Anthologies

When you daydream, does your pen run free? In The Shape of a Story, those in-the-moment doodles and random drawings can be the start of something epic. Here, your abstract blobs, kitty-unicorn-whale hybrids, and silly faces, go into a visual storytelling laboratory that we build together. We’ll transform accidental shapes into creatures, creatures into characters, characters into worlds, and worlds into absolutely original stories.

Writing and illustration don’t have to live in separate worlds! When we put them together, our creativity goes off the charts. Join us in The Shape of a Story and totally transform. So storytelling scientists, what will come out of your creative lab?

Do you have something you care way too much about? Or an unforgettable story you love telling people? A moment that went a little (or very) wrong? Maybe it’s how you got that scar on your shoulder, or a weird adventure that began when you got lost at a concert, or how you first fell in love with anime. This workshop is about turning those moments into personal essays that readers can’t put down.

Personal essays are rooted in real life — your obsessions, your accidents, your “why did I do that?” stories. In this workshop, we’ll learn how to take a real experience or passion and shape it into a compelling narrative with a clear voice, strong structure, and a clear sense of meaning. Essays can be funny, uncomfortable, emotional, or all three, but the goal is always the same: tell a true story that takes the reader somewhere and leaves them thinking.

We’re calling on the brave and bold for a writing adventure! This semester we’ll be writing stories that have multiple choices for the reader - different storylines lead them down alternative paths or to alternative endings. We’ll take inspiration from a few examples like Jason Shiga’s "Meanwhile" and Ryan North’s "To be or not to be", then we’ll build worlds of our own. We’ll dig into key writing techniques and learn some new approaches while we forge our own way – whether it be fiction or nonfiction, the choice is yours. Which way will your adventure go?