24PearlStreet Workshop List

This workshop will focus primarily on poetic form. We will explore not merely what these particular forms are but why, how and the often underdeveloped sense of when you may think to use them. This will involve our studying, in brief, the history of...More

What often keeps our competent poems from becoming captivating ones is a fear of failure, an instinctual aversion to risk. In this class, we’ll work at unlearning this impulse, priming ourselves to jump headlong into what we’ve previously side-...More

Everyone is terrified of the blank page. Perhaps we are even more scared of it now during the pandemic. What is there left to say? What is even worthy of a poem or my time or my focus? The idea of writing is often harder than the writing itself. In...More

This workshop will walk students through the basics of writing convincing and persuasive applications to fellowships, residencies, grants, and other opportunities.  We will address such topics as crafting personal statements, writing compelling...More

“Come, seereal flowersof this painful world.”– Basho It can be difficult, in these trying times, to make space for praise, or to notice the occasion for it. It is easy to believe it, even, selfish. (“Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers...More

In this workshop, we will write poems based on some of the major themes present in the poems of the great German-language Modernist poet Rainer Maria Rilke.  As a poet and thinker Rilke returned to a handful of ideas which he incorporated into his...More

  How can poetry help us to process and respond to uncertainty? How might it teach us to grieve as well as heal? To counter isolation with connection? To generate energy and urgency around the crucial problems of our time?  Poised, as so many of us...More

How do we turn “what happened” into a story? How do we shift through the sheer wealth of anecdote in a lived life and give it narrative purpose? Is “the truth” enough? This is a vigorous memoir workshop in which we devote laser focus to the tools...More

In an interview, Stephen Millhauser once spoke of “the blazing thing that deserves the name of reality.” In this workshop, each of you will be encouraged to go in search of your own “blazing thing.” In addition to workshop critique, the class will...More

During the Covid-19 health crisis, I spent many an afternoon going for walks, staying 6 feet apart from others who were doing the same thing. I often found myself drawn to walking beside the Charles River near where I live. Somehow the water flowing...More

A craft-based workshop for fiction and non-fiction writers on ALL levels: from true beginner to the multiply published, working on witnessing our extraordinary time, expressing the experience of living now in the context of others, and representing...More

The week is devoted to generating new memoir material using approaches that may be a little different than what you may have tried before. Through a series of focused prompts and exercises, you will practice writing vividly detailed creative...More

This class is for people who want to improve their poems, by understanding the art more fully, from the inside out. During our four weeks, we’ll explore seven formal elements—action, voice, sentence, phrase, line, sound, and metaphor—while...More

Whitman celebrated and sang the body and all its atoms. Woolf asked why, if illness is so common and the spirit so changed, it didn't take its place among the major themes of literature. In this class we will look at poems about the body and its...More

“It is true that each self keeps a secret self that cannot speak when spoken to.”   – Lucie Brock-Broido In this workshop we will write into those places where we have always gone mute, or muffled, or still. We will find language for those feral...More