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
Poetry and Intergenerational Trauma
What: Few people are untouched by trauma, and the impacts of war and geopolitical violence extend beyond veterans, refugees, victims, and survivors to their families and descendants. We live with the scars of our ancestors and learn the resilience of our elders, even when the wounds are unacknowledged or our strengths unrecognized. Due to the fragmented, sensory nature of trauma memories and the deeply embedded embodied knowledges of trauma and resiliency, poets may be particularly well-poised to make meaning of intergenerational trauma and strength through language. This workshop invites poets of all levels to explore how they write with, through, and about the traumas they may not have experienced personally but which live on in their bodies, minds, and words.
This workshop is intended for poets of all levels. Though no formal preparation is required, writers should have an existing poetry writing practice. (In other words, we will assume participants have a working knowledge of meter, line breaks, and the like, and participants will be expected to work on their own poems both during and outside of workshop time.)
Interested parties should submit a brief writing sample (one to three poems representative of the writer’s work and creative considerations at this point in time) along with their registration.
Please contact Matthew at info@consequenceforum.org with any questions.
Rough Schedule:
Week 1: Writing with/through/about Trauma
Week 2: Workshops
Week 3: Workshops
Week 4: Reading
Who: Dr. Mara Lee Grayson is an author and educator originally from Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Fiction, Nimrod, Pedestal, Poetry Northwest, Tampa Review, among other publications, and her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. An award-winning scholar of rhetorics of racism and antisemitism, Grayson is the author of five books of nonfiction, and has been featured as an expert on the racialized rhetoric of trauma and the need for equitable, trauma-informed writing pedagogies at numerous conferences, keynotes, and on BBC Radio. Grayson holds an MFA from The City College of New York and a PhD from Columbia University, and has taught creative writing, composition and rhetoric, and the teaching of writing for fifteen years. Previously a tenured associate professor at a large public university, she currently works in nonprofit.
When & Where: Online: Thursdays, Dec. 20 & 27, Jan. 3 & 10 from 7p–9p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $100
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, Dec. 14 & 21, Jan. 4–25 from 12p–2p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $145
Witness to History
What: In this interactive nonfiction workshop, writers will choose an event related to war or geopolitical violence they have witnessed or participated in first-hand. These events can be anything from being in combat to participating in a conflict-related rally to growing up in an environment with a relative who is a refugee. We will begin with oral story-telling of personal recollections and then seek out primary material, such as interviews and archival material, before drafting a personal essay. Then, in a gentle and trusting workshop setting, each draft will be commented on and discussed, so that the writer will have a better understanding of what needs to be revised in future drafts. The goal by the end of the four sessions is for each writer to leave with a solid initial draft and a strong sense of what to do next.
Beginning and seasoned writers are welcome as the only required tools are memory and a willingness to share observations.
Who: Carol Bergman was an Adjunct Associate Professor of writing at NYU, College of Applied Liberal Arts until COVID, and a founding faculty at Gotham Writers Workshop. She is a prize winning, much published author, and the co-owner of Mediacs, a small press. “Objects of Desire,” appearing in Lilith and Whetstone Literary Review, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in nonfiction. “Another Day in Paradise; International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories,” with a foreword by John Le Carré, a great humanitarian, was nominated for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her articles, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications in the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia. www.carolbergman.net
When & Where: The class will meet online. Date and time TBD.
Class Limit: 10
Cost: $200
Recent Workshops
What: These interrelated classes will focus on learning the basics of writing a critical book review—a review, that is, concerning itself with close reading and critical analysis instead of being solely a vehicle for sales. This goal becomes complex when writing reviews that deal with war, conflicts, and the far-reaching effects of their violence, so these classes will pay close attention to representation, appropriate language, and general practices when analyzing and writing about such complicated subjects.
In each session, we will discuss various readings (especially translated work since an understanding of diverse cultures is essential), conduct in-class writing exercises, and exchange work to benefit from crucial peer feedback. Each session’s primary goal is to provide the student with the understanding and practical knowledge necessary to write a compelling and judicious review.
Each session is designed to be its own class, but both sessions will work to amplify and refine the other.
Who: Dr. Fathima M. is the Assistant Translations Editor at Consequence. She has a PhD in English from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her reviews have been published in Wasafiri, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Kathmandu Post, The Daily Star, World Literature Today, and Minola Review, among others.
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.
