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
Conflict Writing
What: 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 info@consequenceforum.org. 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 four weeks, we’ll continue to do this, but will also reserve the last hour and a half of class for two workshops.
Who: Matthew Krajniak earned his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He co-edited the anthology Wendy Battin: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Unsung Master Series, 2020), and his writing and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry Foundation, Willows Wept Review, The Avalon Literary Review, The Wax Paper, and other publications.
When & Where: Online, Saturdays, April 5 – May 3 from 2p to 4p ET.
Cost: $125.
From Personal to Public Narratives: Advanced Writing Workshop
What: This advanced writing class is designed for writers seeking to refine their nonfiction narrative skills through personal experiences linked to major social events. Over six weeks, participants will bring their own writing—essays, memoirs, or personal narratives—to develop and receive feedback. Each two-hour session includes:
Peer Feedback and Refinement—Participants will present their works for constructive feedback from peers and the instructor. Emphasis will be placed on refining narrative voice, storytelling techniques, structure, and seamlessly integrating personal reflections with social commentary.
General Reading—Reading assignments by esteemed authors such as Victor Hugo, George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Maya Angelou, and contemporary writers like Rebecca Solnit, Eula Biss, Claudia Rankine, and Marjane Satrapi. Each session students are expected to submit a brief reflection on the readings.
Final Sessions—The last two sessions of the class will focus on discussing the reading materials, next steps in publishing, and the sharing and development of participants’ works.
Who: Ali Motamedi is an artist, engineer, and educator residing in the US. His primary focus revolves around themes such as travel, migration, and identity. He has taught at various institutions, including Columbia University in New York and Harrisburg University in Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Akron in Ohio and pursued his studies in Fine Arts at the master’s level at the City University of New York. In addition to writing for various Persian and English language journals, he has published two collections of essays: The Train on which We Hopped, 2018, and I Had to Tell Someone I Was Here, 2024. These collections narrate personal stories that, with a critical gaze, explore a new identity quest for an Iranian immigrant.
When & Where: Online: Saturdays, May 3 – June 7 from 12p – 2p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $145
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: TBD
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $100
Recent Workshops
What: When trying to navigate darkness, looking at a thing head-on will do you no good. You have to look away, slightly, from what you want to see in order to be able to see it at all—because when it comes to vision in the dark, all the power is in the peripheral. And so it is with writing about the dark. A head-on approach is rarely the best way to help the reader see, much less feel what’s there, lurking.
So, in this workshop series, we’ll investigate disruptive craft elements (like lists, fractured narratives, splintered syntax, unconventional punctuation, and sonic patterning) as force-multipliers. That is, we’ll explore together how some of the best modern war poets leverage disruptions in craft to wobble the ground beneath the reader’s feet—to disorient, to provoke, to confound, and ultimately, to reveal.
In each of six workshop sessions, we’ll investigate a different formal device called upon by our best modern war poets to evade the reader’s defenses and communicate something about conflict, about violence, that’s viscerally affecting, and—for all its surreality—real. We’ll seek out the access-hatches, the pressure points, the trapdoors to the psyche. And then we’ll work to apply what we’ve learned to the page.
Who: Margaret M. Kelly holds an MFA in Poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, where she studied cross-genre in fiction as well. She also holds an AB with Honors in Political Theory from Princeton University and a JD from Virginia Law, where she co-edited and co-authored an anthology on the Law of War—Lifting the Fog of War: New Thinking about War and War Prevention.
Her first poetry collection, Unbalancing Act, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Her poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in the Asheville Review, the Jabberwock Review, and Quarter after Eight, among others.
When she’s not writing, Margaret works as an admissions specialist at Backcountry Academics; she volunteers as a crisis worker for 988 (the National Crisis Lifeline); and she partners with Ukraine Global Scholars, helping high-achieving Ukrainians earn scholarships and admission to excellent schools abroad.
She lives on a farm in Virginia with her shepherd dog, Huck.
What: This generative, experimental poetry course will explore transmutations, a cyclical conversation between written and visual, auditory, and tactile art. Poems will become audio compositions, artwork will become poetry, and then these conversations will be reversed, fracturing and reconstructing individual and collaborative work.
Working with themes of geopolitical violence and war is neither a prerequisite nor a requirement for the course, but much of the suggested reading and source material will be centered on war and depictions of it. The purpose of this course is not only to create original work, which, on occasion, we will discuss in class, but also to find artistic and literary peers with whom to collaborate.
Required Reading: During this course, we will consider a range of visual and literary material, including the poetry collections The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey and Spectral Evidence by Gregory Pardlo, selected poems by Victoria Chang, Cythia Hogue, and Danez Smith, and depictions of war and geopolitical violence by Otto Dix, Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi, Mona Hatoum, and Bukta Imre.
Who: Christianne is a poet, visual artist, and composer from Michigan. Oracle Smoke Machine is Christianne’s ekphrastic art-and-poetry collaboration with painter Stephen Proski. Christianne’s work is published by Arts Fuse, Consequence, Burningword Literary Journal, Fahmidan Journal, Panel Magazine, Rust + Moth, and The Lakeshore Review, among others, and she writes book and culture reviews for Tupelo Quarterly, HarperOne, and Hungarian Literature Online. She is a graduate of the Boston University MFA program, the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow.
What: This introductory six-week workshop aims to create an engaging, generative space of exploration and experimentation for writers at all levels. Amongst topics of discussion will be point of view, place, and language. Readings may include works by Saidiya Hartman, Jo Ann Beard, Jesmyn Ward, Emily Bernard, and Jaquira Díaz. Students will be expected to read all assigned materials and actively engage in class discussions.
Who: Stephanie Cuepo Wobby is a Filipino American writer and a former US Army combat medic. Her work has appeared in The Point, Off Assignment, and Guernica, amongst other publications. A graduate of Columbia University’s Writing MFA program, she’s received support from the Columbia University School of the Arts and the de Groot Foundation towards her work. She currently lives in Vermont with her husband and their two dogs.
