Connecting You to the World of Writing
JANUARY PROGRAM
Distinguished Speaker Series
“What Makes Comedy Funny?”
David Misch in Conversation with Jeff Reno
ONLINE | SUN., JAN. 16 | 6:00–7:30 PM CST | $10–$50 USD
Two seasoned comedy writers, David Misch and Jeff Reno, will entertain and enlighten us about writing comedy. Their credits include Mork and Mindy, Saturday Night Live, The Muppets Take Manhattan, West Wing, and dozens of other shows. Misch is the author of Funny: The Book and teaches comedy at USC and UCLA. Reno has been nominated for nine Emmys, four Writers Guild Awards, and a Humanitas, and won Cable Ace and Banff Film Festival awards.
Join us for a fun and funny evening with two guys who are serious about writing comedy, and who have been widely recognized for their work!
Online Master Class
Master Class | How to Spin the Straw of Life into Literary Gold with Signe Hammer
ONLINE | JAN. 24, 26 & 28 | 1:00–3:30 PM CST | $250 USD
If you’ve ever wrestled with unpromising or difficult material, you know how hard it is to make it come alive. More than good description is required; the writer needs to see with fresh eyes. In this workshop, participants will learn to find the action in inaction, the singular in the ordinary, the familiar in the strange and the humor in the repellent. We’ll look at how great writers do it, then we’ll try it ourselves in short writing exercises.

SIGNE HAMMER’s memoir, By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide’s Daughter, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. She has published three other nonfiction books, along with short stories, poetry, personal essays and many national-magazine feature articles. She has been an editor at both a major book publisher and a national magazine, and now helps writers develop, complete and publish their manuscripts. She has taught writing workshops for 40 years: as an award-winning Adjunct Associate Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, at the San Miguel Writers Conference and privately in San Miguel and via Zoom.
Online Workshops
Creative Nonfiction Writing: The Art of Experience with Jay Kirk
ONLINE | MON., JAN. 17 | 6:00–9:20 PM CST | $80 USD
Experience can be an elusive thing to capture: a strange hybrid of the subjective and more tangible zone of perceptible fact. How do we strike a balance in narrative nonfiction? For one, we employ the same devices we already use to navigate our way through the world — that of our senses. But what about the more abstract, less concrete sixth sense of thought? In this workshop, we will look at literary technique, story-logic, craft, the mechanics of building vivid and powerful scenes, and just a dash of narrative theory.

JAY KIRK is the author of Avoid the Day (Harper Perennial, 2020), which Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk) said "truly seems to push nonfiction memoir as far as it can go without it collapsing into a singularity." He is also author of Kingdom Under Glass, which the Washington Post named as one of the best nonfiction books of 2010. His widely anthologized award-winning nonfiction has been published in Harper's Magazine, GQ, and the New York Times Magazine.
Writing Memoir When Memory Fails with Jessica Hendry Nelson
ONLINE | TUE., JAN. 18 | 6:00–9:20 PM CST | $80 USD
One of the most common refrains I hear from novice memoir writers is that they just don’t remember. This isn’t unusual. Few of us possess the sort of photographic memory often and unfairly expected of a memoirist, and which we can’t help but demand of ourselves. In this workshop, we’ll learn how to cultivate vivid memories on the page and contend honestly with slippery memory. We’ll practice these strategies in guided exercises and offer one another feedback for development.

JESSICA HENDRY NELSON is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions (Counterpoint Press, 2014) and coauthor of the textbook Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her work appears in Prairie Schooner, Tin House, North American Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty member in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska.
Raising the Spiced Cup: Poetry on GodFire! Write with Spirit! with Judyth Hill
ONLINE | WED., JAN. 19 | 6:00–9:20 PM CST | $80 USD
Join the Caravan of the Beloved! Be inspired by the Ecstatics! Immersed in the passionate, on Godfire outcries of Rumi, Rilke, Mirabai, Lorca: we’ll create poems in luscious, ardent conversation with the Divine. Deliciously inspired, we’ll WildWrite from this wellspring of enlivened Knowing. Leaning into True Voice — let the deep, wild soul within us come to the page, in musical, newly vivid language! Jam-packed Handouts will provide months of ensouled inspiration. Write in the lively, in-love-with-this-world Voice within us!

JUDYTH HLL, poet, author, teacher, editor, educated at Sarah Lawrence College, recipient of numerous literary grants, is the current President of San Miguel PEN. She’s authored nine poetry books and the internationally acclaimed poem, Wage Peace. Judyth conducts writing workshops worldround, authored poetry curriculum for the O'Keeffe and Folk Art Museums, edits manuscripts: judythhill.com, and leads global WildWriting Culinary Adventures, eat-write-travel.com. St. Helena Examiner described Hill as, "Energy with skin”, and the Denver Post as, “A tigress with a pen.”
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