Each week you will write one mini-memoir, between 250–750 words. Each week, you’ll submit your writing for constructive feedback from both me and your peers, while offering supportive critiques to four or five classmates in return. We’ll also focus on how experimenting with language, structure, and imagery can help develop your memoir. To inspire and study technique, I will provide some short examples from writers such as Jane Wodening, Fielding Dawson, Jayne Ann Phillips, Grace Paley, Maggie Nelson and others.

Discussions and critiques will take place in a text-based format on the course website, with one optional Zoom meetup to connect in real time. This course is designed for experienced writers who feel confident in their creative process and would like to refine their work. Supportive, detailed feedback will focus on each draft’s potential, offering commentary and editing suggestions to help you revise and improve your writing.

Who This Course is For

This course is for experienced writers who want to explore memoir through flash and poetic prose. It’s an ideal course for those looking to learn more about poetry in prose while exploring the possibilities in one’s own life story through supportive feedback and thoughtful revision.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

• Learn how to be more particular with your writing.
• Use writing to understand your life story.
• Gain more confidence with your literary writing skills.
• Become more aware of how readers interpret your writing.
• Become more attentive to style, form, and rhythm in sentences and/or lines.

Writing Goals

• Write a series of eight vignettes or prose poems while advancing a narrative.
• Gain clear direction on what you want to do next with your memoir project. 

Weekly Syllabus

Pre-Course Optional Pre-Writing Assignment:

Consider preparing for the class by making a list of turning points in your life, moments that changed the direction of your life, even in minor ways. Imagine a photograph for each turning point and write a few sentences about each photograph. Keep refining this list throughout the class.

Click the Enroll Now button below, enter your details on the Checkout page,
and reserve your spot in the course.

$640.00 Original price was: $640.00.$545.00Current price is: $545.00.Enroll Now

The post Writing Poetic Memoir: Flash or Prose Poems appeared first on Writers.com.

What a fruitful course! Barbara is an exceptional teacher, and exceptional writers are drawn to her.
—Melissa Airas

Weekly Syllabus

Why Take a Journaling Course with Writers.com?

• We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
• Small groups keep our online writing courses lively and intimate.
• Work through your weekly lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
• Share and discuss your work with fellow writers in a supportive course environment.
• Award-winning instructor Barbara Henning will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

The post The Chronology of Mind: From Journal to Poem or Prose appeared first on Writers.com.

Writing the prose poem for writers of fiction, poetry, essays, and memoir.

Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical, without rhyme and without rhythm, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the prickings of consciousness? Baudelaire (Paris Spleen)

The prose poem is a border genre that is particularly suited to tracing/speaking consciousness, the consciousness that the reader and writer encounter and join line by line, paragraph by paragraph, naturally lyrical and easily available as ordinary/extraordinary thought and speech. We will also be looking at language as verbal material to be shaped, a paragraph as a block or a visual space. Besides inviting you to experiment by writing prose poems, this course is also designed to survey some of the theories and poems from movements in modern and contemporary off-center poetry, such as imagism, surrealism, objectivism, the New York School, Language writing, Oulipo, etc. Students will write poems and stories in prose that evolve out of the readings and assignments provided by Barbara. The teacher and students will respond to student writing with positive and constructive suggestions for revision.

If you are a poet, working with sentences and paragraph might change your idea about what a poem is, revealing new possible rhythms, forms, approaches and genre sliding. If you are a fiction writer, working with the prose poem may help you work on style and inventive structures for writing.
Please note that this course can seem like a graduate-level course (if students are inclined that way), involving reading and theory; however, if you are interested only in the workshop part of the course, it is fine to only read the lectures, assignments and participate in the workshop. Many published writers take this class, but beginners are also welcome.

The course has exceeded my expectations. Fantastic lessons and feedback. I would highly recommend to writers of all genres!
—Heather Grant

Poetic Prose: The Prose Poem Course Syllabus

Unit 1: Imagism.

We will read and discuss a short text about Ezra Pound’s Imagism, classical ideas about writing with precision and directness (“luminous details”), as well as William Carlos Williams’ call for writing that focuses on concrete particulars (“no ideas but in things”), especially things from one’s locality. Pre-writing and discussion.

Unit 2: Definitions & Continuations.

We will read and discuss some definitions of the prose poem. There will be a prose poem/short story assignment that privileges images and things, coming from a place you know very well. Class critiques of each other’s work.

Unit 3: Dreams & Improvisations.

We will explore some surreal approaches for writing. There will also be a selection of prose poems to read by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Jacobs and improvisations by William Carlos Williams. One of the assignments will be to write a short prose account of a dream, daydream or improvisation following the mind as it wanders.

Unit 4: Epiphanies.

We will continue working with images and writing that traces consciousness. We will read some epiphanies written by James Joyce, and the assignment will focus on writing short prose epiphanies.

Unit 5: Steinian Portrait.

Gertrude Stein has been a major influence on many modernist and contemporary writers. We will read Stein’s portrait of Picasso, as well as Laura Riding’s Mademoiselle Comet. The assignment will be to write a prose portrait beginning with one theme or motif and then playing with repetition and accumulation.

Unit 6: The Cubists

…broke apart traditional literary ways of experiencing time and space. As a way of calling sequential ordering into question, they worked with collage methods, as well as unusual punctuation and fractured syntax. One of the possible assignments will be to write a prose poem, then find another text that has a slanted relationship to the subject in the prose poem, cut up both texts and then collage them together.

Unit 7: The Objectivist Poets.

We’ll read about the objectivist poets and their ideas about historic and contemporary particulars, an extension of Williams’ manifesto about “no idea but in things.” Perhaps we will work with collecting and assembling material, perhaps the fragments of one particular day (or hour).

Unit 8: Projective Verse & the Beats.

If the line is related to be the breath, how can we translate projectivism into written prose? We’ll read a few poems by Allen Ginsberg and parts of Charles Olson’s essay and then we’ll write prose poems that use space in unusual ways, reflecting the expressive nature of the individual writer, the relation of sound to body to paragraph. We’ll also read an essay and some poems by Robert Bly whose ideas were “contrary” to Olson’s.

Unit 9: The New York School.

We’ll read a short essay and poems by New York School writers, first and second generation. One of the assignments will be to write a lunch hour poem in prose.

Unit 10: NY School & Oulipo.

We’ll continue reading, thinking and writing in the New York School way, expanding experimentation through an Oulipo type constraints. One of the possible assignments will be to write prose poems as fourteen sentence sonnets. We’ll read a transcript of sonnet workshop by Ted Berrigan.

Assignments to Go:

At the end of the class, I will give you one extra lecture on language writing with an assignment and an anthology of prose poems with process notes and assignments that I collected from 28 contemporary poets.

Bonus Zoom Call

During the course, I am offering an optional Zoom call to build a more proactive writing community. I’ll provide additional details in the course itself.

Why Take a Prose Poetry Writing Course with Writers.com?

• We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
• Small groups keep our online writing courses lively and intimate.
• Work through your weekly lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
• Share and discuss your work with fellow writers in a supportive course environment.
• Award-winning instructor Barbara Henning will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

The post Poetic Prose: The Prose Poem appeared first on Writers.com.

Learn how to write short-short stories in this flash fiction writing course.

In the first volume of Sudden Fiction, the editor Robert Shapard writes, “It may well be that the new popularity of the short-short story began in the spirit of experiment and wordplay in the 1960’s.” In this class, students will approach writing flash fiction as an opportunity to experiment with approach, form, structure and style.

Attention to style and structure is very important to the writer of tiny fictions, just as it is important to poets. That’s why this genre is often described as a borderline genre, in between poetry and prose. With that in mind, some of our assignments may begin with a form typically used in poetry, but instead of the line, we will be working with the sentence and the paragraph.

Under the guidance of Barbara Henning, students can craft eight new flash fictions during this course or choose instead to work on writing less and revising more. Each week, Barbara will post a lecture and an assignment, and she will respond to your submissions, giving you critical and supportive feedback. Her objective is to introduce students to new approaches for writing and to encourage a supportive community of writers.

Please note that this course can seem like a graduate-level course (if students are inclined that way), involving theory and extra content to delve deeper. However, if you are interested only in the workshop part of the course, it is fine to skip the optional readings.

Many published writers take this class, but beginners are also welcome.

Super, as always. Barbara’s course materials are generous, plentiful, well researched, inspiring.
—Sophie Cayeux

Writing Flash Fiction: Course Syllabus

Week One: Introduction: An Overview of the Class

Discussion of some elements in fiction with excerpts from critics on fiction, as well as Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and a chapter from Ann Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Informal journal writing and/or discussion for the first week.

Week Two: Haiku in Prose

Discussion of haiku and the importance of images and detail in fiction. Read examples of haiku by Kerouac, Richard Wright, Basho and Issa. Write a short travel narrative with at least three or more haiku embedded. Read prose example from other writers.com students. Class critiques of each other’s work (to continue every week).

Week Three: The Storyteller and Auto Flash Fiction

Discuss Sherwood Anderson and the storytelling voice and how to use autobiography to inspire flash fiction. Reading stories by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Anthony Tognazzini, Lydia Davis, Grace Paley and Terrance Winch. Assignment: Write an auto-flash fiction using material from your journal.

Week Four: Camera Eye

Read selections from Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. Discussion of the new novel project. Three possible assignments: Writing flash fiction using camera eye point of view.

Week Five: Vertical Fields & The Long Sentence

Read a flash fiction by Fielding Dawson and passages from Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis, Roberto Bolano and James Joyce. Write a flash using long sentences.

Week Six: Sestinas-in-Prose and Dream Stories

Read sestina inspired stories by Harry Mathews, Lynn Crawford and Barbara Henning. Also read dream stories by Gisele Prassinos, Richard Brautigan and Lydia Davis. Assignment options: Sestina-in-Prose or dream story.

Week Seven: A Text Inside a Text/ Retell a Myth

Read stories by Julio Cortazar, Dale Herd and Georges Perec, as well as myth based stories by Franz Kafka, Steve Katz and Charles Baxter. Assignment options: Text-in-Text or Retell a myth.

Week Eight: One Liners and List as Story or List in Story

Read list stories by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lewis Warsh, Steve Katz, Cathyrn Alpert, Jamaica Kincaid and Eugenio Montale. Assignment options: Life story in a flash, List story.

Bonus Zoom Call

During the course, I am offering an optional Zoom call to build a more proactive writing community. I’ll provide additional details in the course itself.

Why Take a Flash Fiction Course with Writers.com?

• We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
• Small groups keep our online writing classes lively and intimate.
• Work through your weekly written lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
• Share and discuss your work with classmates in a supportive class environment.
• Award-winning instructor Barbara Henning will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

The post Flash Fiction: Writing the Short-Short Story appeared first on Writers.com.

Each week there will be a list of assignments to select from; topics evolve out of the class readings. In the first two weeks of the course, we will examine ideas about point of view as well as grounding fiction writing in attention to particular details. The next four weeks we will focus on First person (memoir, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, detached autobiography). Readings will be drawn from flash fiction by writers, such as Joyce Carol Oates, Katherine Ann Porter, Bruce Holland Rogers, Ron Carlson, Edwidge Danticat, Manuel Munoz, Kenneth Patchen, Lydia Davis, Carolyn Forché, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Grace Paley, Carson McCuller.

The last three weeks of the course, we will focus on third person (objective narration, 3rd person subjective singular narration, omniscient narration). Readings will be drawn from flash fiction by writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, Alain Robbe Grillet, Lydia Davis, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Michael Delp, Ismail Kadare, Jayne Anne Phillips, Touré, Josefina Estrada, Grace Paley, Jim Heyens, Jane Wodening.

In every work of prose and poetry, there is a narrator, a speaker. When this narrator announces herself as present and as part of the story, then we say it is written in the first person. When the narrator hides his or her presence throughout the work and instead focuses on a character, a setting or an action, then we call that 3rd person point of view. When beginning to write a story, point of view is one of the central decisions a writer makes. It can make or break a story. With every decision we make regarding point of view or verb tense, we increase or lessen the distance between the narrator and the subject (space, time and mentality). To become a skillful writer of stories, it is important to practice writing from multiple points of view.

In this eight-week class, you will explore some of the variations in first and third person points of view. Barbara will provide assignments, lectures and pdfs of the stories and some optional articles. Please note: Many published writers take Barbara’s classes, but beginners are also welcome.

Barbara is a five-star teacher. Always available, always engaged with each individual participant, always encouraging.
—Sophie Cayeux

The Watching Eye/Thinking Mind: Course Outline

Week One:  Introduction to the course.

Topic: Haiku as tiny stories (Walking and Writing, part one).

 Week Two:  Haiku-to-Prose

Topic: Walking and Writing, part two.

Week Three:  Introduction to Variations of First Person

Topic:Interior, Dramatic and Streaming Monologues.

Week Four: Detached Autobiography

Topic: I Was There, I Was a Witness.

Week Five: Memoir #1

Topic: I Remember.

Week Six:  Introduction to Variations of Third person

Topic: Objective Narrator/Camera Eye: Seeing & Listening.

Week Seven: Singular Subjective

Topic: To Shadow Another.

Week Eight: Omniscient Narrator

Topic: All Knowing.

Bonus Zoom Call

During the course, I am offering an optional Zoom call to build a more proactive writing community. I’ll provide additional details in the course itself.

Why Take a Flash Fiction Writing Course with Writers.com?

• We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
• Small groups keep our online writing classes lively and intimate.
• Work through your weekly written lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
• Share and discuss your work with classmates in a supportive class environment.
• Award-winning instructor Barbara Henning will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

Click the Enroll Now button below, enter your details on the Checkout page,
and reserve your spot in the course.

$640.00 Original price was: $640.00.$545.00Current price is: $545.00.Enroll Now

The post The Watching Eye/Thinking Mind: Writing Flash Fiction appeared first on Writers.com.