Cleaver Masterclasses 


Can't Join Live? Replays Available!

POINT OF VIEW AS PLAY AND PRACTICE
Taught by Sheree L. Greer
Sunday, May 28
2-4 pm ET on Zoom

In this single-session workshop, writers will explore point of view as both a craft element and an opportunity for play and practice. Through interactive readings, discussion, and writing exercises, writers will examine point of view as a portal of exploration in their prose and their creative practice.

DELUSIONS OF GRAMMAR
Taught by Sara Levine
Sunday, June 25
2-4 pm ET on Zoom

“All I know about grammar is its infinite power,” Joan Didion wrote, and if that sends a shiver of curiosity up and down your spine, welcome to my workshop! This one-day class is a high-energy exploration of the rhetoric of grammar: how to think strategically about form. We’ll look at how writers make decisions when they confront a sentence: the patterns sentences typically follow and the different ways clauses hang together. By the class’s end, you’ll be able to diagnose what makes a sentence boring and tweak it until it has more suspense than a Netflix thriller. 

YOU, INC.: BUILDING YOUR WRITING BRAND
Taught by Jen Mathy
Sunday, July 23
2-4 pm ET on Zoom

This masterclass will demystify marketing. We’ll talk about your small-business “must-haves,” use literary examples to illustrate the differences among social media platforms, and look at best practices across the literary community. We’ll do exercises to get you thinking about yourself as a brand and discuss ways to weave brand-building into your writing practice.

URGENCY AND THE PERSONAL ESSAY
Taught by Megan Stielstra
Sunday, August 20
2-4 pm ET on Zoom

This lightning-bolt session begins with the gut. What you need to tell; the memories, fascinations, and questions that live not in your head but your bones. Then: craft—how to tell our personal stories in ways that are equally urgent to an audience. Pulling from both literary and oral storytelling traditions, we’ll engage in activities (adapted for Zoom!) to get our experiences out of the body and onto the page, encouraging risk and discovery and examining literary craft in new ways. How does telling a story aloud heighten our understanding of its structure? How does the presence of an immediate audience influence the rewriting process? What does it mean to build an individual writing process that will sustain us without the support of a class? 



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