24PearlStreet Workshop List

Good stories start from vague ideas, character sketches, images, seemingly random thoughts, odd bits of language and rhythm.  But how to put these into motion to get a story started—and moving forward?  This new year, commit to getting that story...More

 Imagine taking your pencil and throwing it against a window.  Now imagine that same pencil growing wings made of feathers, shattering the window, and flying off.  What in the world will happen next?  Instilling a bit of magical or fabulist realism...More

It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet the addition of photographs to text yields surprising results that can greatly deepen the impact of poetry, narrative and other written forms. Or, as Theodor Geisel said, “Words and...More

Writing love stories can feel fraught for many reasons. It can feel gendered, cliche, too personal, or not personal enough. It can feel driftless to write about “relationships” and fruitless to try to say something new about the world’s oldest topic...More

Collaborations inevitably lead creative practitioners to reflect on their own voice, aesthetic choices, and their subject position, expanding one’s sense of what is possible in one’s own projects, even when working alone. With that in mind, this...More

Annie Dillard once said You have to take pains not to hang on the reader’s arms, like a drunk, and say ‘And then I did this and it was so interesting.’  What is it, exactly, that makes personal narrative truly engaging? How do we navigate the mine-...More

Often, a poem has its own intentions that are at odds with the intentions of the poet. The poet will begin the poem with a certain aim, feeling, perspective, or subject, only to find that the poem veers into unknown territory. Often the preferred...More

We live in a time of always more, always faster, where what’s new insists on itself as what’s most important. But outside this frenzy are questions that demand slow pondering, queries old as human consciousness: Why are we here? Is there a God? How...More

We are now in the throes of a sixth mass extinction of plants and animals. Some call it the Anthropocene, but biologist E.O. Wilson said it may be called by scientists and poets alike the Eremozoic, meaning “The Age of Loneliness.” If we take the...More