elements from our lives or the histories of those we know? How do we decide what we want to share, with those we’re writing about and with the world?

Week Four | The More than Human World: How might we write angels, demons, ghosts, animals, trees, golems, dybbuks, or any other beings from the more than human world, whether realistically or fantastically, as central or peripheral figures?

We will be exploring these ideas and reading and writing together in a small group setting, capped at 10 students, which will include:

• Eight sessions: two 90-minute Zoom sessions each week for four weeks, divided between discussion of in-class handouts, a range of processes and approaches, and prompts for imaginative writing that can be shared aloud with the class (Note: in-class time will be focused on discovery and generative writing—rather than workshopping previously written work.)
• A wide range of sacred and secular reading selections from diverse international voices
• Individual manuscript review (3,000 word maximum) with Sarah Stone

This workshop is for fiction writers of all levels, whether writing short stories, flash fiction, novels or hybrid forms, who wish to investigate how we can re-enter central stories, bringing our own experience and perspectives to the long conversation with history and the world’s imagination. 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.