Tag: Craft

Creative Writing Lab with Wendy Brown-Baez

Creative Writing Lab Postponed

Sorry, this workshop has been postponed!

Hone your skills- during each session, we will highlight a specific craft element: descriptive details, character development, dialogue, and plot. We’ll discuss the examples from published authors and practice through writing exercises in a supportive and fun atmosphere. We’ll share ideas to further your writing goals. For fiction or memoir writers.

Register for all four sessions to get the most benefit and a discount. Attend any single session for $25 (paid at the door only).

In person, 4 sessions, 1:00-3:00 pm, Saturdays, May 10 to May 31, 2025

Wendy Brown-BaezInstructor Bio: Taught by experienced writing instructor and published author Wendy Brown-Baez. Wendy’s work appears in prestigious journals and anthologies such as Poets & Writers Magazine, Talking Writing, Tiferet, and The Heart of All That Is, and she won the 2016 Women’s National Book Association contest. She has taught writing classes for years, including through The Loft Literary Center, Elephant Rock, MPLS Community Ed, and MCTC. Wendy is the executive editor of Saint Paul Almanac and teaches with MPWW in state prisons.

NOTE: Starting on March 31, 2025 Hennepin Ave 26th St to Douglas Ave will be under construction. Check our ‘Getting Here’ page for parking options.

To register:

  1. Add the number of tickets you want by clicking the ‘+’ button
  2. Click the ‘Get Tickets’ button.
Categories
Classes

Reimagining Traditional Stories

by Loren Niemi – March 27, 2022

What do you remember about your favorite fairy tale? The major characters? Three pigs, a wolf… The basic plot? They build houses, the wolf blows the first two down but can’t shake the third. What else? The setting? Where were the pig’s houses? The time of year? Springtime or was it Summer? Who is telling the story?

Ahh, now there’s the first question that needs be asked about traditional tales, and personal tales as well. While most traditional tales are told in the third person (they/them), there is an argument to be made that when told in the first person (I/we) the story has more “energy” and greater emotional engagement. What is the story when told from one of the pigs or the wolf’s point of view?

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Classes

How Erotic is that?

by Loren Niemi – September 8, 2021

When we posted the description for “The Erotic in Stories” some wag commented that it was “talking about pee-pee” which probably says a lot about his proclivities but nothing about what the workshop actually is. If anything, that comment points out the need for a considered understanding about what eroticism is amid the frequent and casual misunderstandings.

We are not talking about porn. We are not talking about cliché. We are not even talking about the ordinary images of bare-chested hunks of Romance novels or the prominent busts of femme fatales of Detective/Crime covers, though they may claim it.

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Categories
Classes

Forgetting the Middle for a Moment

Woman smoking on couch

by Loren Niemi – August 7, 2021

In America we are used to stories that begin, “Once upon a time…” It is familiar and recognizable. What follows is not here and now, but some other place, some other time in which, as often as not, magic and adventure are possible. What follows is a story that proceeds to an ending which, as often as not, concludes with “Happily ever after.” It takes us out of that other time and place and returns us to the here and now. This too is a metaphor that all is well, that the world turned upside down has been righted.

“Once upon a time” and “Happily ever after” are not the only beginnings and endings of stories. There are dozens, hundreds, of culturally specific beginnings and endings but all serve the same purpose to mark a departure from the here and now into another realm. Why? It is easy to see the utility of those formula beginnings and endings in traditional stories. They are a shorthand that lets the audience suspend judgment, and enjoy the lessons, values, modeling of behaviors that are contained in the entertainment, that is the story.

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