Writing Workshops
The goal of our writing workshops is to help individuals grow either creatively or professionally. We do this through traditional creative writing workshops and through professional writing workshops that are focused on topics like publishing, grant writing, and business plan development. Our primary audiences are Veterans and victims of and witnesses to war and geopolitical violence—individuals whose experiences may not have afforded them the opportunity to yet learn these skills. However, we also offer plenty of classes to general audiences, though the class topics gravitate toward our themes.
Upcoming Workshops
Designations of Empire and Our Use of Poetic Language
What: Poetry is profound because it is emotive and deeply personal. But how do we express the personal and the affective in the face of linguistic habituation, unified literariness, and linguistic conformity? This writing workshop will focus on dismantling and discouraging automatic associations, mental slips, and every usage of already-made language. The incorporated writing exercises will encourage us to experiment with and borrow from subversive language approaches that free language from its riveted and imperial past. We will examine the designation of “poetic language,” how much of our agency and legitimacy is sacrificed in pursuing this poetic language, and what language we can invent to share personal truths and revelations.
By the end of this class, participants will be exposed to constructive and edifying approaches to language use and meaning-making.
Reference books:
Mad Woman by Shara McCallum
Togetherness by Wo Chan
Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil
Who: Chiagoziem Jideofor is Queer and Igbo. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in POETRY, Michigan Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, South Carolina Review, berlin lit, The Lincoln Review, Passages North, Commonwealth’s ADDA, the minnesota review, Sho Poetry Journal, Obsidian, and so on.
When & Where: Online: Thursdays, May 22 – June 12 from 7p – 9p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $100
The Witnessing Poet: Navigating the Personal and the Collective
What: Poetry that bears witness to personal and historical trauma, war, and grief, demands both immediacy—the ability to bring a reader directly into a moment—and urgency—the necessity of speaking difficult truths. But how do poets balance raw experience with reflection? William Wordsworth described poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility, but for those writing about war, grief, and historical trauma, this luxury is often unavailable.
In this workshop, we will consider the difference between personal testimony and inherited witnessing, as well as strategies for evoking lived experience versus reflecting on history. We will examine how poets navigate the personal and the collective, writing from both direct experience and the responsibility of bearing witness to others’ suffering. Our primary focus will be engaging with and strengthening participants’ own poetry, exploring how poetic techniques—such as syntax, pacing, omission, and sensory detail—create urgency, immediacy, and authenticity.
- Session 1: Witnessing and the Poetic Lens
- Session 2: Crafting Urgency and Immediacy
- Session 3: Navigating the Personal and the Collective
- Session 4: Refining and Deepening the Work
After this class, participants will be able to point to a deeper understanding of how to balance immediacy and urgency in their poetry, particularly when writing about personal and collective trauma. They will leave with practical techniques for crafting authenticity—using syntax, pacing, omission, and sensory detail to heighten emotional impact—while also recognizing the power of reflection and restraint. Through readings, discussion, and writing prompts, they will have explored different modes of witnessing, from personal testimony to inherited history, and gained strategies for navigating these complexities in their own work. Most importantly, they will walk away with strengthened drafts and a refined awareness of how form, voice, and perspective shape the weight and resonance of a poem.
Who: Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Pushcart Prize poet, award-winning translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She has authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards ‘Must Read’ in Poetry, and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest, which was named to Brilliant Books’s Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list. Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize and winner of the 2020-2021 AAUS Prize for Translation. They received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship for their translation of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024), a finalist for the 2025 PEN America Literary Award.
When & Where: Online: Saturdays, June 7 – 28 from 12 – 2p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $105
Previous Workshops
The Quartet: Exploring the Multi-Part Poem
What: Designed for poets with some previous writing experience, this workshop explores the quartet (the multi-part poem) made famous by T.S. Eliot. While Eliot’s opus is our starting point in terms of themes (e.g., time, the universe, and the divine), we will explore examples from contemporary poets—like Natalie Diaz, Patricia Smith, and John Murillo—who draw from their lives to create visceral and culturally relevant interconnected poems that tell a powerful story.
This workshop is for those who have work (or the beginnings of it) that addresses the consequences of war or geopolitcal violence. The four-class workshop series will be of particular interest though, to poets who have lived under occupation or segregation / apartheid, or veterans of war, displacement, migration, etc., as the quartet lends itself to highlighting a series of experiences or a time period.
Poets will learn how to use select forms, and experiment with time and perspectives to tell a cohesive story.
Conflict Writing
Who: Consequence Executive Editor, Matthew Krajniak, will host a fiction workshop for writers who are at any stage of developing a story that relates to the human consequences of war or geopolitical violence. These stories can be of any length, though self-contained pieces typically work best. If you are unsure if your story fits this workshop, please email Matthew at consequenceforum@gmail.com. This class is not exclusively for veterans, combatants, and victims, but rather is open to everyone as long as your story relates to these consequences.
Why: Writing fiction related to the consequences of war and geopolitical conflict is difficult for any number of reasons, from the lack of verisimilitude to shaping intense personal experiences into an effective narrative. We’ll cover any number of aspects of craft, but learning how to handle these challenging themes will be the focus of this workshop.
How: The first week we’ll concentrate on generative exercises, discussing a short story and a craft essay, talk about the publishing world, and in general get to know each other a little better. For the other five weeks, we’ll continue to do this, but will also reserve the last hour and a half of class for two workshops.
Writing Speculative War Fiction with Literary Flair
What: War is a human constant, so it’s no surprise that conflict and its consequences feature across all genres of fiction—even the fantastical and futuristic. This workshop will focus on a broad range of speculative fiction, from fantasy, sci-fi, and horror to magical realism and fabulism, that specifically explores themes of geopolitical violence. At Consequence, we define geopolitical violence broadly to encompass displacement, systemic racism, state-sponsored killings, and colonization. Through the lens of the speculative, these types of short stories depict the familiar in an unfamiliar light, enabling readers to uncover new facets of crucial, real-world topics.
Here, you’ll find a crash course in writing short speculative fiction centered on victims and witnesses to war and political conflict. Participants will read and discuss 8,000–15,000 words per week (typically two or three pieces—short stories, novel excerpts, and/or craft essays) related to a variety of subjects: world-building, character details, style, and endings. Each session will include a generative writing exercise component.
Writers will receive individualized feedback from one of their peers and the instructor on a short story or novel excerpt. In addition, they will have the opportunity to vent about their writing obstacles during a Talk Therapy for Writers session, where each writer talks their way through a problem while the group asks them questions designed to get the gears turning.