"What a week to be treasured! I keep telling people it feels like I crammed a year's worth of graduate school in a week in the Dordogne. In a castle. In the most beautiful month of the year." Lucy Price

8:00 to 10:30 Dailly classes with ones core instructors.Core Instructors for the first session are: Fiction/Dan Chaon or Russell Celyn Jones; Non-fiction/Sheila Schwartz or Anne LeClaire; Screenwriting/ Joseph McBride or Lisa Rosenberg. Second session: Fiction/Colum McCann, Jane Hamilton or Gail Tsukiyama; Poetry or Memoir/Hettie Jones; Playwriting and writing dialogue/Fidelis Morgan. Session three: Fiction/Chris Abani and Chuck Wachtel; Non-fiction/Anne LeClaire; Playwriting and writing dialogue/actress & writer Fidelis Morgan along with other actors who will read scripts and assist writers on how to read their work; Screenwriting/Joseph McBride.

10:45 to 12:30: Four days a week, students will have a craft workshop with four alternating instructors. They'll cover specific problems such as: Point of View, Structure and Plot, Dialogue and other related topics. During this block of time, three days a week students will use this time for writing and personal conferences with your core instructor. Our alternating instructors for the 1st session are: Anna Campion, Alan Lightman, actress Fidelis Morgan, Michael Ondaatje, Rebecca Swift, Peter Walker. Second session: Amy Bloom, Billy Collins, Agnes DeSarthe, Nicholas Evans, Sophie Powell. Third Session: Margaret Drabble, Harrison and Herb Solow, actor Clive Swift and others to be announced soon.

Our craft workshops will be devoted to addressing particular issues of the writing process, which may include anything from the discipline of maintaining a writing routine to questions of character development, language, or settings. Every participant in the writing workshop will have at least one private 20 minute session with their core instructor over the course of the week, as well as having his or her work examined and discussed within the group.

General description

In our workshops we will focus intensely on the writing process and the craft of fiction. Working with participants' writing, their weaknesses as well as their strengths, we will explore the nuances of building a story and creating vivid characters. We aim to create a nurturing, kind and open environment, yet work to high standards in order to help each writer achieve his or her intentions on the page. We will also encourage participants to experience the lush and inspiring natural surroundings, by combining excursions with writing exercises that encourage participants to dig deeper into their creativity, to look at the world around us in a new way and to express what we see in our own unique voice. We will have an opportunity to generate new material and share what we create and receive constructive group feedback. During the week we will also explore the craft of fiction through a more intense look at literature. You can expect a supportive environment as well as one that challenges you to explore your creative capabilities and to reach to new sources of inspiration and ways of thinking about fiction.

Structure

Workshops will be structured on a two tier system. The First Tier, is for Writers of all levels. Instructors will assist students by helping them dig deeper into their creativity and to improve their quality of writing. The Second Tier, is designed for more advanced writers. To be accepted into this Second Tier Workshop, you must first send us a sample of your writing or manuscript; afterwards, a determination will be made on your placement. Papers or manuscripts must be at least 5,000 words.

Writers participating in the daily creative writing workshop will be asked to send work they intend to workshop 60 days before class begins. This should be a prose work of no more than 30 pages – a short story perhaps, or a chapter from a novel. To insure that each piece of writing receives concentrated attention, there will be no more than 14 writers in the group. Each piece of writing will be read by all participants, with the aim of providing constructive, critical feedback and engaging in supportive dialogue with its author. Models drawn from literature and guided practice exercises that will enable writers to develop the particular strengths of their writing and to identify and correct their weaknesses. There will be ample time outside of the daily workshop for writing and revision.

Lisa Rosenberg, SCREENWRITING
	The workshop, taught by 2 instructors in the mornings with guest lecturers in the evenings, will be divided into two levels, determined by initial submissions. Both levels of workshop will include lecture, brief film clips and discussions, daily writing workshops, critiques, and both a one-on-one instructor conference and a final evaluation from one of the instructors.

Suggested texts: Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, edited by Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2001 The Story Behind the Story: 26 Contemporary Writers and How They Work, edited by Andrea Barret and Peter Turchi, introduction by Richard Russo, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2004.

Level 1

This workshop would be for beginning screenwriters, from those who have never tried writing in this form to those who’ve taken a beginning course but haven’t written a script. Following registration for the workshop, I would assign purchase of a basic screenwriting book (Making a Good Script Great, 2nd Edition, by Linda Seger), ask that participants read the chapter on gathering ideas, and then prepare and send me the following by mid-May at the latest:

• A story idea they’d like to pursue as a screenplay • Character sketches of 1-3 key characters • A 1-3 page outline of the plot

I would prepare written evaluations of these submissions to give to the participants on their first day at the workshop, including suggestions for fleshing out their ideas, characters, and plot outlines, and ideas about dealing with challenges I foresee in their proposed projects.

The overall workshop goal would be to have participants accrue a group of scenes by the end of the week that would each address a challenge typical to screenwriting – such as creating meaningful dialogue redolent with subtext or upsetting audience expectations with a surprise twist.

Level II

This workshop would be designed for writers who have completed the first draft of a screenplay. Writers should have completed at least 1 screenwriting course (or request consent of the instructor), and have a complete draft of a screenplay ready to submit for pre-evaluation by mid-April 2005. The screenplay would not have to be of any particular quality, but just completion would allow us to teach the course at a higher level.

Again, writers would receive an evaluation of their work to date on their first day at the workshop, including strengths, challenges, and targeted areas to work on during the workshop. The subsequent days would focus on brief lectures intended to push the level of craft to a higher level, intermittent film clip examples, but a longer period devoted to writing exercises and critique sessions. The writing exercises would also be designed to push the level of craft – for example, one exercise might be to take an important, dialogue-heavy scene and recreate it as a more visual scene. Mid-way through the week, these writers would also receive one-on-one consultation sessions with an instructor. Within two weeks following the last day of the workshop, they would also receive a follow-up evaluation of their progress and suggestions for proceeding with their work.

Chuck Wachtel
	Class and workshop descriptions: Fiction: Keeping Yes and No Unsplit:

In difficult and transitional historical moments, such as the one we live in, the first purpose of nearly all public discourse seems to be persuasion. Language, as it is read and heard, bounces back and forth between the polar extremes of meaning -- Yes and No – and the words we speak, and write, feel drawn toward the seemingly provable certainties of empiricism, while the language of the imagination -- its reflection of the sensations of life that resist being contained in easily communicable forms of meaning -- can thin out to a barely audible whisper. Thus (I paraphrase Lionel Trilling), The human fact can remain hidden within the veil of circumstances.

In his poem “Speak, You Also,” the German-language poet, Paul Celan, writing in post-WWII Europe, asks us all to challenge the language we write in: Speak - But keep yes and no unsplit.

The overall goal of this workshop would be to have writers work on and rework important but challenging scenes and sequences in their screenplays, which would ideally give them new ideas, insights, and skills that they would be able to use when the workshop ends to address other problem areas of their work.

Not-Knowing, by Donald Barthelme, Edited by Kim Herzinger, Random House, New York, 1997. Burning Down the House, Essays on Fiction, Charles Baxter, Graywolf Press, St. Paul, 1997. The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera, Perennial, Harper Collins, New York, 1988

This is an issue that affects writers in all narrative forms, and especially writers of fiction. This class will be an informal discussion into ways our work -- the voices we use, the structures within which they speak -- can best represent our thoughts and dreams, our perceptions and subjective response to the world around us.

Discussion can from this class can also carry over into workshop disussion of student manuscripts, and conferences with individual students.

Hand-outs, including excerpts from Isaac Babel, Leslie Marmon Silko, Julio Cortazar, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley and others (with more work than needed for class, but to take away, to help continue the process) will be provided.

For Screenplay/Adaption class/workshop: Screenplays are often adapted from other forms of narrative: fiction, all forms of non-fictive discourse, plays written for the stage, and existing films themselves. In return, screenplays and film itself have also, increasingly, had their effect on other writing forms as well. Fiction writers have written novels and stories as screenplays to be read. Even poets have made wonderful use of the form. A workshop and discussion will base itself on the process of adaptation, investigating how the shape can effect content, and understanding the actual substance of the things we write as they make the journey between forms. Hand-outs will be provided. People writing in all forms, but with an interest in writing for film, are welcome.