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, Gina Ochsner:

In this intensive, we will explore how stories ask difficult questions without too quickly providing stock and perhaps, stale, answers. What does it mean to be human in what may seem like inhumane times? How and where in a story do faith and doubt and hope challenge characters (and perhaps readers)? What techniques can we use to uncover the deeper questions our stories want to explore?  How can we reveal the inner lives, voices, and vision of our characters?

Through craft lectures, generative exercises, and workshop discussion, we will focus on deepening the interior landscape of our characters, developing and clarifying a unique voice, and vision for our characters and the story as a whole. We will explore how setting and imagery enliven the interior and even the exterior world of the characters. We will examine how manipulating point of view, the lens through which a story is apprehended, allows for mystery, irony, and increased tension in our work. We will contemplate how to ask difficult questions within our stories and our characters (and perhaps of ourselves?).

Together we will:

• Convey the interior landscape of a character into image and scene
• Create passages in which telling and showing work in tandem to render a developed character
• Build narrative spurred by conflict (whether large or small) that propels the story
• Write endings that “stick the landing” while at the same time allow/suggest a larger mystery at play

Participants will workshop their own fiction and receive thoughtful feedback in a supportive, rigorous cohort of writers.

Structure
The course includes:

• 8 live sessions (60-90 minutes each) over 8 weeks
• A mix of craft-focused classes and workshop discussions
• One personalized written critique (up to 3,000 words submitted)

Who Is This Workshop Best Suited For?
This intensive is designed for:

• Fiction writers at any stage who are engaging questions of meaning, belief, doubt, or moral complexity.
• Writers who want to deepen the emotional and interior life of their work.
• Writers interested in deepening their skill in craft and technique.