Join the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop in Newport, Rhode Island for the opportunity to take these exciting classes taught by award-winning authors and editors. The 4-day retreat will allow participants to hone their craft and writing skills in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, screenwriting and playwriting.

Registration for the retreat ends on March 15, so apply while seats are still available.

Workshop on the Evocative Object
(with Diana Norma Szokolyai and Rita Banerjee)
Enjoy searching for and discovering evocative objects in your surroundings, and tell their stories through lyrical descriptions that will thrill the reader.

Literary Taboo (with Rita Banerjee)
Learn to play a literary game that will keep you on your wordsmithing toes. You will have to think of new ways to write about subjects, while avoiding clichés!

Your Voice: Bringing your Page to Performance (with Diana Norma Szokolyai)
Whether preparing for a literary reading or recording your poetry with musicians, it is important to develop your own voice because it is the vehicle for your words. In these sessions, you will connect with your inner voice to bring it outward, learning how to better create a bond between you and your audience.

Developing Your Manuscript for Publication (with Kathleen Spivack)
All genres, all levels welcome
Please choose only one project to work with, and bring all necessary materials. Plan to dedicate yourself fully to your writing project during the retreat. This course will look at beginnings, transitions, and choices of endings. We’ll discuss the many publication options, but if your manuscript isn’t ready for that yet, don’t worry. My goal is to help each of you shape your manuscript to the best of your ability. The classes offer encouragement, support and yes, the gentlest of pushes. We’ll work with the positive energy of the group to support you in your writing goals.

Weirding the World (with Stephen Aubrey)
“My mind affects my reality.” -Farad’n Corrino (in Frank Herbert’s Dune)
The script is not a flat work of literature, not a description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space. Language is only one part of this world. The rest is space. And before we populate this space, we must create it.

Theater of the Impossible (with Stephen Aubrey)
From “Exit, pursued by a bear” to today, part of the joy of live performance has been in watching the difficult, the unlikely and the unstageable become staged. Instead of thinking of a play or script as a blueprint for a realist performance, this class encourages you to think of it as a challenge for potential collaborators. A problem to be solved instead of a recipe to be followed. In this class, we will explore the tension between imagination and execution in order to answer one of the central questions of playwriting: how do we create spectacle and what’s the purpose in doing so anyway?

Against Aristotle: New Structures for New Stories (with Stephen Aubrey)
For over two millennia, Aristotelian structure has dominated the Western sense of story. Protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe. Over and over. The same structures breeding the same stories. In this class, we’ll first look at what makes Aristotle’s ideas so seductive before investigating alternative ways of imagining and telling story. From collage/assembly to circular structure to devising, we’ll study new forms of a very old practice.