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 will offer additional optional events to be announced.

Below are our workshops for 2024 – please note that workshop descriptions are still subject to change, and more descriptions are coming soon!

2024 Core Workshops

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

True to Their World: A Workshop on Character with Jessica Anthony

Moving quickly beyond “where characters come from” towards a more complex investigation into the art of writing the lives of others, we ask: how do I write the people I write? And why do I write them? Do I know? Are characters reflections of our world—or do they invent it? Through close readings of participants’ own fiction, this workshop discusses all manners of a character’s potential knowability and verisimilitude by way of imagery, gesture, voice, point-of-view, interiority, environment, conflict, dialogue and indirect speech. Writers are encouraged to experiment through short character exercises, and will share a story or excerpt in progress to be workshopped by our entire group. Conversation, while centered on character, is open to all questions on fiction. Additional readings may appear from among Borges, Paley, Hempel, Saramago.

Fiction with Jamel Brinkley

Description TBA

Fiction with Novuyo Tshuma

Description TBA

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.

Nonfiction with Chris Feliciano Arnold

Description TBA

Intimacy of the Sentence: Prose Poetry and Lyrical Prose with Diana Khoi Nguyen

The word lyric has roots in the Greek stringed instrument, lyre, and thus the lyric mode necessitates musicality and sound in its expressive forms–be it emotive poetry, prose, or any other artistic form. For our two weeks together, I am thinking of “workshop” like a woodshop, that is, a space of sawdust, raw materials, craft, and conversation. We will begin by paying close attention to what happens when lyric is embroidered in a block of prose and how this transforms the nature of syntax, of the sentence at an elemental level. This will entail close reading passages across genres from writers such as Monica Youn, Jo Ann Beard, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Jane Wong, to name a few. Based on our discoveries, we’ll extract tools to craft lyrical sentences and pieces of our own of our own. Along the way, we’ll also hold “open studios” in which each writer will share a sample of what they have been working on, guiding our group’s interaction with their creative thinking, process, and work. This workshop is hybrid- and interdisciplinary-friendly.

Writing the Luso/a Experience with Katherine Vaz

Disquiet provides the unique opportunity for those of us with roots in the Portuguese diaspora on all continents to gather with the common artistic goal of finding and expressing our individual voices, in whatever form that might take. Through the years, this group at the very heart of the Disquiet experience has elevated the work discussed to an exhilarating degree while creating familial-style bonds. We’ll study content and form, helping one another take our pages to the next level, while gaining inspiration from the city that radiates the culture and the stories many of us hold in our own pasts and hearts.

^* 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.