The Writers Studio

Prerequisite: Completion of Level 3 or the Intermediate Workshop. Students may register for this class with the teacher’s permission.

This advanced workshop combines the full range of Level 4/5 techniques with the intimate, exploratory power of persona‑based journal writing. Designed for students ready to deepen their connection to their material, this class emphasizes creating and sustaining effective artistic distance while strengthening the writer’s relationship to the writing process and material.

Students in this workshop may focus on developing publishable stories, poems, memoirs, and novels and/or experimenting with persona journaling techniques to more fully investigate their material. To spur that investigation, we select an archived craft class at the start of the session for deeper-dive discussions and use in journal forms and literary masks. By adopting the crafted personas of writers such as John Cheever, Joan Didion, Édouard Louis, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and experimenting with material in the journal form, students gain access to emotional territories that may have felt unreachable in more conventional narrative modes.

This workshop is a place where the crafted voice can lead you toward the material you’ve been waiting to write.

Craft Class

At this level, all Level 4/5 students enroll in The Writers Studio Craft Class and continue to hone their skills of reading as writers. Students also may use techniques from Craft Class in their journal-writing exercises. The Craft Class reading list can be found here. Students can enroll in Craft Class Taken with a Workshop here.

Class Structure & Details

•Format: Weekly, unrecorded live classes via Zoom

•What to Expect: During the two-and a half-hour, weekly Zoom class, students share work aloud, receive critiques in real time, and discuss craft from the Craft Class for potential exercises.

•Who Can Join: Level 4/5 is only open to students who have completed at least three terms of Level 3 or Advanced and upon recommendation of the teacher.

📌 Note: Our Zoom sessions are highly interactive and designed to be a safe space for sharing fresh work, so they are not recorded.