One Acts
Create a play you can take from the page to the stage.
It’s five minutes to curtain – are you ready? Work alongside a professional playwright to learn the essential tools of playwriting (like plot, action, character, and dialogue) to build a one act play from the ground up. Participate in acting exercises to experience the collaborative process that can make writing for theater feel like anything is possible.
Picture This
Write for the eye, with your soul as your guide.
Cave paintings. Hieroglyphics. Graffiti. Even before letters, we told stories through pictures. Explore the raw power of connecting words and images as you work to bring visual poems and stories alive with characters, plot, and a rich background. With excursions about town and graphic texts to draw from, discover how to produce collages, comics, illustrated poems, calligraphy, and stories meant for the eye.
Strange Lands
Build a (strange) new world in this sci-fi/fantasy fiction camp
Zombies, dragons, robots, oh my! Kick things off by working with other writers to build the rules for the fantastical realm of your dreams. With your teaching-writer/wizard guiding you about town, let your imagination boil and bubble as you create an original short story inspired by this strange land – all while learning the spells behind all good stories, like plot, dialogue, character, and setting.
Urban Ink
Pound the pavement and take your imagination downtown.
The city has its own heartbeat (or so the song goes). Can you find it? Using cityscapes, coffee shops, public art, and urban life as your map, find and write the pulse of an urban-influenced short story or poem – with characters spotted on street corners, plots born out of passing conversations, and the vibrant settings of alleys, parks, and mysterious buildings.
Writing for the Movies
Learn the tools to produce your own blockbuster screenplays.
Feel that force, flowing through you? That’s visual storytelling, the language of action and romance, drama and comedy, waiting for you to harness it. With popular movies and classic cinema as your director, learn how to develop characters, plot, action, and dialogue that turns a notion into an idea and an idea into a script.