Colgate Writers Conference Program

There are three jumpstarter workshops. They are led by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, Leslie Daniels, and Susannah Nevison.

Jumpstart your writing life by discovering the seeds of your next project or uncovering a fresh path forward in a stalled manuscript. Through craft discussion, writing exercises, and focused feedback, our workshop will encourage you to stretch your creative muscle and chart your next steps as a writer. Bring questions or stray fragments of character or scene, and be prepared to write each day. Share your words and ideas in a supportive, community-minded environment. I look forward to meeting you.

This workshop is open to anyone who wishes to take it. If you’d like to provide a brief description (<500 words) of your project, feel free to do so.

There are no submission requirements
Workshop size: 10-15 participants

The Retreater option offers ultimate freedom and flexibility. Instead of participating in a workshop, you’re welcome to write, rest, and recharge as you see fit. You can choose to attend any combination of craft lectures from our esteemed faculty, shop talks with editors and agents, literary readings, and social events. You’ll also have lightly guided sessions to build community with other retreaters and generate new work. You’ll have the opportunity to use the campus library, fitness facilities, and network of hiking trails. This includes room and board.

Led by Eleanor Henderson
Intensive workshop

The memoirist and critic Sven Birkerts said writing a memoir is about “getting hold of vanished experience.” Sometimes that means activating our memory to reach deep into the past, or our family’s. Sometimes, the experience isn’t vanished but all too present, a story still in progress. Either way, we’re faced with choices about how to give form to formless experience. In this intimate and intensive workshop, we’ll address these choices—structure, time, scene, voice, dialogue, distance, and the ethics of writing about others. To ground our practice, participants will respond to in-class writing prompts and discuss memoir excerpts and craft texts. They will also read and give feedback on the first 30-40 pages of the other participants’ memoirs and receive the same from the other participants. Eleanor will provide feedback on the entire manuscript, up to 200 pages, and meet one-on-one with each participant. Together we’ll help each other “get hold” of our experience and invite others to witness it.

Submission limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop size: five participants

Led by Thomas Mira y Lopez
Intensive workshop

Writing a memoir means wrestling with experience — reaching deep into the past, excavating family history, or finding shape and meaning in a story still unfolding. Either way, we're faced with choices about how to give form to formless experience. In this intimate and intensive workshop, we'll work through those choices together: structure, time, scene, voice, dialogue, distance, and the ethics of writing about others. To ground our practice, participants will respond to in-class writing prompts and discuss memoir excerpts and craft texts. They will also read and give feedback on the first 50 pages of each other's manuscripts and receive the same in return. The instructor will provide written feedback on the full manuscript and meet one-on-one with each participant. Together, we'll help each other find the words for lives worth witnessing.
 

Submission Limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop Size: 5 participants

Led by Molly McCully Brown

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, wrote Joan Didion; we interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images. In this nonfiction workshop, we’ll experiment with how to find and shape the narrative line(s) that make an essay from the images that populate our lives, the lives of others, the fabric of the world around us. Together we’ll consider the question of how an experience—lived, researched, recollected, reconstructed— becomes a story we can tell ourselves, and then share with others. We’ll divide our time between thoughtful collective discussion of participants’ submitted manuscripts, and brief craft conversations about essays and excerpts from writers like Leslie Jamison, Hanif Abduraquib, Eula Biss, Christina Sharpe and more, whose work can serve as inspiration, impetus, and guide.
 

Submission limit: 8,000 words (Up to 32 pages)
Workshop size: 10 participants 

Led by Peter Balakian

We will be focused on your poems for an intensive week. The workshop is grounded in an atmosphere of trust and intellectual honesty. You will bring poems you've submitted or newly written poems to the workshop, and we will, as a group, read them with great care and rigor and discuss how to push them further and discuss how the poem can realize its materials in the fullest possible ways. Poets will be asked to read their work aloud in class. The workshop is predicated on the belief in the ancient and contemporary value of the lyric poem as a continual landmark in human consciousness and thought and form of language. You should read each other's submissions before we convene our first workshop. At our first meeting I will hand out a small sheaf of poems (mostly by 20th century poets) and we may refer to them during the week. My hope is that each poet will leave the workshop energized and writing with new intensity and at new levels.

Submission limit: six poems (Up to 20 pages)
Workshop size: 10 participants

Led by Maya C. Popa

Bring your poems-in-progress to this supportive and constructive workshop in which we will focus on both the craft and vision behind your work. Through close attention to language, form, and revision, we will help each other discover the next best choices to make for our poems. Our discussions will balance practical technique with the larger questions that drive us as poets: how to enact experience through the vehicle of the page, how to work with and against tradition, and how to conceive of something original with integrity. In addition to workshop sessions, each writer will meet individually with Maya once over the week.

Submission limit: six poems (Up to 20 pages)
Workshop size: 10 participants

Led by Anne Valente
Intensive workshop

The state of flow is often discussed in creative practice, referencing absorption and immersion in the process of crafting fiction. In this novel workshop, we will discuss this state of flow not only in our creative processes but in the structure of the narrative itself. How is your novel fostering a state of flow for the reader, from one chapter to the next? In workshopping your novel, we will address its flow – also called its profluence – and how the construction of the opening, the characters’ development, the setting and the narrative’s tension are building momentum across the entirety of the novel. You will read other workshop participants’ manuscripts in advance, and we will workshop each novel in class. You will also meet with Anne in a one-on-one conference during the week. Together, we will craft narratives that build profluence and momentum, crafting novels that reflect your own immersive flow states as fiction writers.

Submission limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop size: five participants

Led by Alex Gilvarry
Intensive workshop

This intensive workshop offers novelists the rare opportunity for deep, sustained engagement with their manuscripts. Over the course of the week, we'll workshop each participant's novel-in-progress, examining structure, pacing, character development, and voice. Through careful reading and generative discussion, we'll help you identify your novel's strengths and the places where revision might unlock new possibilities. You'll receive detailed written feedback from Alex on your full manuscript and meet one-on-one to discuss your work and your path forward. Come prepared to think deeply about craft and to engage seriously with your fellow participants' projects.

Submission limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop size: five participants

Led by Alexandra Kleeman
Intensive workshop

Everyone begins a novel thinking they know what the story is about—if we didn't, how could we move forward, putting one word after another? But the most effective novels grapple with this question throughout, uncovering surprising and evocative answers in the process. In this novel-focused intensive, we will work learn to listen to your manuscript, to hear the elements that pulse beneath its intentional surface, to honor what is working and follow our curiosity toward those elements of our story that retain their mystery. As we do so, we will explore writing toward the unspoken, uncovering specificity beneath vagueness, and carving away the extraneous until the core of the novel shines through.

Submission limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop size: five participants

Led by Jack Wang

In The Science of Storytelling, British author Will Storr says, “The challenge any of us faces is that of grabbing and keeping the attention of other people’s brains.” How do stories hold attention? What are effective strategies for “grabbing and keeping” the interest of other people’s minds? What can neuroscience and evolutionary psychology tell us about how best to do this? This workshop will address these and other questions as they apply to fiction. In addition to reading published writing, participants will read and respond to each other’s work and meet individually with Jack to further discuss their manuscripts. Whether you’re working on a short story or a novel set in the past, present, or future—with or without dragons—this fiction workshop will help make your writing more “unputdownable.” 

Submission limit: 10,000 words (Up to 40 pages)
Workshop size: 10 participants

Led by Chanelle Benz
Intensive workshop

This intensive workshop offers novelists the rare opportunity for deep, sustained engagement with their manuscripts. Over the course of the week, we'll workshop each participant's novel-in-progress, examining structure, pacing, character development, and voice. Through careful reading and generative discussion, we'll help you identify your novel's strengths and the places where revision might unlock new possibilities. You'll receive detailed written feedback from Chanelle on your full manuscript and meet one-on-one to discuss your work and your path forward. Come prepared to think deeply about craft and to engage seriously with your fellow participants' projects.

Submission limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop size: five participants

Led by Kyle Bass

Do you have a story to tell as a playscript or a screenplay? How are the forms similar and different, and what can one teach us about the other? Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced dramatic writer, this unique dramatic writing workshop will allow you to start or revise a short stage play, short narrative screenplay, or both! Beginning with proven prompts that inspire and challenge, we will workshop 5- to 15-page scripts and focus on theatrical and visual storytelling and even the basics of proper script formatting. So, whether it’s “Lights up” or “FADE IN:,” come ready to explore, learn, and share. Fiction writers are encouraged to join. All experience levels are welcome.

Submission limit: 15 pages
Workshop size: 10 participants

Led by Amber Smith 

Whether you're writing contemporary realism, fantasy, romance, or genre-blending YA, this workshop will help you craft compelling stories for young adult readers. We'll examine the particular craft considerations of YA fiction—voice, pacing, character interiority, and the ways YA literature engages with both universal and generation-specific concerns. Through thoughtful workshopping of each participant's manuscript, we'll explore what makes YA resonate with readers of all ages. You'll receive detailed feedback from your peers and Amber, and you'll meet one-on-one to discuss your project with Amber as well.

Submission limit: 10,000 words (Up to 40 pages)
Workshop size: 10 participants

Query Letters and First Pages Critique
Get feedback from agents on how to make your first pages and query letter shine. Samantha Shea, VP of Georges Borchardt, Inc. will join, along with additional agents to be announced in the coming months. 

Submission limit: First ten pages and query letter
Limited availability

7:30–9:00 a.m. | Breakfast and Early Bird Activities

• Breakfast served at Frank Dining Hall.
• Coffee and tea available throughout the morning.
• Activities include campus walking groups, morning meditations, and writing time in the library.

9:00–10:00 a.m. | Craft Talks
Rotating faculty-led discussions on topics such as:

• How to read and write the lyric essay
• How to reframe the wonders of fiction
• The possibilities of rhyme in contemporary poetics
• How to mix fiction and politics

10:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m. | Workshop Sessions

• Workshops
• Retreater Write-Ins

12:15–2:00 p.m. | Lunch Break

• Lunch served at Frank Dining Hall.
• Time for informal meetings with faculty.

2:00–3:00 p.m. | Panel Discussions

Each day features a different industry-focused panel with three to four experts and a moderator. Panels include a Q&A session.

3:30–5:00 p.m. | Your Choice
Participants choose one:

• One-on-one agent consultations (pre-scheduled)
• Participant readings
• Writing sprints
• Free writing time
• Informal faculty office hours

5:00–7:00 p.m. | Dinner
Dinner served at Frank Dining Hall.

7:00–8:00 p.m. | Evening Programming
Rotating schedule includes:

• Faculty readings
• Open mic night

9:00 p.m. onward | Late Night Options

• Gathering at Merrill House
• Writing time in designated spaces
• Rotating activities: Literary trivia, game night, fellow-led activities