Creative Writing

I am interested in building power and voice with language, and in writing personal stories that push the boundaries of self. I’m obsessed with narrative persona, as well as the narrative modes required to shape a story. I loved braided essays and hybrid memoirs, where the story is larger than the self. Another obsession is creative writing pedagogy, which I work on with writers who want to teach. 

I work with my nonfiction writers via email, on the phone, over Zoom, however they need to work. “Who is this person writing the piece?” I want to know, “and how can I help them fulfill their intention and vision for the work?” I listen carefully—I’m a deeply intuitive writer—because writers often say out loud what they have neglected to say on the page. Speech is important to voice, and to catching the parts of ourselves that we reveal spontaneously and without censure. These are often the most important parts of the story. 

But writing is not just self-expression. The poet Billy Collins said, “Form gives you an enclosed space to work within and keep it from descending into chaos or tantrum. “ We are here not to only say what we must but to find the most effective way to say it. Artfulness comes only when one applies a shape—even in nonfiction. The separation of the author and the narrator is critical. I don’t think that demystifying the writing process has to take the magic out of it. It can add to the awe. 
 
For more information about Janet, visit her website: www.janetpocorobba.com 

The publishing industry is changing. There is a broader definition now of what storytelling looks like, and who storytellers are. But change is coming painfully slowly, and it needs to be changed from all fronts, including accepting that there are different, beautiful, engaging ways to tell a story than we have previously seen on our shelves, in our classrooms, and in our workshops.

The traditional workshop model worked for those whose stories were traditionally acceptable, stories that often perpetuated bias and cut out many voices. I work to educate myself about storytelling from different cultures. I actively seek new ways to create workshops that embrace different story styles and push the individual creator forward. I love the low-residency model of the Creative Writing program because I can individualize instruction for each mentee.

It is, I hope, a way to break new ground while also cracking open something for each writer. The goal is to find stories that only you can tell, and the format that best serves the story, and then focusing on the craft that illuminates both. It is tough, careful work, and my favorite thing about teaching.

Learn more about Tracey Baptise on her website.

Erin is a poet and writer whose work focuses on gender, love, and history.  In 2009, along with the poet Cate Marvin, Belieu founded the national literary organization VIDA.

To be an effective dramatist, I believe you must do three things:

•  Know what your characters want
•  Never make it too easy on your characters
•  You, the dramatist, must love your characters, even the most despicable ones.

Writing a script, play or screenplay, is a journey, and as your teacher/mentor, I'll do my best to guide you in writing the script you want to write. At the same time, I'll be asking all the hard questions of the script. No doubt, my main focus will be on character, for the core of all drama is "character in action." "Character in action" applies to every script, from a high-concept action-adventure screenplay to an intimate two-person play.

An interview with Jami Brandli

I have been teaching playwriting since 1990 and screenwriting since 1998. My total love for theatre and movies (and TV too) as well as the history of these genres, drives my instruction. I'm always intrigued at the seemingly infinite number of ways people want to tell a visual story. Just when I thought I'd seen it all, some student will come to a class, or send me an assignment, that will test the boundaries of everything I thought I knew about writing for the Stage and Screen. And that's when the fun begins. As I read something I'm working on, I'll often stop and think "I'd never accept this from a student," shake my head, hit the "delete" button, and try it again.

It all pays off when I'm sitting in a theatre, or a classroom, and watching (or listening) to a student's work being read or performed. I remember the piece's various drafts. I marvel when something I told the student wouldn't work does work after all. I can feel the attention being paid to the spoken word. And I can't imagine doing anything else.

I teach creative writing as the art that it is. Teachers of any art can’t implant true originality, or stoke the “fire in the belly” without the help of ready kindling, but they can nurture, through attentive challenge, the promise of apprentice artists. That dynamic involves the student’s willingness to recognize critique as a kind of caring, and the teacher’s alertness to the constraints and capacities of the apprentice.  The way a painter teaches studio art, or guitar instructors position their students’ fingers on the frets—that’s how good creative writing mentors teach.  And they don’t confuse rigor with ruthlessness, even as they know artists must be ruthless with themselves. Yes, they have to provide an honest appraisal of the merits of a student’s work-in-progress—promising or unpromising—but that can be done with what Seamus Heaney beautifully calls “care for the emotional tissues.”

I'm interested in how poetic traditions of all sort live inside our own work. I don’t believe that creative writing exists without creative, constant, and catholic reading. I know of no serious writer who didn’t first love reading.

When a poem is finished, it is a gift that no longer belongs to the poet.
 

My teaching philosophy is constantly evolving...in response to what I'm reading, encountering in daily life and in the classroom, or learning from my students. My basic goal is to provide my students with the tools to teach themselves. Some of these tools have to do with how we gain access to the creative, inspired, subconscious sides of ourselves; others have to do with our critical faculties. The writing workshops are particularly useful to help people learn to become their own best editors through editing the work of others.

Beyond that, I'm strongly interested in questions of how we live in, engage with, and observe the world. I teach a seminar on the art of observation or "seeing like a writer." Understanding our own habits of mind and how these affect what and how we see is vital to also understanding that others see differently, and that you can show a great deal about who people are by what it is that they notice or fail to notice.

My aim is to encourage my students to move their own work to its highest level, not to write like me or according to some prerequisite standard of what makes a good story. There are always a variety of styles and approaches to writing in my workshop, and I'm delighted when someone "goes too far." Beyond that, I have to agree with Henry James that "the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of (a work of fiction) is, that it be interesting.

My philosophies regarding the teaching of writing are these: that the gateway to the unconscious must be opened, through habit and practice, in the production of creative material, or the writing cannot succeed. As a mentor, I ask students to describe the actual process that goes on in the writing of a story (or novel), and specifically how the story or novel idea came to be, how it germinated. Often stories succeed or fail when they are conceived in the rational part of the mind, or when the rational mind is too soon engaged.

I encourage students to risk themselves in their work, to be bold, for only in the act of risk can there be growth. The two years in an MFA program is in and of itself a permission slip, perhaps the one time they've been afforded to place writing in the center of their lives, and therefore students should use this time to try as many different styles as possible. In this way it is also important that they be exposed to many different types of writing, both contemporary and from the canon. In this way they are exposed to the many ways other writers approach the craft. What matters, I always tell students, is what has been gained in the process of taking risks.

In poetry, more than in any other type of writing, language drives meaning. By focusing on the small elements of craft: line, syntax and line break, image and metaphor, sound and diction, I believe the poet finds a way to discover and inform the large elements: inspiration, intention, concept, invention, and communication. I engage each poem—and student—on their own terms, taking them as far (and deep) as possible, while challenging the student to examine their assumptions about what a poem can do. Through my extensive experience as an editor, I am especially able to help envision and re-envision a poem as well as a thesis/manuscript. My students have published books and chapbooks as well as poems in journals.

Good writing makes us our most honest selves, and as a faculty mentor I'm fundamentally committed to coaching students as they work to set down the truth - whether it takes the form of fiction or nonfiction. When I work with a student, my most important job is to notice everything I can about that student's writing. Because the best way I know to understand writing is through detail - what Ryszard Kapuscinski called "the universe in the raindrop" - I focus on very close readings of student manuscripts. I try to read not only the story that's on the page, but also the story that might only be hinted at, because the writer hasn't yet dared write it. Sometimes this kind of reading leads us to focus together on what initially seemed only a faint tracery on the page - but might in fact be the barely audible heartbeat of the story that the writer truly needs to tell. My students know I'd rather they take risks and fail than write safe stories that leave no mark on either reader or writer. I congratulate my students on attempting each big leap, even if they fall hard - that sort of failure is productive, necessary, catalyzing.

I write fiction and nonfiction and have edited radio drama, but I learn a great deal from other genres and art forms, and I encourage my students to do the same - to attend playwriting workshops, read craft books written for sculptors. Art should always be surprising, and I want my students to surprise themselves; to raise the bar again and again; to be delighted by their own and others' contributions to the fledgling writing community that is a workshop. I believe in taking a student's writing more seriously than he or she may have dared take it... I tend to focus intensely on character development, as so much of a story's structure and plot grow out of character... I have a particular interest in the ways in which history and politics are metabolized through art. That said, I try to leaven seriousness with humor, with compassion, and with the sense that good writing is absolutely essential, though producing it can feel like pulling one's soul through a sieve.

If we do this work well together, then the heartbeat of a story, perhaps only faintly audible in the first draft, strengthens. These are the best moments. A student revises and I critique, the student revises and revises again... and then abruptly the student is off and running without need of more advice, and we're looking at a draft together, and we can all of us hear that heart beating.

Listen to Rachel Kadish talk about her work on Lesley's podcast, Why We Write. Also available here: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or Spotify.

My most valuable teaching tool is the work itself, whether it's a piece of student writing, or the published work of a seasoned author. I'm interested in how and why a piece of fiction engages the reader, and I ask my students to consider what elements make a story and lead them to feel a certain way. I ask them where the engagement is happening on the page, and what dynamic is taking place between the reader and the words. This search is often where the student, transferring this consideration to his own work, discovers what his story is really about. This exploration, if we take a risk and allow it to, will lead the writer to discover the truth in and about his own writing.

I stress revision as the time when a piece of work finds its form and meaning, and when all the elements of fiction we talk about in seminars and workshops and submissions come together to serve the story. Revision - that process of chipping away, fine-tuning, and rethinking - is also about looking at the language and considering the cadence and the music of the writing. It's during revision that we feel ourselves itching to leave the work and run away, but it's those drops of sweat, that racing heart, that lets us know we're about to get to the true and genuine stuff.

I love teaching in Lesley's program and find my students enormously inspiring.

Learn more about Hester at her website, www.hesterkaplan.com, or at www.goathillwriters.com

Michelle Knudsen is the New York Times best-selling author of fifty books for young readers of all ages, including the award-winning picture book Library Lion, which was selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best Children's Books of All Time. Her other books include the picture book Marilyn's Monster (one of NPR's Best Books of 2015) and the novels The Dragon of Trelian (VOYA Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers) and Evil Librarian (YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults and winner of the Sid Fleischman Award for Humor). Michelle also works as a freelance editor and writing coach. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Connect with Michelle through her website at www.michelleknudsen.com. 

E. M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher, and opera librettist. Her work has been produced around the world, and published by Samuel French. She received the Steinberg Award for both How the Light Gets In and Song of Extinction and the Primus Prize for Heads from the American Theater Critics Association, the Ted Schmitt Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for outstanding writing of a world premiere play, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a playwriting fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Commission, the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama, and an Edgerton Award for her epic Antarctic play, Magellanica, that was produced at Artists Repertory Theater in 2018 and released as a five-part audio podcast in 2020.

Other plays by Lewis include: Apple Season (which received a rolling world premiere from the National New Play Network in 2019), Infinite Black Suitcase, The Gun Show (which has had more than fifty productions across the country and went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland), True Story, Dorothy's Dictionary, You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center), and How the Light Gets In (a semi-finalist for the O’Neill that premiered at Boston Court Pasadena in 2019).

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant, a new opera commissioned by American Lyric Theater that Lewis is working on with composer Evan Meier, had an orchestral workshop in New York City in February 2020. Town Hall, her opera about health care in America, created with composer Theo Popov, was produced at University of Maryland and Willamette University. She wrote a ten-minute musical called The Letter with composer Stacey Philipps, and is working on a full-length musical called In the Deep with composer Roscoe McDonald.

Lewis is currently working on a big, new political play called The Great Divide, commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of their American Revolutions program, and co-commissioned by Artists Repertory Theater, where she is Playwright in Residence through the Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program. Lewis is a proud member of LineStorm Playwrights, Opera America, and the Dramatists Guild. She is represented by Samara Harris at the Michael Moore Agency. She lives on her family’s farm in Oregon. 

To walk a fictional mile in someone else's fictional shoes, first you have to make that pair of shoes; it helps to know something about cobbling. After many years in the footwear trade, as it were, I'm happy to share with students anything I've learned about uppers and soles (or even, on a good day, maybe, souls).

Having worked with quite a few editors over the past twenty years, I feel my strongest work as a teacher is when I bring the best of those experiences to my students. The most energizing exchanges always came when I realized a great editor was in fact pouring her energy into channelling me, rather than battling me. I believe new writers come to us wanting to sound like their best selves, I believe they are right to feel this way, and I believe it is my duty to help them achieve this. (We may sometimes have to debate what that best self might actually be, but that too is part of the fun.)

In workshop there is one horse I feel is never too dead to beat: our objective is to get the writer back to the keyboard. All feedback does not need to be cheerleading but it does need to be designed to leave the writer with the ideas - and the will - to go back and make the work stronger.

I do not have a teaching philosophy. Maybe empathy. But that's not philosophy. As a mentor I try to intuit what's in the minds and hearts of the writers I work with, hoping to help sharpen their philosophy, their thoughts, their words, and their meaning, so that they can achieve whatever special literary goal they have set for themselves. In the end, if I do have to define a philosophy of teaching, or the technique I use to buttress that philosophy, then simply, it is to use my experience as a writer in guiding and assisting my students along their journey to fulfill their imagination.

In the early drafts, I'm mostly interested in helping you see what is at the heart of the story. Who is this character, what does he or she want, and why do you, the writer, see him or her in that particular place doing that particular thing? I try to get you to understand the elements of the story that interest you the most - the characters, the place and the time setting, the images that started you thinking about the story in the first place, the one sentence that seemed right and important from the beginning - in order to sort out what is essential and what is not. My job is to help you figure out which things you started out with are worth keeping and developing, and (just as importantly) to encourage you to be utterly ruthless about throwing out the rest.

In the middle stages, I try to help you with the overall structure of the narrative: where to begin, what to explain right away, what to reveal more gradually along the way, how much to leave open-ended. This is a good time to consider and reconsider what is plausible and what is not, what is confusing to the reader and what is so clear that it doesn't need to be explained, where the story happens too fast and where it bogs down. With every subsequent draft, more attention can be paid to each paragraph, each sentence, each word. The final revision in which we get to scrutinize every word is a real pleasure and reward. I enjoy teaching because I like to see the story come into focus over time; it's both a pleasure and an honor to be part of that process.

Learn more about Kyoko at her website: www.kyokomori.com

Thato R. Mwosa is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. Her films have been broadcast nationally and internationally. Thato’s first feature film, Memoirs of a Black Girl, premiered at the 2021 Boston Globe’s Black History Month Film Festival and it won Best Feature Film award at the 2021 Hamilton Black Film Festival and the 2021 Roxbury International Film Festival (RIFF). Thato has been featured by National Public Radio (NPR) and Boston Globe. Thato is currently working on her next feature film which hopes to complete in 2024.

In 2021,  Thato was selected for  Company One’s Playlab Circuit Volt Playwriting Lab. She was a finalist for the 2019 Mass Cultural Art Fellowship in the Dramatic Writing category. Thato was a quarter-finalist for The Academy Nicholl Fellowship and a semi-finalist of the 2021 Writer Lab NY for her screenplay A Blue Dawn.

Thato teaches Visual Media Arts at Emerson College and Writing for Stage and Screen at Lesley’s University Creative Writing MFA Residency Program. This fall of 2022, she will be a full-time Professor of Screenwriting at Boston University.

Pamela teaches in the Nonfiction and Graphic Novel & Comics genres of Lesley's MFA in Creative Writing program. Pamela views the mentoring relationship in both as a dialogue rather than a traditional teaching experience.

"The most important thing I’ve discovered as a working writer, and that I can convey to students, is that inspiration comes from writing. Writing doesn’t come from inspiration. Slogging out one word after another, sketching one comics panel after the next—especially when you don’t know what you want to say or where you’re going—is an act of great bravery. It’s also the only way I know to sufficiently rev up my imagination to take creative leaps into the unknown. The usual advice is to write what you know. I say, write what you are familiar with, not what you know. The very act of writing helps us articulate the deep, important things we didn’t even know we knew. Only writing affords me access to that place of understanding inside me. And I see my job at Lesley University as helping students find their way to that place inside themselves."

In addition to mentoring students, Pamela directs the Dylan Thomas Summer School in Creative Writing at The University of Wales where Lesley MFA students have been attending for credit since the program began in 2014. If you’ve ever wanted to write about an 11^th-century Welsh castle while in that castle, or compose a poem in the style of Dylan Thomas in Dylan Thomas’ childhood bedroom, come with us to Wales.

Learn more about Pam on her website and connect with her on Instagram @petropamela

Cynthia Platt is the author of books for young readers for all ages, ranging from board books to young adult fiction. Her picture books include Grow, A Little Bit of Love, and Panda-monium. She’s also the author of the young middle grade novel Parker Bell & the Science of Friendship, the YA novel Postcards from Summer, and numerous Curious George books. She also teaches undergraduate liberal arts courses at Montserrat College of Art. With more than twenty years under her belt as an editor of books for young readers at Candlewick Press and the former Houghton Mifflin Harcourt trade publisher, she brings her experiences as both a writer and editor to her work as a faculty mentor for Writing for Young People MFA program.

You can learn more about Cynthia at her website: cynthiaplattbooks.com

Keven Prufer teaches in the Poetry genre of the MFA in Creative Writing program.

"Like other art forms, poetry at its best is a kind of complex communication—a way one mind speaks to a multitude of minds, many of them not yet born. What attracts me to poetry particularly is not merely the way it compresses or asserts meaning, but the way a poem can hold multiple, often conflicting, meanings. The poems I admire are frequently born out of ambivalence—out of strong feelings or beliefs in conflicting directions. These poems ask difficult, vital human questions, but their object is not necessarily to answer these questions. They are, in fact, often unanswerable. Instead, they think about them with purpose and complexity, helping us reformulate them for ourselves."

Although Kevin loves to talk about the technical aspects of poetry writing—rhyme, meter, image, tone—Kevin generally approaches drafts of student poems with these 3 questions:

1. What questions is this poem engaged with?
2. How does it go about trying to think about these questions?
3. How might it do so more successfully?

Connect with Kevin through his website.

My philosophy is to have a good time getting to know the characters in the stories. Let's all ask the questions, the hard ones, the funny ones, the ridiculous ones, to make sure the characters are breathing. Then, once they are alive, we can be better informed of the development of the plot.

Also, I believe in positive reinforcement. I refuse to edit without highlighting strengths. My job is to serve as sort of a literary "personal trainer."  When you show up to my "gym," I'll be certain to let you know how great you look, and far along you've come. I'm going to tell you how proud I am, and how I can finally see the abs coming in. And then, we're going to hit the weights and work our butts off, pushing you to the limit for the desired goal — a perfectly chiseled story.

Aside from writing for television, magazines, and video games, John Rozum has been writing comics professionally for over thirty years. He has written for companies such as Marvel, DC, Topps, Milestone Media, Boom! Studios, Interpop Comics, and others. He has written characters such as Daredevil, Batman, Superman, and Scooby-Doo, and properties ranging from The X-Files to Dexter’s Laboratory. He is best known as the creator of the critically acclaimed Xombi and Midnight, Mass. Currently, he is writing the digital comic, The Abyss, for Interpop Comics. He has been an independent study advisor in writing graphic novels for Lesley University since 2012.

Cassie M. Seinuk is a playwright, AEA Stage Manager, visual artist and educator in Boston, MA. Her play, From the Deep, has won multiple awards, including The Pestalozzi New Play Prize and the Latinidad Playwrights Award at the Kennedy Center. It was also a recipient of the Boston University Jewish Culture Endowment, and it appeared on the 2015 Kilroys Honorable Mention List. The production of From the Deep received IRNE Award nominations and nearly sold out at 2016 FringeNYC Festival.

Eyes Shut. Door Open. or “ESDO” was a recipient of the Bob Jolly Charitable Fund Grant. ESDO won the 2016 OnStage Critics Award for an Outstanding New Work. Short play, Occupy Hallmark, won the 2015 National Ten Minute Play Award at the Kennedy Center. Her newest play, Dream House, was developed at New Repertory Theatre as part of Next Voices Fellows, and has earned her a Mass. Cultural Council Fellowship. 

Seinuk’s short plays have been produced nationwide. She is a member of Boston Public Works, The Dramatist Guild, and AEA, and is a 2017 Mass. Cultural Council Fellow Finalist. As a stage manager, Seinuk has worked with Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Central Square Theatre (The Nora and URT), Bridge Rep of Boston, SpeakEasy, and The Berkshire Theatre Group.

"Playwrights are given the gift of creating entire worlds for our audiences to experience with all five senses. We are able to make magic happen before their eyes with our words.  I want you to know what your character wants and what they will do to get what they want.  As a faculty mentor, I want you to dream wild, write imaginatively, and ask big questions from your plays and screenplays." - Cassie Seinuk

When asked what principle qualities make a good dramatist, playwright David Hare replied without hesitation: “Good playwrights have a distinctive view of the world. It’s their world view. It’s how they see the world.” This is the mantra that steers me as artist and as instructor. If my first job is to ensure that students discover, value and cultivate that individual perspective, my second - and perhaps more important - job is to give them the tools to bring forth a work of art.

My teaching passion involves revision. Period. When I first began to write, I was completely daunted by my heroically obtained but completely unsatisfactory drafts. I went, as I do always, in search of references to instruct me, and found nothing I could really use on revision. This challenged me. I have spent all my teaching energies of the last fifteen years coming up with a strategy for communicating revision. My work as a teacher is all about answering this critical question: What do you do now that you have a good draft? How do you move a draft from "done", to beautiful?

I teach a method of revision that has been page-tested by my students. Beginning with defining the hot center, or the passion source, of each manuscript, and radiating out, we refine everything down to where you place your commas and periods. I teach students to revise with acuity, and I teach students to consider and reconsider every word they choose to use. I encourage students to refresh their understanding of the narrative and poetic elements we employ to write fiction, and to make choices among those of which elements to scour, polish and/or re-envision.

Once you know what you're doing revision is the revelator. Watching a manuscript begin to glisten from the muck of an early draft is like finding an emerald in the mud.

Listen to A.J. share writing advice on our podcast.

Sara Zarr is the author of nine novels for young readers, as well as Courageous Creativity: Advice and Encouragement for the Creative Life and This Creative Life: A Handbook for Writers. All of her fiction is contemporary realism, with a focus on the inter- and intrapersonal dramas within the family unit, broadly defined. Her nonfiction (both short and long form) ranges in focus from the psychological and practical obstacles to a productive writing life, to how childhood trauma and dysfunction play out in adulthood, to faith and religion in art and culture. 

Sara is a National Book Award finalist and two-time Utah Book Award winner. Her books have been variously named to annual best books lists of the American Library Association, Kirkus, School Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly, and the International Reading Association. Her essays and creative nonfiction have been published in Image, Relief, Gather, and several anthologies. She also hosts and produce the This Creative Life podcast.