WELCOME TO THE HVWC CALENDAR: home of all our upcoming readings, events and workshops. You can view by list or calendar (see right menu to choose). Click the colored tabs below to show only specific options. Our workshops run as multi-session series or one-day “intensives.” Note, we list the multi-session courses on the first day they meet only. The full dates of the session are described in the course descriptions. You would need to scroll back to the start date if you needed to enroll for something already underway. But do let us know if you want to join something in midstream since we need the blessing of the instructor. Questions? Email us.
Workshops – This category encompasses all one-day and multi-week classes, whether in person or via Zoom.
Readings – Our readings are in many different genres and take place in person, on Zoom, or both!
HVWC Recurring Events – This category encompasses such regular favorites as Open Mic, Open Write, and Submission Sunday.
Special Events – These other creative experiences are sure to interest our creative community!
This lecture will help poets discover their own poetic "family tree"--the poets who have and will make you the poet you are. We'll look at groups of poets to see what poetic influences we can trace through looking at several literary movements (Harlem Renaissance, Confessional poets of the 1960s, and Black Arts Movement Poets). How […]
“You own everything that happened to you.”—Anne Lamott This workshop will focus on writing your memories into poetry or prose with discussion, examples, and in-class writing prompts designed to help you mine the rich territory of your past. We’ll generate a lot of seeds for future work and look at some ways to structure your […]
This is a course designed for writers looking to create screenplays, stage plays, and teleplays for television shows. Paramount in this effort, we will focus on an approach which is necessary in all dramatic writing — the importance of conflict. How we define, pinpoint and create interesting, unusual characters. How structure is the backbone of […]
In this two-hour workshop, you will brainstorm, write, and receive verbal feedback on a brand-new lyric essay in the spirit of danger. How can a single sentence become an essay? How can we draw from the pulse of poetry to write nonfiction narrative? And in what ways can the lyric essay as a genre allow […]
Rainer Maria Rilke is probably the most widely-read German-language poet, and yet his poems present challenges to readers. This two-hour class will be a primer on how to approach his work generally. More specifically, we will look at The Duino Elegies, their framing devices, the themes of the work, and the strange, posthumous voice the […]
The generative constraint is a mainstay of poetry workshops and praxis. A ‘good’ constraint—one that works for you right now—is (paradoxically!) freeing. If a constraint feels like an itchy sweater, strip it off and toss it to someone else! In this generative workshop, we will briefly explore familiar generative constraints such as subject matter (write […]
This is a course designed for writers looking to create screenplays, stage plays, and teleplays for television shows. Paramount in this effort, we will focus on an approach which is necessary in all dramatic writing — the importance of conflict. How we define, pinpoint and create interesting, unusual characters. How structure is the backbone of […]
The ekphrastic poem—one provoked by or in response a work of art—is a form that holds rich interior and surface tensions, deriving energy from the friction between two mediums and modes of experience: the visual and the verbal. As such, it can be a vibrant site of experimentation and play, liminality and subversion. How does […]
Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz describes the act of the poet as a passionate pursuit of the real. Taking a close look at early as well as contemporary villanelles and pantoums, we will try to determine what separates the real from double-talk. Poems by Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Donald Justice, Rita Dove, Marilyn […]
Nearly 2,700 years ago, Sappho made songs of consuming desire; what remains of them thrills us today. Why are we drawn to other people’s love stories? How do amorous and erotic poems capture the specificity of a single relationship while also making our hearts sing? By close reading exemplary poems, we will explore strategies for […]