What happens when our stories and poems are written to someone rather than being about something?

In this six-week class, we’ll explore how borrowed forms such as letters, prayers, and confessions, can open new emotional pathways for writers. Through structured address (whether to a person, place, object, or idea), you’ll discover how having a persona narrator address someone or something creates intimacy, vulnerability, and resonance.

Each week introduces a new variation of address and a different way to have your narrator approach emotion on the page. Your narrator might write to someone real or imagined, to a version of yourself, or to something that can’t answer back.

By experimenting with these forms, you’ll learn how intention and structure shape what your narrator reveals, and how voice can balance emotional honesty with craft. In other words, you’ll practice writing that feels emotionally true while using form and technique to give that emotion shape, distance, and power.

This online class meets weekly via Google Meet on Wednesdays from 6 to 8 p.m. Eastern. All the readings and exercises will be provided in the online classroom. Students post their work in the online classroom the day before the live session, however, all feedback is provided during the weekly Google Meet session.

All writers are welcome, whether you work in poetry, prose, or hybrid forms. Sessions are not recorded. This class is open to new and returning Writers Studio students.

Instructor

Writers Studio Teacher

Kaecey McCormick

Kaecey McCormick is a poet and fiction writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work appears in literary journals such as Poet Lore, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch Journal, Clockhouse, On the Seawall, The Heartland Review, Poetry South, Jabberwock Review, Pedestal Magazine, and Sky Island Journal. She is the author of Sleeping with Demons (2023) and Pixelated Tears (2018), and served as Poet Laureate for the city of Cupertino, California. Her writing has received numerous honors, including the Connecticut Poetry Prize, the Dare to Dream Poetry Prize, and multiple awards in the Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize, as well as nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has enjoyed support from the Community of Writers and the Good Hart Artist Residency. When she’s not writing or teaching, she spends her time hiking, painting, and reading.

"Every week, I presented a new story. Finally something did click, the very thing that’s their specialty at The Writers Studio, emotional content. Before, my work was dead. When I brought in my breakthrough story, I felt I was carrying a weird animal in my bag. It was the first story I sold."

Jennifer Egan, former Writers Studio student, Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

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