CREATIVE WRITING 101
Have you been wanting to try your hand at writing? Have you been meaning to read more but struggling to find the time? You might enjoy Creative Writing 101. Think of it as a monthlong reading-and-writing club.
Experience: Suitable for writers of all levels. No application is required, but a deposit is due two weeks before class starts.
Meets weekly over Zoom for two hours.
Reading for craft: Each week you’ll read 1-2 published works of short fiction. I’ll teach you my personal techniques for reading for craft — reading “like a writer.” This should prepare you to develop your own writerly reading life. It will also help you prepare a sample if you wish to apply for the Workshop.
Writing: Each week, during class, I’ll give you a writing prompt, and we’ll write together for about an hour over Zoom. I’ll also give you ideas for how to continue that prompt on your own time. You’ll leave the class with the beginnings of several short stories.
Repeatability: You can take CW101 as many times as you like. I run different modules with different themes, so you can encounter new stories and new prompts with each module.
Pricing: $400 for four weeks.
Want to sign up? Scroll down to check the open courses.
CW101-A: Real and Unreal
Perhaps my most popular reading and writing class ever!
A man wakes up as a giant bug. A woman marries an ogre. A nose earns a promotion, landing a great government job. Eerie wallpaper comes to life. In fiction, anything can happen, including these seemingly “unreal” events. But what is reality? When we write fiction, how much should the material world constrain us? When does hewing to the everyday world—a world concerned with relationships, money, death—help us create richer fiction? When does departing from the strict rules of this world—adding vampires, zombies, ghosts, and metamorphoses; subtracting mortality, gender, time—make for a more textured, even more real literary experience?
In this class, we will consider some canonical and contemporary “unreal” writers, from Shirley Jackson and Julio Cortázar to Danielle Evans and Carmen Maria Machado, as well as writers who straddle the margins of the real and the unreal—the strange, the surreal, the absurd, and the real-yet-bizarre.
Dates: Stay tuned for dates in February of 2027!
Email banyanwritersworkshop AT gmail DOT com if you’d like to stay in the loop about this class. Dates to be confirmed in fall of 2026.
CW101-B: Close Encounters: How to Meet Your Characters
My personal favorite class to teach!
You brush by a stranger on train platform. You encounter an estranged cousin. A peculiar conversation with an acquaintance leaves you wondering. Literary fiction is fascinated by these fleeting moments: the slippery, difficult-to-categorize beats of daily life that serve as a window into the mysterious aspects of our psyches. Fiction may be the only art form that can immerse us in someone else’s most intimate reality, and immerse others in our own.
In this class, we will read fiction that takes as its subject the inner life. We’ll discuss what causes change in humans, and how to represent that on the page. We’ll ask questions about the unknowable parts of strangers and family members and we’ll locate the strange and uncanny within the familiar. Writers we will study may include James Baldwin, Raymond Carver, Miranda July, Tessa Hadley, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Akhil Sharma, and Anthony Veasna So.
Dates: Summer 2027 — stay tuned for more!