Writing Workshops
We offer both a sliding scale and a reduced rate for those who can’t make a class
but would like to have access to the video recordings.
For more info, please email info@consequenceforum.org
Upcoming Workshops
Poetry and the Consciousness of War
What: Modern poetry is an art based in consciousness, one that finds its music in working with the patterns of how we think and process information, our own experience, and also our experience of information.
This month-long workshop and discussion class will focus on how poets have used formal strategies to address the information and experiences of war. Using prompts from the instructor, students will produce weekly poems responding to or using craft-strategies used by poets discussed in the first part of each class session, share their poems in class, and get feedback from the instructor and classmates in workshop discussions.
Reading List (2-4 poems per week)
Week One: Yehuda Amichai, Alan Dugan
Week Two: Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Jarrell
Week Three: Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara
Week Four: C.K. Williams, Marianne Moore
Class Process:
Students will email instructor Word files or PDFs of poems workshop five days before class, and instructor in turn will email class packet of assigned readings and workshop poems to think about before class sessions.
Who: David Blair has been teaching poetry workshops for thirty years. He is a poet based in Somerville, Massachusetts. He teaches poetry in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of five books of poetry (Ascension Days, Friends with Dogs, Arsonville, Barbarian Seasons, and True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems) and a collection of essays, Walk Around.
Where & When: Online: Tuesdays, July 8, 15, 22 and Aug. 5, 6:30 – 8:30p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $100
Writing through Conflict: A free nonfiction workshop for emerging writers
What: A nonfiction writing workshop for writers ages fifteen to twenty-four whose lives or relationships have been affected by war, conflict, or global violence. Whether through family history, displacement, political instability, or community impact, this workshop invites writers to examine how large-scale events intersect with personal experience. You’ll explore how to craft compelling personal essays that reflect on history, identity, and the consequences of global crises—past and present.
This three-session workshop will feature writing activities, revision strategies, and feedback. You’ll have an opportunity to submit to the Young Writers Project. If your essay is accepted, you will be able to work with editors to further refine your writing.
In these sessions, you will
- Write a personal essay reflecting on how war or global conflict has shaped your life, family, or community
- Learn how to turn your own experiences into powerful writing
- Get tips on how to revise—what to keep, what to cut, and how to make your voice stronger
- Share your work and get feedback in a supportive space
Who: Chris Gorrie is a writer, editor, and digital marketer from San Diego. After completing an MA in British Literature from San Diego State he published a monograph on W.B. Yeats and existential psychology. His poetry, fiction, and hybrid works have appeared in venues like Duende, San Diego Poetry Annual, The Penn Review, and Poems-for-All. He has held various senior editorial roles in the electronic media space, and is the owner of Text Sense, a content creation and digital marketing agency.
Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, where she teaches and manages arts-in-education programs in schools and correctional facilities. Her book, Mothers Over Nangarhar, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton prize, was published in 2019 by Sarabande Books. She received a poetry fellowship from the NEA. She is Poetry Editor for Afghan Voices, the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and Assistant Nonfiction editor for Consequence Forum. Her poems have been published in online and print journals.
Where & When: Online: Monday, July 28; Wednesday, July 30; and Monday, August 6. Each class will run from 7:30p – 8:30p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: Free
Email to Register
The Grammar of History, the Syntax of War
What: “The rules of grammar,” according to writer Janice Lee, “aren’t just a set of rules; they’re a set of expectations, conventions, agreements, and an archive of relationality and history.” In this course, we will explore how writers use grammar and its “archive” to order and disrupt, repeat and erase, embody and transform experience—not only to depict the violence of history, but also to examine and problematize language itself.
We will read and discuss works by Layli Long Soldier, M. NourbeSe Philip, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rick Barot, and others, using these as invitations to generate new work. Participants will then revise one of their pieces for the fifth and final class, which will be a workshop.
Who: Born and raised in the Philippines, José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes is the author of the chapbook Present Values, winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. In 2024, he received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America for a selection of poems. His poems have recently appeared in RHINO Poetry, Laurel Review, and Lily Poetry Review; and have been featured on The Slowdown.
Where & When: Online: Saturdays, Aug. 23 – Sept. 20 from 12 – 2p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $105
Writing Sci-Fi War Stories
What: Terminal Learning Objective (TLO): Participants generate a short, speculative war story (up to 5,000 words) of publishable quality.
Session 1: The Hook
~Prework: read three military science fiction stories
~Enabling Learning Objective (ELO) 1: Understand what constitutes military fiction
~ELO 2: Understand the difference between science fiction and fantasy
~ELO 3: Write the first sentence of a war story
~Homework: write the backstory of your main character (100 words)
Session 2: The Character
~ELO 4: Understand how to give and receive feedback
~ELO 5: Invest the reader in the main character
~ELO 6: Write a 100-word character backstory
~Homework: outline a short war story
Session 3: The Plot
~ELO 7: Outline the story
~Homework: Prepare to 15- to 20-word critique of all other participants’ stories
Session 4: The Workshop
~ELO 8: Emphasize how to give and
~ELO 9: Hone the short story
~Workshop: 5 minutes of critique per story, without introduction from author
~Homework: Make a plan for submitting the story (introduction to Submission Grinder)
Who: Nathan W. Toronto is the author of Rise of Ahrik, Revenge of the Emerald Moon, and Redemption of the White Planet (forthcoming), a trilogy about the meaning of love, gender, and war in society. He also edits and publishes Bullet Points, a print and digital magazine of military science fiction, and is the author of How Militaries Learn: Human Capital, Military Education, and Battlefield Effectiveness, an academic book about how armed forces become professional.
He holds a PhD in international relations from The Ohio State University and speaks Arabic, Spanish, and Hebrew. He has lived in ten countries and visited some two dozen others, developing a firm belief that Mexican food is the best, at least for lunch and dinner.
Where & When: Online: Thursdays, Sept. 4 – 25 from 7 – 8:15p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $90
Bringing the Receipts: Using Personal Documents as Prompts to Write about the Past
What: Writing can be a powerful tool for processing the past, especially when it’s painful. The mind has tricks for coping with difficult events, hazing the details or even obliterating them. Maybe the trauma happened to you as a child, or before you were born. In this workshop, we will use personal documents as prompts to explore writing about the past. Each meeting in this generative three-week workshop will incorporate a different artifact: a photo, an official document, and a letter. The documents will be used as prompts for free writing exercises. After a short craft discussion, there will be side-by-side writing that expands upon the free writing exercises, followed by group sharing, and supportive feedback.
This workshop is for anyone interested in writing about complicated life events in memoir, creative nonfiction, personal essays, autofiction, or even just to explore the past. All writing levels are welcome.
Who: Author of the novel, Famous Adopted People, Alice Stephens is also a book reviewer, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in LitHub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Margins, the Washington Post, and other publications. Her historical novel, The Twain, is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in 2027. She is currently working on a collection of autofictional short stories that tell the story of her adoption from Korea.
Where & When: Online: Wednesdays, Sept. 10, 17, and 24 from 8 – 9:30p ET
Class Limit: 8
Cost: $80
Previous Workshops
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
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
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.
