DISQUIET offers core writing workshops in Fiction, Poetry, and Memoir and Nonfiction, as well as the Writing the Luso Experience workshop. These core workshops meet three times per week (M/W/F). In addition, we offer additional optional workshops on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Below are our workshops for 2025.

2025 Core Workshops

(M/W/F 10:00 AM-12:30 PM)

One Sentence At a Time: Fiction with Camille Bordas

In this class, we will focus primarily on your work: the stories or novel excerpts that you are working on, those on which you’re most curious to hear our thoughts. “Focus” means we will read each piece twice before we meet for workshop: once comfortably in our favorite chair, no pencil in sight, for the pleasure of discovering a new world; and then a second time, more closely (pencil now in hand, ready to line-edit), to help the author of the piece better realize the intentions we have perceived her to be after. Depending on the questions each piece brings up, we might end up talking about action (how to make stuff happen on the page?), dialogue (how to make it sound natural?), pacing (what to cut? What to expand?), etc. Mostly, though, we’ll get back, time and again, to that fundamental unit: the sentence. All strong fiction being made of strong sentences, strong strings of words that make us want to linger even as they push us toward the next strong string, we will aim to get our own in fighting shape. Expect short in-class exercises, based on readings that might range from the deceptively simple prose of Agota Kristof to the lush and sinewy sentences of Maylis de Kerangal.

Fiction with Gabriel Bump

In this workshop, we will explore ways to fill our stories with more excitement and fun and emotion. We’ll lean into what is working and tinker with the shortcomings. We will, ideally, leave each session with a greater understanding of our artistic preferences and desires. Before arriving in Lisbon, participants will turn in one submission between fifteen to twenty-five pages. Submissions can contain one short story, a novel chapter, or collected shorter fictions. We will begin each class by discussing published work before moving on to our works-in-progress.

Fiction Workshop with Adam Levin

By seriously examining and critiquing fiction written by others (i.e. measuring and helping advance the success of a work of fiction according to its author’s intentions), writers not only develop a greater capacity to strengthen their own fiction, but a clearer understanding of their own literary values. In this workshop, students will hand in one piece for critique, and closely read and critique fiction by their classmates. Our class will be entirely discussion-based. Focusing primarily on style and structure, we’ll each make it our goal to help others improve their writing through line-edits and in-class conversation, in accordance with the authors’ perceived intentions. Additionally, we may read some fiction by published authors, and reverse-engineer it to determine the ways in which it functions. In-class generative exercises may occasionally be assigned.

Move Me: Writing the Essay with Emma Copley Eisenberg

To essai is to try, and the best essays are active — urgently trying, reaching and inquiring, moving the reader forward with every sentence. While some great essays have plots that unspool a series of events in the past, others find their engine in the speaker’s rigorous thought process as they grapple aloud. Yet many essayists struggle to manifest this movement, instead offering nonfiction that stays still, leaving readers without any deepening insight and to wonder why they bothered! In our work together, we will focus on forward movement, as well as sharpening the fundamentals of narrative — beginning/middle/end, development, insight, and structure. Through discussion of published works, discussion of students’ essay drafts, and in-class writing exercises, we’ll strive to take our work from stagnant accountings or piles of research written to serve ourselves, to a dynamic, driving story that will delight others and leave them changed.

The Power of Perhaps: Speculative “Nonfiction” with T Kira Madden

Terms like surrealism and magical realism are most often used to describe works of fiction, but what about the inherent magic, wonderment, and time travel of our true, lived experiences? In this generative class, we will discuss alternate realities, hypothetical what if’s and ways of perhapsing into the surreality of our everyday lives. We will focus on isolation and compression, and on finding the narrative heat and emotional potency in our memories, our selves, and all the selves we’ve been. We’ll talk magical objects, the electricity of sensory experiences, and forge new pathways and connections between seemingly disparate ideas. The scaffolding behind short published work (sent in advance) will serve as blueprints for our discussion and in class writing exercises.

Playing with Form, Forms of Poetic Play with John Keene

What effects and meanings can poetic forms and modes, ranging from long-established fixed ones to newly devised ones, possess and convey? How can poets open up new spaces of creativity and thinking in their work utilizing set forms and modes and imagining new ones—from the internet, apps, gaming, etc.–in their poetry? This generative workshop will explore these questions, as well as larger questions about the social, political and cultural lives of poetic forms, experimentation in form and content, and employing established and novel forms as a leaping off point for new possibilities with poetry and poetics, including going more deeply into the emotional heart of your poems, even if you do not usually think of formal play as an option. Participants are encouraged to think of one form they have not yet explored that they might like to try in this class, but our baseline will be aesthetic openness, exploration and engagement with each other’s ideas, interests and approaches.

Image and Text, Text as Image: Poetics at Junctures with Diana Khoi Nguyen

During our immersive time together, we will closely read each other’s poems and engage in scholar Tina M. Campt’s practice of Listening to Images; we will attune ourselves to the “lower frequencies” of a photographic image so that we can register “‘felt sound[s]’–sound that, like a hum, resonates in and as vibration.” We’ll trace how various poets approach the intersection of text and image: Victoria Chang, Douglas Kearney, Anthony Cody, and others. Participants are invited to submit work that engages with visual poetics, but are not required to do so. This will be a creative, exploratory space in which participations may generate and share work in communal generosity. Our goal is to pay deep attention to poems and the images/documents that impact us, to tap into the fissures of what is left unsaid. No prior knowledge or practice of visual work required.

Writing the Luso Experience with Chris Feliciano Arnold

Writing the Luso Experience is a multi-genre workshop that explores the global reach of the Luso diaspora, investigating how the past informs the present, how our heritage shapes our worldview, and how the creative possibilities of classic and contemporary Lusophone literature can inspire us to break boundaries in our own work. Through group discussions, manuscript critiques and craft exercises, we will discover new ways of thinking about literature, writing and our lives.

2025 T-Th Workshops

(T/Th 10:00 AM-12:30 PM)

Soundshaping with Erica Dawson

In this generative workshop for poets and prose writers alike, we will focus on the part of poetry that hits on a different level than what we are saying. We will focus on how we say it, how our sounds, rhythms, and movements can help convey our motives and emotions. We will zoom in on prosody, which we’ll define as the study of the patterns of rhythm and sound in poetry. We will review the basic poetic feet (iamb, trochee, etc) and practice scansion (studying a poetic line to determine its rhythm). We will look at a wide variety of writers—from Shakespeare to Denis Johnson, Elizabeth Bishop to Evie Shockley—and discuss how working with rhythm can create mood, tension, and emphasis. And we will generate new poems of our own.

Flash & Furious: Creative Nonfiction Bursts with Annie Liontas

There may be no more potent form than short Creative Nonfiction, which “the writer’s experience of the world makes small and large at the same time.” Our excursions into short Creative Nonfiction ask us how real, how raw, how precise and unforgettable we can get in 2,000 words or less. What story or stories are you ready to excavate? What worlds exist within you, what discoveries might you make among your compatriots in the beautiful literary city of Lisboa? How can you invite others to join you?

In this generative workshop, we invoke the authorial stance of the lived experience to build intimacy with the reader, engaging in a friendship that—in the words of Philip Lopate—“is based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship” & “confides everything from gossip to wisdom.” And we do it all in a little over a page.

Our in-class sessions offer scaffolded writing prompts, mentor texts, collaborative exercises, and opportunities for sharing and critique. Revision practices informed by Annie Dillard and George Saunders will move us from expression to communication as we think about audience. Our o passo, modeled on The National Writing Project’s Writing Marathon, will get us out of the classroom and into the city in an exploratory writing exercise that sees what shakes loose when we let ourselves wander. (Pack a notebook, a pen, walking shoes, spending money.) This series is designed for participants who want to play, as well as for those hoping to walk away with a draft towards publication. Writers of all genres welcome.

Writing Through Translation with Bruna Dantas Lobato

Translation provides us with a unique opportunity to dive into another writer’s sensibilities and engage with different literary styles, traditions, and theories. In this generative open-genre writing workshop, we will experiment with English-to-English translations, try our hand at translating well-known Portuguese-language poems, practice writing under the influence of our favorite writers, and learn some skills we can bring into our own writing. No prior translation experience or fluency in another language required.

The Fernando Pessoa Game with Terri Witek and Cyriaco Lopes

The Fernando Pessoa Game is composed of a series of creative prompts that invite participants to engage their own practice (in writing, visual arts, performance, etc.) along with their sensitive and physical surroundings. We will examine text in terms of site-specificity, the body, its sensorial reception–and the production of art as a response to scores, to maps, to sets of open-ended instructions. Encounters will be anchored in brief historical overviews of transdisciplinary and contemporary experimental art. This is an opportunity to expand your artistic vocabulary, to try strategies outside your routine, to adventure yourself into a wonderful world of creative possibilities, all in the spirit of Fernando Pessoa and in his beloved city.

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^* All workshops are subject to enrollment considerations. Workshops may be canceled if adequate enrollment is not reached. ^** Instructors sometimes drop out or reschedule, and, in this unlikely scenario, DISQUIET will replace them and notify participants.