Writing Classes
We offer a sliding scale for each course.
We also offer a reduced rate for those who can’t make a course but would like to have
access to its materials and video recordings.
For more info, please email info@consequenceforum.org
Upcoming Classes
The Land Cannot Forget: An Eco-Poetics Workshop
What: Our human relationship to trauma is often embodied interpersonally as well as politically. However, the land in which war and geopolitical violence is enacted is subject to wound, just as our flesh and mind are.
In this five-week workshop, we will engage with a number of poets who look to the natural world to express the devastating effects of war and colonization. We will read and discuss poets like Jehanne Dubrow and Don Mee Choi, as well as have an opportunity to workshop our own poems.
Week One: Intro to Trauma-Informed Eco-Poetry
Week Two: Workshop, lecture on the Anthropocene
Week Three: Workshop, lecture on War and the Environment
Week Four: Workshop, lecture on the War on the Environment
Week Five: Workshop, closing reading.
This class will build critical reading skills as we analyze poems from an eco-poetics lens. It will also provide instruction and prompts for writing your own eco-poems. You will leave the class with a host of first drafts and sharpened skills in close reading and text analysis, while also getting a chance to hone your public reading skills if you so choose.
Who: Madeline Simms is a creative with midwestern roots. She is concerned with how our unique ecologies inform language and believes in place-based pedagogy. Madeline is the recipient of the 2023 AWP Intro Award in Fiction. She has received support from the University of Alabama and Sundress Academy for the Arts. You can find her writing in About Place Journal, Poet Lore, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Madeline writes and teaches in Madison, WI.
When & Where: Online: Sundays, July 5 – Aug. 2 from 1p – 3p ET
Class Limit: 10
Cost: $110
Fiction on Foreign Policy and Conflict
What: War, diplomacy, and global conflict have animated some of the best-known fiction around the world, but writers with firsthand knowledge of these worlds often struggle to translate their expertise into compelling storytelling. This course explores how short stories and novels can carry geopolitical themes and plots without becoming dry or didactic. Across three sessions, moving from classic texts to contemporary voices to formally experimental work, this course will examine how authors transform foreign policy and conflict into character and craft.
Each session divides its time between close reading and generative writing. The class will discuss excerpts together, identifying the specific techniques authors use to render inner conflict, moral ambiguity, pacing, and place, and then immediately put those tools to work in short generative exercises. Writers will have the opportunity to share pieces of new or revised drafts and receive feedback from the group.
By the end of the course, students will leave with several pages (either new or revised from works in progress) that consciously deploy techniques drawn from the authors covered. Students should be introduced to at least one writer they hadn’t read closely before and should have a clearer sense of whose writing resonates with them and why. More importantly, they’ll have an expanded set of craft strategies for writing about conflict.
Who: Lauren D. Woods is the author of The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, a short story collection that won the 2024 Autumn House Fiction Prize and the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters. Lauren lives in Washington, DC, where she has also worked for the Department of State, on Capitol Hill, for various internationally focused nonprofits, and most recently in the private sector. She loves the intersection of foreign policy and literature.
When & Where: Online: Saturdays, July 11, 18, & 25 from 11a – 12:30p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $75
Telling from the Edge of Conflict: Writing as Witness
What: This course for fiction writers or poets centers on memory as a craft tool, on how writers can shape personal and collective memory into narratives of survival or poetry of witness in the context of violence. From this foundation, the class explores what it means to write as a witness, whether drawing from lived experience, inherited histories, while confronting questions of voice, responsibility, and representation. Particular attention will be given to how to render trauma without exploitation, how to hold complexity without erasure, and how to write toward truth rather than spectacle. This focus matters because narratives of conflict or violence do more than recount events, they shape understanding and create space for voices that have been silenced, distorted, or excluded.
Participants will engage through a mix of generative writing exercises, close readings of short texts and poems, guided discussions, and optional workshop feedback. Sessions will include prompts designed to help writers approach difficult material with care, experiment with perspective and form, and develop a language for portraying trauma without exploitation. Short lectures will introduce key concepts such as testimony, narrative techniques, while discussions will create space for reflection and exchange.
By the end of the course, students will leave with at least one substantial draft or a portfolio of developed pieces rooted in the course themes. They will also gain practical strategies for writing about conflict, a stronger sense of their own voice as witness, and tools for revising work that engages sensitive subject matter. Additionally, participants will develop a clearer understanding of how to situate their writing within broader literary and social conversations violence.
Writers of all levels welcome.
Who: Gloria Ogo is an American-based Nigerian writer with several published novels and poetry collections. Her work has appeared in Eye to the Telescope, Brittle Paper, Spillwords Press, Metastellar, Gypsophila Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Allegro Poetry Magazine, among others. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and serves as a reader for Reckoning Magazine.
She is the winner of the Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize (2024) and a finalist for the Jerri Dickseski Fiction Prize (2024), the ODU Poetry Prize (2025), and the Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Prize (2025), earning honorable mentions. She is also a finalist for the Lucky Jefferson Poetry Contest (2025). Her work was longlisted for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize (2025).
When & Where: Online: Saturdays, Aug. 8, 15, & 22 from 12 – 2p ET
Class Limit: 12
Cost: $80
The Retrospective Eye: A Nonfiction Class
What: This course focuses on the challenges and opportunities for a narrator in a memoir or a personal creative nonfiction piece that deals with events from the past. What are the tools a writer can employ to effectively recreate setting, tone, etc., and what is the point of retrospection from which the narrator is looking back toward these elements? By exploring the friction between the fictive self on the page and the writer of the present, we get at the essential meaning of the piece and of memoiristic writing in general—to say something of what it all means.
Through lecture, reading, and discussion, we will explore examples of how authors handle retrospection and point of view. We will isolate specific techniques and their effectiveness, and employ them in our own writing, which begins with short free-write sessions leading into after-class assignments.
Students will complete a draft utilizing class techniques, with the opportunity to share a portion of their writing in the final session. More importantly, they will leave with an understanding that memoir/personal CNF is a recreation of the past tethered always to the moment of narration, which is to say, the evolving future. With this synthesis in mind, they will be prepared to explore the greater meaning of their work.
Writers of all levels welcome.
Who: R.M. Harper is a genderqueer writer and US Navy veteran whose work explores the intersections of state power, storytelling, and identity. A native of California’s Central Valley, they served as a military photojournalist in the Indo-Asia-Pacific before earning an MFA from Saint Mary’s College. Their writing has appeared in The New Ohio Review and elsewhere. They are currently based in Edinburgh, where they are at work on a collection of essays that examines the friction between systems of empire and the reclamation of identity.
When & Where: Online: Saturdays, Aug. 15, 22, & 29 from 3 – 5p ET
Class Limit: 10
Cost: $75
Writing the Other: A Poetry Class
What: This class focuses on writing exercises that encourage participants to actively imagine and adopt the perspective(s) of an identified Other or Others. Participants will be encouraged to write pieces employing first-person viewpoints different from their own lived experiences.
The two-hour session will focus on prompts and exercises. Material(s) will be sent ahead of time to facilitate the grounding and focus on the topics taken up in class activities. The class will start with a brief talk, and if time permits, will end with class discussions.
Participants will leave with first drafts of their creative pieces, mostly in the genre of persona poems. They will also leave with a better understanding of the complexities of the act of writing, and a more empathetic imagination to write pieces focused on universal justice and human rights.
Writers of all levels welcome.
Who: Bänoo Zan is a poet, translator, and curator, with numerous published pieces and books including Songs of Exile and Letters to My Father. She is the founder of Shab-e She’r (Poetry Night), Canada’s most diverse and brave poetry open mic series. Bänoo, with Cy Strom, is the co-editor of the anthology: Woman Life Freedom: Poems for the Iranian Revolution. She was given Life Membership in the League of Canadian Poets in 2024 and is the recipient of the 2025 Writers’ Union of Canada Freedom to Read Award.
When & Where: Online: Sunday, Aug. 16 from 2 – 4p ET
Class Limit: 15
Cost: $30
Previous Workshops
Slowing Down and Speeding Up: Playing With Time and Detail in Prose
What: Even when we write about less difficult subjects, choosing what speed we use to recount them can change our own, and our readers’, understanding. If we’re reflecting on how conflict affects our world or the people we come from, experimenting with time and detail can make a big difference.
When might zooming out or zooming in, speeding up or slowing down, help us convey the profound effect something has had on us, our family, our community? What happens when we play with the pace of events in unexpected ways?
We’ll read a few short examples together, talk about how they expand or compress time—and use them as prompts to try some new writing of our own. By the end of class, participants will have new ways of thinking about pacing and detail—the big picture and the small—as well as examples and drafts to keep experimenting with.
When Worlds Collide: Writing to Visual Art
What: For millennia, writers have expressed their thoughts in response to visual art through ekphrasis, the Greek word for “description.” Visual art provides sensory entry into writing about the complexities of conflict and collision. It lends itself to strong imagery, rhythm, and history.
No previous knowledge of art or art history is necessary for this course. You will receive ten images in seixty-second intervals to spark ideas. Then you’ll choose two of them for more in-depth generative writing in fifteen-minute intervals. Using the Amherst Writers & Artists method, we’ll read our work aloud (optional) and give strengths-based feedback on what’s strong and memorable. There is no critique.
Upon completion of the workshop, students will:
1. Have a minimum of eight drafts of ekphrastic writing
2. Discover where the strengths in their writing shine
3. Gain an appreciation of visual art to prompt creative writing
All experience levels and multiple genres welcome.
Flash Fiction as Resistance
What: Flash fiction can feel intimidating as a form. How can a writer convey a full story or emotion in under a thousand words? And how can we do justice to war and geopolitical violence in such a short space?
In this two-hour intensive, we’ll explore the power of flash through examples of published work from Consequence and writing prompts tailored to help you create a new piece around themes of conflict. We’ll discuss how flash can be a tool for resistance through hyperfocus on a particular image or the use of inventive structures. Through the compression of language, writers can communicate nuanced ideas and experiences that lend themselves to rereading.
By the end of this intensive, students will have 1) A draft or outline of a new flash fiction piece themed around the human consequences of war or geopolitical violence, 2) developed an understanding of at least three tools for approaching flash fiction as a genre, and 3) a deeper understanding of the purpose and possibilities of flash.
All levels of writers are welcome
Seeking Peace through Poetry: Reading Palestinian and Israeli Poets
What: After more than two years of devastation in Israel and Palestine, and decades of loss and dispossession, those who care about the fate of all people on the land are heartbroken and weary. Poetry may not be able to repair broken agreements or bring the dead back to life, but it can help us pick up the broken pieces of our world, bear witness, and imagine a different way forward.
We will read Palestinian and Israeli poets in translation who express the human cost of war, the pain of loss, and the longing for home. Among the poets we will read and discuss are those who paid the ultimate price in this latest war: Hiba abu Nada, a Gazan poet killed by an Israeli airstrike, and Amiram Cooper, an Israeli poet who was taken hostage and died in captivity. Other poets we will read are Mosab Abu Toha, Adi Keissar, Hosam Maarouf, Tuvia Ruebner, among many others.
In each session, we will create a safe and supported space to read and discuss the poems. We will then engage in writing exercises inspired by the poems in which we will be invited to contemplate our own relationships to this fraught material. We will consider: How do we make sense of events we read about in the news that feel incomprehensible? How do we look inward during a time of war? What does home mean to you? What could peace look like?
You will leave the class with several poem drafts and an expanded sense of humanity that comes from bearing witness through poetry to the costs of war. All are welcome regardless of background, knowledge, poetry experience, or relationship to the topic.