Summer Writing Workshops

There is still time to register for a summer workshop at the Writers' Center! Details of our workshops, information on our instructors, and registration information can be found on our website, www.writerscenter.org. On the schedule are:

M. Doretta Cornell


Kate Gallagher


Charlotte Walsh

David Surface


Brenda Connor-Bey


Susan Hodara


Herbert Hadad


Natalie Safir


Amy Holman

Joanne Dobson

We're happy to have just added M. Doretta Cornell to our summer schedule with Panning for Gold. This 3 or 4 session (your choice) workshop is designed for poets at all levels who have a trove of poems and drafts and want to "mine" them for the gold within them. You will examine some early and late versions of published poems, explore various methods of re-imagining a poem to discover its latent possibilities, and—the main focus of the workshop—discuss the class's works in progress. Thursdays from 10 to noon, July 23 & 30; August 6 & 20.

Kate Gallagher and Charlotte Walsh will co-teach Creative Writing for Third, Fourth, and Fifth Graders every Tuesday and Thursday morning (10 - noon) through mid-August. Each day you take in the world around you—a fly perched on a leaf, the smell of spaghetti sauce bubbling on the stove, the sound of traffic rushing by on the street outside our window. How does one use these things to create stories and poems? This class will help stimulate students' senses, imagination, and emotions, and allow them to try out various writing techniques and share ideas in a comfortable atmosphere. Each class is a stand-alone session, so students can sign up for as few as four classes to accommodate busy schedules. (Note that some sessions will be taught by Kate Gallagher and others will be taught by Charlotte Walsh.)

David Surface offers a fiction double-header on Saturdays— Finding the Heart of Your Story from 10:30 until 12:30, and Seriously Scary Stories from 12:45 to 2:45.

"What's your story about?" Many writers hate that question because they think it reduces something big and complex to something small and simplistic. The truth is that when we can't get a story started or when we labor for months or years on dozens of drafts, it's often because we haven't found the simple human truth that the story is trying to tell. Fortunately, there are techniques we can use to cut through the fog and discover what your story is trying to be. In Finding the Heart of Your Story, look at how other writers have turned simple human truths into the driving engine for their stories, and try those techniques in a supportive and creative setting. (4 weeks with optional 2 week extension beginning July 11)

People have a powerful and undying desire to hear—and tell—scary stories. Unfortunately, many so called "horror" or "supernatural" stories rely on outworn cliches that have lost their bite. No wonder many "serious" writers are reluctant to admit their desire to dip into the dark side. In Seriously Scary Stories, you will examine the art of the scary story from a craft-based perspective, looking at works by classic masters of the genre such as M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood as well as contemporary practitioners like Douglas Clegg and Mark Morris who are bringing new ideas and new life to the genre. Writing exercises will open up the darker side of your imagination and get you started on your own "seriously scary" story. (6 weeks beginning July 11)

Brenda Connor-Bey's popular Learning To See™: Creative Writing For Teens Age 14+ moves to Wednesday afternoons for the summer. Sign up for either 3 or 4 of these stand-alone workshop sessions in which writers age 14 and up can refine their “writer’s eye” and find their own voices. Participants will be challenged to use their imaginations and every sense of their being to get beyond the surface of things and to put on paper the stories and ideas that come to them. They will also celebrate the sound of words and the images they create. Wednesdays in July, 2 to 4 pm (July 8, 15, 22, 29)

Susan Hodara joins our family of instructors with a 4-week Memoir Writing workshop (Tuesdays, July 14 to August 4) from 10:15 to 12:15. Are you compelled to write about the transforming events in your life? Do you want to record stories from your past? Are you haunted by vivid memories and drawn to explore the circumstances that surround them? Whether you are in the process of writing a memoir or just getting started, this workshop is a supportive environment where you will read your work aloud each week and receive constructive feedback. It also provides a structure to help you develop and maintain a regular writing practice. Writers of all levels, working on short pieces or book-length works, are welcome.

On four Wednesday evenings from 7 to 9 beginning July 15, Herbert Hadad will help you explore The Art of the Essay. More than any other kind of non-fiction writing, the essay offers the opportunity to express, in a short and conversational form, the whole range of thoughts and feelings, from intimacy and grief to joy and epiphany. This once-neglected form, now in renaissance, allows for the most satisfying and polished examination of ideas, beliefs, troubles and pleasures by writers beginning, renowned, and (like most of us) in between.

Natalie Safir offers a Writing as Healing workshop on four Fridays from 11 to 1 beginning July 17. Using her skills as poet, therapist, and certified life coach and sharing inspiration from the "healing" poets—Mary Oliver, Lucille Clifton, Rumi, Linda Pastan, etc.—Ms. Safir will lead you into writing exercises to free your emotions, find coherence and greater meaning. Finding language for our struggles becomes an active meditation that once shared, opens us to the comfort of others. In the words of Mary Oliver, "so this is how you swim inward/so this is how you flow outward." The free stream of writing becomes a digging instrument that helps to reconcile different aspect of our selves. Writers at all stages are welcome. Click here to read a recent article by Natalie in About Town.

On Monday August 3 from 10:30 to 3:30, Amy Holman will help you improve your odds of becoming a published writer with her Publishing Success workshop. Beginning and emerging authors will learn to analyze the editorial interests of publishers and match their own styles to print and online journals, magazines, and presses. Participants will consider all aspects of the writing business, including how to keep up with changes in the marketplace. Topics to be covered include copyright and contracts, cover and query letters, chapbooks, print and electronic formats, standard publishing practices, readings and performances, literary agents, grants, fellowships, conferences, colonies, book promotion, and standard business practices--and strategies for success.

Joanne Dobson's How to Write Page-Turning Fiction will begin a four-week summer session on July 16. We’ve all done it, stayed awake until three a.m. compulsively turning pages until we finish the book or our eyes betray us and we fall asleep. How do writers grab us like that and not let go? As writers ourselves we can learn from literary techniques of popular genres how to keep the story moving in a compelling fashion. Whether we write about the everyday dramas of ordinary life or the extreme situations of the detective novel or the pulse-pounding thriller, our work will benefit from consideration of how to develop compelling and sympathetic protagonists, disquieting antagonists, a unique voice, well-considered plots, conflict and tension. Our characters may or may not be seeking the Holy Grail, but everyday life with its quiet agonies and quiet satisfactions is equally sacred to the writer of intelligent fiction—and equally deserving of that special magic it takes to keep the reader turning “just one more page.” Thursday evenings from 7 to 9, July 16 - Aug. 6.

Those interested in reading at our November 13th, 2009 Slapering Hol Press Writers on War and Peace gathering at the Writers' Center (with featured poets D. Nurske and Frances Richey) may submit up to three samples of original poems or prose for consideration. Each piece should be no longer than two pages, double spaced as there is a three minute limit per reader at the event. Please include name, e-mail address and /or phone number at top of submission for notification of acceptance. Only those accepted will be notified. Send submissions to:

Submissions, Writers On War and Peace
The Hudson Valley Writers' Center
300 Riverside Drive
Sleepy Hollow, New York 10591

postmarked no later than September 1st 2009. No email submissions, please.