Events

Many of New York CIty’s waterways were buried as the land became more industrialized and urbanized. Toni Morrison wrote “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” In this session, participants will read eco-poems written by lucille clifton, June Jordan, and Rajiv Mohair to study the ways water shows up in their words. We will reflect on our relationship to the bodies of water that are important to us and write poems inspired by our water memories.

In this studio, participants will critically analyze pacing and tone in a spoken word, written, and sung poem. They will then branch their own piece from the ones they analyze in session or others they find. They will consider the author’s background, cultural storytelling, and intermixing of languages while highlight the use of emphasis, phrasing, and rhythm as tools to relay their voices.

Situations where you’ve felt silenced, whether by colleagues, friends, family brothers, can cause a lack of confidence and uncertainty, even anxiety. In this studio, participants will reflect upon experiences at work, at home or in social situations and devise strategies to master their fear, voice their feelings, and become a better advocate for themselves. 

Great at beginnings but struggling with endings? Join us for a crash course in ending your flash fiction and submit your own 53-word story to one of our favorite contests!

In this studio, we’ll do a deep dive into editing techniques about pacing. We’ll discuss reasons why you might want the pace to be faster or slower in certain scenes, how to diagnose with pace, and how to correct them.

In the second session of the Punk Never Died studio series, we will take a look at small literary journals and the resources they provide for emerging writers. If you want a way to build up your CV and get your work out there, indie literary journals are a vital pathway to ensuring your vision is both supported and realized.

In this studio, we will host a generative session that will encourage you to research a topic of your choice and develop a “mind map” tracing potential avenues to a creative piece of writing.

Step into the timeless battle between heroes and villains and discover what makes unforgettable characters leap off the page. In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn how to craft compelling protagonists, complex antagonists, and the powerful conflicts that bring fantasy stories to life.

In this community studio, we will explore the meaning and importance of subtext in dialogue and have participants write scenes with subtext.

This studio focuses on the unconventional poetic form of the golden shovel, created by poet Terrance Hayes. We will learn about the golden shovel and get some hands-on experience in writing our own!

In this session, we’ll explore how our personal narratives shape our leadership intincts, learn to tell the difference between a conductor (a leader whose success is measured by how good everyone sounds) and a controller (a leader whose sense of security requires the talent to stay smaller, quieter, or more isolated than it actually is), and begin rewriting any inherited scripts that no longer serve us or our communities.

Politics is not for a select few—government impacts every single one of us. Explore how you can get involved and use storytelling to influence policy.

In this lesson, participants will learn what defines an argumentative essay from other forms of argumentative writing and begin constructing one of their own.

In this session, participants will learn how to apply their extracurriculars and engagements in their community, including their involvement in GWN, to the concept of ambassadorial potential. Using the community studio lead’s Marshall Scholarship as a case study, participants will bring free-writing about their ambassador potential, locally and abroad.

Join us to learn how to craft fictional languages that feel and operate like real ones! We’ll study how culture, history, and values shape language, then build a conlang of our own from scratch. Some basic understanding of linguistics is recommended, but curious world builders of all kinds are welcome!

Our objective during this studio is to immerse ourselves in the world of artistic expression by learning about how artists use both artistic tools (i.e. pen, paper, colored pencils) and digital art platforms (such as Canva, Krita, or another digital art platform of choice) to give form to fears, hopes, and experiences. During our workshop, we will look at, contemplate, and discuss a few art pieces that relate to uncertainty. Following this, participants will engage in a meditative artistic activity of their own.

Sometimes we reach a point in our process when we can’t help but ask ourselves “What’s even happening here?” in this community studio we will learn how to transform our confusion into a powerful curiosity to guide us when things get out of control.

In this studio, we will explore our deepest curiosities and how we can transform those into the dramatic questions that creates conflict in a story. We will also take a look at the relationship our characters’ emotions, wants, and needs has to the conflict and drama of our story.