-We are offering some classes in-person and some classes via Zoom. Please read all course descriptions carefully before registering.
-To ensure that students receive individual attention from the instructor, enrollment is limited.
5-Week Classes
Lang 371.EZ1: Story in Verse: Writing the Narrative Poem
Instructor: Steve Cushman
CRN: 60556
Meets online via Zoom
Please note: begins in September.
Monday evenings starting 9/9, 6:00-8:30
Whether a ballad, slice of life, or sweeping epic, a narrative poem tells a story by employing character, setting, plot, and other fictional devices. Yet it’s most definitely a poem, alive with sound patterns, compressed lines, and electric images that won’t let the reader go. This form of poetry often provides sudden laser-like revelations of individualized lives, including our own. In this class, we’ll examine the art and craft of narrative poetry by studying classic and contemporary examples and, through prompts and exercises, begin writing some of our own.
Steve Cushman earned an MA from Hollins University and an MFA from UNC-Greensboro. He has published three novels, Portisville, which won the 2004 Novello Literary Award, Heart With Joy, and Hopscotch. Cushman’s first full-length poetry collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book Award. Along with a short story collection, Fracture City, he’s also published two poetry chapbooks, Hospital Work and Midnight Stroll. His latest collection, The Last Time, was published in 2023. Cushman lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his family and works in the IT department at Cone Health.
Lang 371.EZ2: Zero to Hero: The Hero’s Journey
Instructor: Alli Marshall
CRN: 61251
Meets in-person at UNC Asheville, Karpen Hall room 244
Please note: begins in September.
Wednesday evenings starting 9/18, 6:00-8:30
In this workshop we’ll use the Hero’s Journey as a template for sharing a personal story. Hero’s Journeys are everywhere in our lives: Travel, adventure, illness, marriage and divorce, parenthood, big risks, love and loss. These all follow the path of Departure, Initiation, and Return outlined in Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey model.
The monomyth is filled with archetypes found in ancient legends and modern films alike. They’re easy characters to recognize and identify with and, because they’re familiar, we can use them — and the stations of the Hero’s Journey — as a guide to create a new work.
Over the course of five weeks we’ll dive into the Hero’s Journey through the lens of personal narrative. Participants are invited to write in any genre they wish, and the workshop will include discussions, writing prompts, creative inspirations, and weekly assignments to be completed outside of the classroom.
Alli Marshall is a poet, performer, writer, editor, teacher, content creator … and more. The process of discovery is ongoing! Alli is interested in moving writing beyond the page, seeking the golden in the mundane, finding the intersection of art and social justice, and reconnecting with mythology — both ancient and modern. Alli was named “Artist whose work pushed the boundaries of storytelling” for her multimedia project MER/made at the 2021 Asheville Fringe Arts Festival.
Lang 371.EZ4: Craft Secrets for Fiction Writers
Class Full; email ldanzis@unca.edu to be added to the waitlist
Instructor: Mimi Herman
CRN: 60794
Meets online via Zoom
Please note: begins in September.
Monday evenings starting 9/30, 5:00-7:30
Move beyond the “how-to” books to learn techniques that will bring your characters, scenes and settings to life on the page. We’ll begin with the “Three-legged Stool” approach to imagery and learn the difference between “Balloons & Bricks,” then use vectors and action to write compelling and realistic dialogue. In future weeks, you’ll find out how to build three-dimensional settings and investigate the differences between scene and non-scene. We’ll conclude the course with a toolbox full of easy and practical revision tools. The techniques you’ll learn in this course will apply equally well to short stories and novels, and can even be used in writing memoir and narrative poetry. Each weekly session will include a discussion on an element of craft, time to experiment in your own writing with that craft element, sharing what you’ve written with your peers, and a conversation on what you have discovered and how you can use it. This course is accessible to all writers, from hopeful beginners to published authors, and requires no advance preparation or work outside of class, though you’re free to continue to explore these techniques throughout the week.
Mimi Herman holds a BA from the University of North Carolina and an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson. She is the author of The Kudzu Queen, A Field Guide to Human Emotions, Logophilia and The Art of Learning. Her novel, The Kudzu Queen, was selected by the North Carolina Center for the Book for the 2023 Library of Congress “Great Reads from Great Places” and has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, The Hollins Critic, Main Street Rag, Prime Number Magazine and other journals. Mimi has performed her fiction and poetry at many venues including Why There Are Words in Sausalito, Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh and Symphony Space in New York City.
Lang 371.EZ5: Writing the Body Electric
Instructor: Shae Savoy
CRN: 61235
Meets in-person at UNC Asheville, Karpen Hall, Room 244
Tuesday evenings starting 10/8, 6:00-8:30
How do you craft writing that lands in the bodies of your readers and listeners? How do you create resonance, musicality, and visceral emotional impact with your work? How do you leave a hum in the air and in the minds of your readers long after reading? This class will bring you home to the wonders of the body as a generative field and workshop space and will deepen the work of poets and writers of all genres and experience levels.
Some of what we’ll do together:
-Explore different exercises, prompts, and tools to take you into the body and translate its messages
-Analyze poems and pieces that create physical impressions effectively
-Create fresh work and practice revision approaches that bring the body in as a wise collaborator
-Share and receive feedback with others in a workshop setting
Shae Savoy is a writer and teacher rooted in poetry, including performance poetry, with branches of hybrid work, creative nonfiction, and speculative fiction. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and her work has most recently appeared in WomenArts Quarterly, Jet Fuel Review, Common Ground Review, and Sinister Wisdom, and she won SLAB Literary Magazine’s Elizabeth R. Currie Poetry Prize. Shae lives on Bearwallow Mountain and practices herbalism and Tarot.
Lang 371.EZ6: Stepping Over the Threshold: Seven Easy Steps to Starting Your Memoir
Instructor: Sebastian Matthews
CRN: 60703
Meets in-person at Grace Episcopal Church
Thursday afternoons starting 10/10, 3:00-5:30
There are some tried-and-true steps one can take to kickstart that memoir you 1) have always wanted to write or 2) started but put down and been unable to return to. In this 5-week course, we’ll begin by “discovering an occasion for speech” and “creating a present perfect ground” before moving into learning how to “write close to the body,” “build scenes,” and “balance show and tell.” We’ll conclude with two helpful strategies for revision–“cutting for the dog” and “choosing an opening beat.” Open to all levels.
Sebastian Matthews is the author of two memoirs—most recently Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State—a collage novel, and two books of poems. His hybrid collection of poetry and prose, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, won the Independent Publisher Book Award’s silver medal. Matthews currently serves locally on the board of WPVM (where he hosts the radio show Jazz Hybrid) and on the advisory boards for Orison Books and Story Parlor. He is an associate editor for Asheville Poetry Review and host of the reading and music series Jazz Hybrid Presents.
10-Week Classes
Lang 372.EZ1: Creativity & Personal Mythology
Instructor: Erin Hallagan Clare
CRN: 61236
Meets in-person at Hanger Hall School
Monday evenings starting 9/16, 6:00-8:30
As we investigate the stories we tell ourselves, we explore purpose, meaning, and the fabric of the human condition while also reaping the innumerable fringe benefits that result from responding to our creative calling. With the accompaniment of a creative project, this ten-week course will investigate the intersection between our creativity and personal mythology, including strategies to work through common blocks, ways to kickstart and sustain creative momentum, and ways to leverage personal narrative for creative bounty. This course is open to narrative artists hailing from any medium, in any stage of their creative journey.
Erin Hallagan Clare is the Founder and Artistic Director of Story Parlor, a narrative arts space dedicated to multidisciplinary storytelling based in Asheville, North Carolina. She is a certified creativity coach and holds a Masters in creative psychology, as well as a graduate certificate in Applied Mythology. A writer and storyteller, she has told stories at The Moth, Listen to This, Testify, One Page Salon, NC Writers Network and more, and is a Moth Story Slam Champion. Her writing can be found in Psychology Today, Thrive Global, and others, and she is a contributing author to The Coach’s Guide to Completing Creative Work published by Routledge.
Lang 372.EZ2: Premise to Publication: A Short Fiction Workshop
Class Full; email ldanzis@unca.edu to be added to the waitlist
Instructor: Meagan Lucas
CRN: 61237
Meets online via Zoom
Tuesday evenings starting 9/17, 6:00-8:30
Short Fiction, with its approachable length, necessity of precision, and focus on depth over breadth, is the perfect medium to start or strengthen your storytelling skills. Working from premise to publication, students will learn the conventions of short fiction, how to generate story ideas, plan plots, build characters, command time, draft, revise, edit, and submit to journals. We will discuss mentor texts as examples of craft. Students will also be introduced to the business of writing, including: submission calls, mastheads, cover and query letters, author bios, managing rejection, and literary citizenry. This is a generative workshop, with prompts and freewriting, and the course is structured so that students will leave with a fully crafted piece, and an instructor critique. It is suitable for enthusiastic beginners, through to established writers looking for inspiration, new techniques, and motivating deadlines.
Meagan Lucas is the author of the award-winning novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs and the collection Here in the Dark. Meagan has published over 40 short stories and essays. She has been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net, Derringer, and the Canadian Crime Writers Award of Excellence multiple times, and won the 2017 Scythe Prize for Fiction. Her short story “The Monster Beneath” was listed as Distinguished in the 2023 Best American Mystery and Suspense. Her novel Songbirds and Stray Dogs was chosen to represent North Carolina in the Library of Congress 2022 Route 1 Reads program, and won Best Debut at the 2020 Indie Book Awards. Meagan teaches Creative Writing at Robert Morris University. She is the Editor in Chief of Reckon Review.
Lang 372.EZ3: Writing With a Plain Style: Learning from William Stafford’s Poetry and Ideas
Instructor: Bruce Spang
CRN: 61239
Meets online via Zoom
Thursday evenings starting 9/19, 6:00-8:30
I’ve always wondered what place—the land one lived— has to do with poetry. Our language seems to be influenced by our environment. As a Midwesterner, I’ve found that certain poets have a plain style of speak that comes from living on the prairie. They can grapple with large issues in an unadorned style.
William Stafford is one of those poets. His poems have a searching open-mindedness along with a deep questioning that seems to come from living in a land of endless horizons. He wrote every day, got up before dawn, went for a run, ate a leisurely breakfast, and then sat down at his desk to await whatever came to him. His poems delve with the large issues of life and death, of passage of time and the vastness of space, of childhood and aging, of love and loss. He speaks to each of these with a forthrightness and directness that is refreshing and accessible. We will look at his poems and his approach to and advice about writing poems. He had some very idiosyncratic ideas about how to write.
Each week we will read and discuss several poems, noting the craft elements in them. We will look at what place has to do with your poems. We will also workshop your poems based on writing prompts that emerge from discussing his poems.
Bruce Spang, former Poet Laureate of Portland, is the author of two novels: The Deception of the Thrush and Those Close Beside Me. His most recent collection of poems, All You’ll Derive: A Caregiver’s Journey, was published in 2020. He’s also published four other books of poems, including To the Promised Land Grocery and Boy at the Screen Door (Moon Pie Press) along with several anthologies and several chapbooks. He is the poetry and fiction editor of the Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. His poems have been published in Gay and Lesbian Literary Review, Connecticut River Review, Red Rover Magazine, Great Smokies Review, Caesura, Los Angles Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal and other journals across the United States. He lives in Candler, NC with his husband Myles Rightmire and their five dogs, five fish, and thirty birds.
15-Week Classes
Lang 473.EZ2: Zero to Sixty: An Intensive Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Class Full; email jhmcgaha@unca.edu to be added to the waitlist
Instructor: Jennifer McGaha
CRN: 60945
Meets in-person at Grace Episcopal Church
Wednesday evenings starting 8/21, 6:00-8:30
Students new to LANG 473 must ask for the instructor’s permission to register: jhmcgaha@unca.edu. Limited to 10 students.
This intensive creative nonfiction workshop is designed to get you writing and to boost your confidence and your productivity wherever you are in the writing journey. For the first twelve weeks, we will do readings, generative writing activities, and informal workshopping during class. Each student will write and share three to five pages of new work each week for up to sixty pages total–yes, sixty! For the final three weeks, students will choose up to thirty pages to submit to the instructor for in-depth written feedback. We will then meet individually to discuss your goals for your project, any challenges you’re facing, etc. As the generative writing will be open-ended and flexible, students may use this class to begin new projects or develop existing ones, but everyone should come with some prior writing and workshopping experience.
Jennifer McGaha is the author of three creative nonfiction books including Flat Broke with Two Goats, a 2018 OverDrive Big Library Read, Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out, and The Joy Document: Creating a Midlife of Surprise and Delight (coming from Broadleaf Books in November). Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Image, The Huffington Post, The New Pioneer, Lumina, PANK, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brevity, Bitter Southerner, Crab Creek Review, River Teeth, and many other publications. A native of Appalachia, Jennifer lives in a wooded North Carolina hollow with her husband, two cats, three unruly dogs, ten relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of chickens.