Lunch Poems, Lunch Prose
The idea for this course springs from Frank O’Hara’s legendary collection, Lunch Poems, which, as the story goes, O’Hara composed on lunch breaks from his work as a curator at MoMA. The collection’s poems are filled with imagery, idea, fun, and spontaneity. Yours will be, too, if you follow O’Hara’s simple rules: “You just go on your nerve, … you take your chances and try to avoid being logical.” Beginning June 1, NYWW will offer synchronous zoom session lunchtime workshops. The sessions will last 50 minutes, from 12N to 12:50 (EST), leaving participants enough time to stop at the hot dog or pretzel stands on their way back to – where do people go these days, because it’s not the office. Anyway, four 50 minutes sessions per week, M-T-W-Th, with a rotating roster of workshop leaders, each of whom will determine the week’s focus (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, or a mix). Each session will begin with a short craft talk, a short craft sample, a prompt, exercise-writing time, and time at the end for a few shares. The clock will be watched, you’ll be in, out, and on your way back to work or the pool with a notebook full of drafts.
 
Instructors and schedule as follows:    
*Sessions each week run M-T-W-Th, except Weeks 1 & 6, which run T-W-Th-F.
 
Cost: $20 per session, $70 for one week (four sessions), $395 for all six weeks (twenty-four workshops total).
REGISTER*: Buy tickets for NYWW Lunch Poems, Lunch Prose
​CONTACT: [email protected] 
(*If registering for one week, please specify which instructor/week you'd like to attend.)

PROSE IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC: A WORKSHOP IN NARRATIVE w/Tim Tomlinson

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This online workshop is designed to keep writers writing in the wave of face-to-face workshop cancellations. Each week includes
  • a new model of narrative prose
  • exercise prompts based on the model
  • space to post submissions
  • feedback from participants
  • feedback from instructor 
The workshop will offer opportunities for work in flash/micro-fiction, short story, memoir, and long-form narrative. Writers considered might include Sally Rooney, Joy Castro, Justin Torres, Carmen Maria Machado, Eve Babitz, Myriam Gurba, Joan Didion, Kate Zambreno, and others.
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We’ll go live June 17. Registration will remain for three weeks after class launch; one can join in progress and complete the six modules without rush, penalty, or limited access.  

The course is entirely ONLINE. It goes live Wednesday evening, June 17, 2020. Six individual modules go live on consecutive Wednesdays. The course will remain accessible for several days beyond the closing date, August 4, 2020.



​Register: https://bpt.me/4595151
Early Bird: $345 (until June 3)
After June 3: $370

Instructor: Tim Tomlinson
Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Other publications include the chapbook, Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the celebrated collection of short fiction, This Is Not Happening to You. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in numerous US venues, as well as in Australia, China, and the Philippines. He serves on the advisory board of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators. He resides in Brooklyn, New York City, where he teaches in NYU's Global Liberal Studies program.

PROSE IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC: A WORKSHOP IN NARRATIVE W/TIM TOMLINSON

This online workshop is designed to keep writers writing in the wave of face-to-face workshop cancellations. Each week includes
  • a new model of narrative prose
  • exercise prompts based on the model
  • space to post submissions
  • feedback from participants
  • feedback from instructor 
The workshop will offer opportunities for work in flash/micro fiction, short story, memoir, long-form narrative. Writers considered might include Joy Castro, Justin Torres, Carmen Maria Machado, Eve Babitz, Myriam Gurba, Joan Didion, Kate Zambreno, Anatole Broyard, and others.
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In order to get those who need to write writing, we’ll go live April 1. Registration will remain open throughout the six weeks; one can join in progress and complete the six modules without rush, penalty, or limited access.  

Register before April 1 and receive $25 back on the Early Bird price. Early Bird price will remain in effect for three weeks from course launch.
Early Bird: $345 (until April 15)
After April 15: $370
The course is entirely ONLINE. It goes live Wednesday evening, April 1, 2020. Six individual modules go live on consecutive Wednesdays. The course will remain accessible for several weeks beyond the final date, May 13, 2020.

Register: https://bpt.me/4553708

Instructor: Tim Tomlinson
Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Other publications include the chapbook, Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the celebrated collection of short fiction, This Is Not Happening to You. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in numerous US venues, as well as in Australia, China, and the Philippines. He serves on the advisory board of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators. He resides in Brooklyn, New York City, where he teaches in NYU's Global Liberal Studies program.

THE PERSONAL ESSAY, WITH ROBERT ANASI

"Personal Essay" is vast and contains multitudes - humorous essays, opinion pieces, mini-memoirs, first-person journalism. What the personal essay always does though is document the writer's journey through a specific experience. My workshop focuses on how to be a compelling first-person narrator and employ craft elements such as theme, character development, voice, pacing, scene-setting, and exposition to tell a story that matters. Students will complete at least one personal essay (600-2,500 words) and also develop material for future essays.

The course is entirely ONLINE. It goes live Monday evening, Oct 21, 2019. Six individual modules go live on consecutive Mondays. The course concludes on Dec 2, 2019.

Register: https://bpt.me/4332006
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Instructor: Robert Anasi
To date, I've published two books, The Gloves: A Boxing Chronicle and The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). My journalism, interviews, and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Observer, Los Angeles Times, LA Review of Books, Pacific Standard, Salon, and Publishers Weekly, among many others. My non-fiction story First Stripe was published in The Bittersweet Science (University of Chicago Press). I'm a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and I've received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Schaeffer Foundation, and the U.C. Irvine Chancellors Club. I recently finished a book on exploring the lost cities of the Andean Amazon and I'm currently researching both a family history and a book-TV project about a legendary police informant in the contemporary underworld of the American West.
In an age of increasing specialization, I remain a generalist, which, while certainly not the most lucrative career decision, has led me to interesting places that include maximum security prisons, the North Shore of Oahu, unexplored tracts of the Andean cloud forests and now the darker corners of law enforcement in South Central, East LA, and Tijuana. As a writer, I try to tell stories about marginalized people and communities that go beyond headlines and stereotypes, no matter if my subjects are boxers, snitches, bohemians, campesinos in the Peruvian highlands or the now-vanished blue-collar Irish Catholic neighborhood in which I was raised. In every case, this work relies on long immersion, both through research and sharing the daily lives of my subjects. I often wish there was a faster path to empathy, understanding and seasoned prose but, as a friend once said, If it was easy, everybody would do it.

Contact: [email protected]

Writing from Inception to Publication: an Online Course with Ravi Shankar

In this six-week online workshop, open to all genres and levels of writers, we will move from drafting a piece of writing to revising it until it is ready to send out for publication. We will look intently at the mechanics of what we hope to accomplish in our writing, using a workshop model to help with our revisions. We will supplement our investigation by a discussion of different editing techniques and advice from writers running the gamut from ancient India to the New York School. We will look closely at what various kinds of editors are looking for and how to craft a successful query letter, taking into view the large landscape of the contemporary publishing world. Our goal will not be airy and abstract, but very pragmatic: by the end of our time together, we will learn how to write and publish our work.
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The course is entirely ONLINE. It goes live Monday evening, Oct 21, 2019. Six individual modules go live on consecutive Mondays. The course concludes on Dec 2, 2019.

Register: https://bpt.me/4332020

Ravi Shankar is the author most recently of Durable Transit: New and Selected Poems (Poetrywala, 2018), and co-translator with Priya Sarukkai Chabria, of the award-winning Autobiography of a Goddess (Zubaan Books/University of Chicago Press, 2016). His other books include Deepening Groove (The National Poetry Review Press, 2011), What Else Could It Be: Ekphrastics and Collaborations (Carolina Wren Press, 2015), and, as co-editor with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (Norton, 2008). He founded and edited one of the oldest electronic arts journals on the web, the legendary Drunken Boat. He is a celebrated speaker and educator on several continents, including Asia, Australia, and the US.
Contact: [email protected]

DEVELOPING NARRATIVE PROSE: A SIX-WEEK ONLINE COURSE IN FICTION & NONFICTION

Over six sessions, covering Entry Points, Character, Setting, Plot, Scene/Summary/ Dialogue, and Revision, participants will do exercises in critical craft functions of narrative prose, critique manuscripts of their peers, and submit their own work for assessment by peers and the instructor. The course will cultivate the talent and enrich the skills of participants at whatever level, and it will do so in a nurturing, sensitive environment. By course's end, participants will have over a half-dozen new pieces and over a dozen techniques with which to continue the work started in the sessions.
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The course is entirely ONLINE. It goes live Monday evening, Oct 21, 2019. Six individual modules go live on consecutive Mondays. The course concludes on Dec 2, 2019.

Register: https://bpt.me/4331990 

Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Other publications include the chapbook, Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and a celebrated collection of short fiction, This Is Not Happening to You. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in numerous US venues, as well as in Australia, China, and the Philippines. He serves on the advisory board of Asia Pacific Writers and Translators. He resides in Brooklyn, New York City, where he teaches in NYU's Global Liberal Studies program.
Contact: [email protected]

WRITING THE FIRST DRAFT: A SIX-WEEK ONLINE COURSE IN SCREENWRITING

Emeritus co-chair of the UCLA Screenwriting Program and author of the influential Write Screenplays That Sell…The Ackerman Way, Hal Ackerman will be offering a 6-week series on WRITING THE FIRST DRAFT. Experienced and less experienced writers know that the “first draft” means anything from the first to the 15th draft. In a series of lectures, writing exercises, and immersions into successful techniques that have aided the careers of dozens of currently successful film and TV writers, the class will take writers’ projects from where they are to where they need to be. 
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In his thirty years of teaching Screenwriting at UCLA, the last decade as Area head, Hal Ackerman has helped launch the careers of dozens of brilliantly successful screenwriters.  His last cohort of MFA students prior to his retirement are currently dazzling the TV world, writing, directing, creating the most influential films and series; among them are Pose, The Chi, Insecure, Sorry for Your Loss and many, many others. His fifteenth anniversary edition of his book on screenwriting Write Screenplays That Sell…The Ackerman Way has just come out and is the text of choice for a growing number of university programs, and a source of guidance for beginning and advanced screenwriters and novelists. He has sold material to and been hired by the major studios and networks.  He has two published novels, many published short stories and an award winning one-man play about his humorous encounter with prostate cancer, called Prick. Through it all, he has never lost his love for teaching and is eager to work with writers at all stages of their writing development. He makes this promise to everyone who works with him: You will be a better writer.

The course is entirely ONLINE. It goes live Monday evening, Oct 21, 2019. Six individual modules go live on consecutive Mondays. The course concludes on Dec 2, 2019.

Register: https://bpt.me/4332961 

Contact: [email protected]

WRITING THE ADDICT: A MULTI-GENRE WORKSHOP IN THE REPRESENTATION OF ADDICTION

In this six-week online course, participants consider the ways that addiction has been written about in poetry, memoir, and fiction, then borrow premises and strategies to launch their own work. The first week looks at a number of angles on addiction. Weeks two through five trace an arc: early experiences, deeper involvement, bottoming out, getting out. We’ll see instances of tolerance, withdrawal, relapse, craving. We’ll look at a few examples that deal specifically with various steps of Twelve-Step recovery. In each section, participants will be asked to write their own accounts, based on the craft or the content (or both) of the samples under consideration. The sixth and final week will look at methods of revision, consolidation, and publication. Workshop critique guidelines will establish methods of manuscript analysis. Each participant will receive at least one extensive analysis from the instructor. By the end of the sessions, participants will have an overview of addiction as it’s appeared in prose and poetry, along with several drafts-in-progress (of prose or poetry), one or more of which might lead completed, publishable work. [Models for course work will derive from some of the following sources: Ann Marlowe, D. Watkins, Kim Addonizio, Solomon Jones, Mary Gaitskill, Robert Bingham, Emily Carter, Raymond Carver, Jeet Thayil, others.
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DATES Oct 6 – Nov 17: six online sessions
COST Early Bird $215 – now thru 9/15
General $245 – 9/15 on
Register: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3067328

BIO
Tim Tomlinson is co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing, and author of the poetry collections Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, and Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire. His collection of short fiction, This Is Not Happening to You, appears in Fall 2017. His work has been published in Australia, China, Singapore, the Philippines, and in many venues in the US, including the anthologies Long Island Noir (Akashic Books), and the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (Brooklyn Arts Press). He’s offered workshops and given talks at many international locations, recently including Guangzhou and Shanghai, China, Adelaide, Australia, and at the Philippines Consulate in New York City. He’s a certified yoga instructor, an avid scuba diver, and his past addresses include extended residencies in Shanghai, Manila, London, Florence, New Orleans, Boston, Miami, Andros Island, Bahamas, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, where he currently lives with his wife. He’s a member of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators. He teaches writing workshops and hybrid seminars on addiction in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies program.

PERSON, PLACE, POEM

The Course
Person, Place, Poem is a six-week online workshop in poetry. Those new to poetry will learn some craft and generate some poems, while experienced poets will pick up a few new tricks and work a few muscles. Along the way we'll look at previously published work by a range of contemporary poets, which might include Kim Addonizio, Mahogany Browne, Nick Flynn, Jason Koo, Terrance Hayes, Dorianne Laux, others, along with poetry from around the globe, across the spectrum, and/or in the “canon.” We’ll consider setting, persona, voice, music, truth, image, presence, the line, and forms (sonnet, haiku, the abecedarian, odes, free verse). Each week, participants are given optional exercises to try and to post; the group offers feedback, and the instructor offers substantive critique*. By the end of the sessions, each participant will have attempted at least a dozen exercises, and generated at least a half-dozen drafts of new poems.
*The number of instructor critiques depends upon enrollment.
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Registration: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2995724  

Early Bird: $190 / After June 24: $215 

The Instructor
Tim Tomlinson is the author of Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, about which poet/critic Robert Kramer wrote: “…the overall tone [is] sparse, restrained, laconic, hard-boiled, skeptical, ironic. Even in the portrayal of what would seem to be deeply emotional situations, an atmosphere of ‘cool’ prevails” (American Book Review, Jan/Feb 2017). Tomlinson is also the author of This Is Not Happening to You, a collection of short fiction (due Sept 2017), Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, and co-author of The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. His work has been published in Australia, China, India, the Philippines, Singapore, and throughout the US, and is anthologized in We Contain Multitudes: Twelve Years of Softblow, The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Eternal Snow, and in the forthcoming Lofi Poetry Poets Responding to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. He is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, and a professor in New York University’s Global Liberal Studies Program. 

NYC POETRY: CEREBRAL JUNKIES TO LANGUAGE HUSTLERS

The Focus NYC stands as bedrock and metaphor. It has become emblematic of motion, progression, controlled chaos, the height of culture, and exchange of ideas. But it also amplifies all that does and does not work in The United States. If this city represents not only urban centers across the country, but also the individual as they understand themselves as part and whole, how can we pull from the exchange of tangible and intangible made real? How can we harness the prosody of a city street and transfer it to our poetry and prose writing? How can we move down the page as the One Train barreling under Broadway?
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The Route From synapse to street corner, we vacillate between moments of intense connection and isolation [the individual as the collective : micro as macro]. This is true of many places where people meet, around the globe, to exchange ideas. Each time we are pulled within, then tugged out, we are witnessing the writing mind in action. By reading New York City poetry from the Industrial Revolution right up to today, we will learn how poets have drawn and continue to draw from individuality in order to connect with collective determination on the page. The poetry may be physically housed within city limits, but it reaches out and across humanity. Each week will be an opportunity create new work, mimic the forms and content that resonate with us, and connect with other poets doing this work right alongside us. 

The Means In this non-traditional workshop, we will each be challenged to think outside of our comfort zones and trust our creative impulses. The artist in you will be respected and nurtured here. I seek only to move you further along the trajectory you have set for yourself-- I am not here to criticize your content, influence your creative impetus, or steer you down "traditional routes." If you would like help setting a creative trajectory, we can work together to identify the sonic impulses you return to and the quiet themes emerging in your work. I look forward to spending this time with you and showing you around the real and imagined city my family has called home for six generations.

The Instructor Jen Fitzgerald is a poet, essayist, photographer, and a native New Yorker who received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University and her BA in Writing at The College of Staten Island (CUNY). She is the host of New Books in Poetry Podcast, a member of New York Writers Workshop, and was a Bread Loaf 2014 Conference participant. She teaches creative writing workshops online and around NYC. Her first collection of poetry, The Art of Work was published by Noemi Press in September of 2016. Her essays, poetry, and photography have appeared in such outlets as PBS Newshour, Boston Review, Tin House, Salon, PEN Anthology, Colorado Review, Harriet: The Poetry Foundation Blog, Best American Poetry Blog, among others. She now divides her time between N.Y.C. and D.C. where she is at work on a few exciting projects and collaborations.

Contact: [email protected]

Register: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2937286

DEVELOPING FICTION: A WORKSHOP IN NARRATIVE PROSE

Over six sessions, covering Entry Points, Character, Setting, Plot, Scene/Summary/ Dialogue, and Revision, participants will do exercises in critical craft functions of narrative prose, critique manuscripts of their peers, and submit their own at least once for assessment by peers and the instructor. Once registered, participants will be welcomed onto the course shell, hosted by Wet.Ink. When course ends, participants will remain within the NYWW online community, and will receive a full electronic package of all course materials. The course will cultivate the talent and enrich the skills of participants at whatever level, and it will do so in a nurturing, sensitive environment. By course's end, participants will have over a half-dozen new pieces and over a dozen techniques with which to continue the work started in the sessions.  

Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Other publications include the chapbook, Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse, the poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, and the forthcoming collection of short fiction, This Is Not Happening to You (Fall 2017). His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in numerous US venues, as well as in Australia, China, and the Philippines. He resides in New York City, where he teaches in NYU's Global Liberal Studies program. He is excited to lead New York Writers Workshop into the online-workshop world.