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.

We’ll be updating our 2026 workshops over the next few months as descriptions come in!

2026 Core Workshops

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

Fiction Workshop with Dur E Aziz Amna

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Fiction Workshop with Anelise Chen

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Fiction Workshop with Brian Evenson

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Move Me: Writing Creative Nonfiction 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 writers 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’ creative nonfiction 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. Please submit up to 25 continuous pages for this workshop.

Poetry Workshop with Desiree Bailey

Description TBA

Entry and Exit Ramps: How to Begin and End a Poem with Chet’la Sebree

A poem is only as strong as all its parts—the line, the diction, the imagery, the syntax. Although that may be true, we often put pressure on its opening and closing moments. Should the poem startle us upon entry? Leave us breathless in the end? In this workshop, we’ll pay particular attention to how the beginnings and ends of poems work in tandem with the larger construction of the piece through close readings of contemporary poems and exercises to encourage students to rethink their own work-in-progress.

Generative Writing Workshop with Diana Khoi Nguyen

Description TBA

Writing the Luso Experience with Bruna Dantas Lobato

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2026 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 say. We will focus on how we say it, how our sounds, rhythms, and movements can help convey our motives and emotions—what I call soundshaping. 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 play with rhyme and repetition. We will look at a wide variety of writers—from Shakespeare to June Jordan, Denis Johnson to Evie Shockley—and discuss how soundshaping can create mood, tension, and emphasis. And we will generate new poems of our own.

Flash & Furious: Creative Nonfiction Bursts with D/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.

The Fernando Pessoa Game with Terri Witek

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.

Wordless Worlds / Wordless Words with Aaron Becker (2 days only)

Reading is often thought of as a process of the mind. But it remains a physical act. We pick up a book, open its cover and turn its pages. As writers, it’s easy to get lost in a manuscript and forget that the work will ultimately be a physical object with pages to turn. While a chapter break provides space for leaps in time and space, what other tools might we have at our disposal if we think of reading as a physical process? How can time and meaning be affected by the spaces between the pages and what we choose to place on either side? Wordless picture books offer a unique window into this process. Without language, the page turn becomes one of the few tools the author has at their disposal to pace the story. Anticipation, surprise, fulfillment, resolution, questions, and curiosity spontaneously arise as the reader ponders a story’s most fundamental question: what happens next?

In our first session, we will explore the world of wordless picture books, including views into the creative and editorial process in the author’s own work. Participants will be asked to draw rudimentary “dummies” to gain an understanding in visual narrative. The second session follows with a workshop culminating in the creation of an experimental draft of fiction or poetry that utilizes page turns to play with pacing and heighten meaning of the piece. Drawing expertise is not necessary for either class.

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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.