Sharing our stories of trauma and grief through the cathartic act of writing can bring healing, hope, and acceptance. This 6 week course will explore the five stages of trauma—victim, survivor, thriver, server, empowered server—and give individuals an opportunity to assess where they are in their journey. We will be given ample time to craft and share origin stories of trauma and/or grief and provide encouragement and feedback to one another for personal use or professional publication. Please note: This…

Fall workshop for those who have completed the Teen Writers Fellowship in 2019 or 2019 and 2020, and have not yet graduated from high school. Only Fellows who match these criteria are eligible for this workshop. Fellows will need to be signed into their Muse accounts in order to register. If you have issues with signing up please contact our Youth Coordinator Remy Smidt at rsmidt@the-muse.org. Please note: This class is an online class. To participate, students must have a…

For comic writers and artists looking to hone their works in progress, this workshop will emphasize critique and accountability. While retaining an element of lecture from How to Write Comics & Graphic Novels, we will delve deeper into each student's comic project of choice, with the goal of polishing and revising our work. Please note: This class is an online class. To participate, students must have a stable internet connection with a computer or device with a webcam and microphone.…

Creative writing is fun! And finding your voice doesn’t have to be hard work. It’s just a matter of letting your words and ideas flow onto the page without tinkering and re-tinkering your way into a creative cul-de-sac. In this class, you’ll write--in the moment--to cues and prompts and then share your work in a safe and positive environment. (You can always opt out.) You can write in whatever form inspires you, from prose (memoir, nonfiction, fiction) to poetry. Class…

We all have stories to tell, whether we’ve never written anything before, or we’re dusting off the old writing muscles and getting back in the game. This class is a foundational course to get started or begin writing fiction again. We will learn and explore all of the essential fundamentals of the craft of fiction writing. We will discover and begin to understand how to write an active scene, define a character, and move your story from A to B,…

English poet, David Whyte, describes self-compassion as a form of faith, a way in which to converse with the world, and as poets, we can only best perform this act with innocent eyes. In this class, we will attempt to do just that. We will grant ourselves permission to wonder again, to gaze at the world freshly, to recognize our innate curiosities as our own spiritual journeys and to return to those curiosities with sacred ferocity. And in turn, hopefully,…

Do you have an awesome idea for a piece of historical fiction, but it’s set in ancient Rome and your only knowledge of the period is based solely on the movie “Gladiator” or Monty Python’s “Life of Brian?” How about if you have a killer idea for a medieval story, but the brutality of “Braveheart” and “Game of Thrones” is all you can think of?  Maybe you want to set it more recent, like World War II; was the world…

In this workshop we will read love poems, poems of longing, poems about the love for one’s hometown and other objects of affection, and we will generate a series of prompts that we can use during and after the workshop to further reveal and develop our associative image-repertoires of desire. In the straight-talk of poetry craft, the image system is a set of images used throughout a poem or larger work that belong together in some way. Barthes’ image-repertoire, however,…

Writers share a lot with our artistic cousin, the actor: we strive to bring characters to life and transport our audiences with good stories. Unlike painters, who have paint, brushes, and canvas to aid in bringing their art into existence, or musicians who have their instruments, the actor and the writer have only themselves. They don’t play the instruments; they ARE the instruments. We will explore philosophies and exercises put forth by some of the most highly esteemed theatre professionals:…