Non-credit Workshops
We’re offering several non-credit workshops this summer, open to anyone, regardless of residency!
- “Essay in a Day” with Tessa Fontaine, May 18 (virtual)
More details and registration information here. - “Poetry & Performance: Finding the Singer Within” with Keith Flynn, June 15 (in-person)
More details and registration information here. - “Scene in North Carolina” with Wiley Cash, June 22 & 29 and July 6 & 13 (virtual)
More details and registration information here.
For-credit 5-week Classes
We’re pleased to announce that two or three Cori Gross scholarships are available for for-credit classes this summer! Find more details and apply here.
To register for a class, click one of the “Register” buttons below. You’ll need the class title and 5-digit CRN number.
North Carolina residency verification is required for in-state tuition rates.
Lang 371.EZ1: The Craft of Adaptation: Playwriting Through Love and Hate
Instructor: Bonnie Antosh
CRN: 30116
Meets in-person on the UNCA campus, Reuter Center 206
Tuesday evenings, June 10–July 8, 6:00–8:30
Adaptation is a strange process: it not only encourages, but depends upon strong reactions. As a result, the sharpest riffs and re-imaginings often emerge on the tideline between attraction and repulsion. This generative class will explore what we love-slash-hate in the myths, legends, and stories we’ve grown up with.
Each week, our workshop will read New and Old: a contemporary play alongside the script or myth it grew from. Think Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice next to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, James Ijames’s Fat Ham next to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Through writing exercises for scenes, monologues, and short plays, in and out of class, we’ll experiment with different games and tools of adaptation. In short, we’ll be asking how writers can imitate oysters: building pearls from what’s already in the water, irritating and feeding us.
This workshop is open to new playwrights, experienced playwrights, and writers in all genres who work from a strong sense of dialogue and rhythm.
Bonnie Antosh is a playwright & screenwriter from both Carolinas and New York. She’s a staff member and Tennessee Williams Scholar at The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival winner, and an alum of The Road’s Under Construction Cohort. Most recently, her plays have been performed and developed by Ensemble Studio Theatre in NYC, Threshold Theater in Minneapolis, and City Theatre Miami. Her EST/Sloan commission Lemuria is the winner of the NC New Play Project’s Mark Gilbert Award; it is also a finalist for Seven Devils and SETC’s Getchell New Play Contest.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
Lang 371.EZ2: A Cartography of Belonging: Poetry & Personal Essay
Instructor: Jasmin Pittman
CRN: 30117
Meets online via Zoom
Thursday evenings, June 12–July 10, 6:00–8:30
In her book, Belonging: A Culture of Place, bell hooks says, “We are born and have our being in a place of memory…We know ourselves through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where there is no death, where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection.” A Cartography of Belonging is an invitation to engage, through our writing, in hooks’ sustaining act of “regard and recollection.” This course uses poetry as a guide to help us interrogate and map our memories of belonging to ourselves, our communities, the land, and our sense of spirit, or, one could say, mystery. We will also examine what teacher and narrative nonfiction writer Jack Hart calls the “ladder of abstraction,” and use it as a tool to help further propel directionality in our work. Students will have the opportunity for generative writing time in each class and come away with an outline or draft of a personal essay.
Jasmin Pittman is a writer, editor, and mentor based in Asheville, where her work rests at the intersections of identity, place, and spirituality. She holds an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of Georgia, and her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Bitter Southerner, The Oxford American, Callaloo, The Porch Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also a contributing author to Bigger Than Bravery, The Peace Table, and Meeting at the Table. Jasmin currently serves as assistant editor for The Christian Century, one of the original publishers of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” When she’s not playing with words or mothering her two amazing kids, you can probably find her out in the woods.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
Lang 371.EZ3: Such a Character: A Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Heather Newton
CRN: 10874
Meets in-person on the UNCA campus, Reuter Center 206
Thursday evenings June 5–July 10 (skipping the week of July 4), 6:00–8:30
We’ve all known people whom we have called “characters” (if we haven’t said it aloud, we’ve thought it). What makes these people so fascinating, and how can we harvest their traits to make our fictional characters more interesting? This class for beginning or experienced writers will focus on how to develop believable and compelling characters through effective use of point of view, voice, dialog, description and gesture. Come prepared to write and to share your writing.
Heather Newton’s novel The Puppeteer’s Daughters (Turner Publishing 2022) won the North Carolina Indie Author Project award for adult fiction, was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and has been optioned for television. Her short story collection McMullen Circle (Regal House 2022) was a finalist for both the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the W.S. Porter Prize. Her novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection, and was named an “Okra Pick” by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. A practicing attorney, she teaches creative writing for UNC-Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and Charlotte Lit and is co-founder and Program Manager for the Flatiron Writers Room in Asheville.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
Lang 371.EZ4: Two P’s in a Poetic Pod: The Poetry of People and Place
Instructor: Tony Robles
CRN: 30119
Meets in-person on the UNCA campus, Reuter Center 206
Friday evenings June 6–July 11 (skipping the week of July 4), 6:00–8:30
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.
Lang 371.EZ5: Deep Dive: Diaries and Daybooks
Instructor: Barbara Roether
CRN: 30120
Meets in-person on the UNCA campus, Reuter Center 206
Wednesday evenings June 4–July 2, 6:00–8:30
An essential practice for writers is keeping a daily record of events and ideas as they occur in real-time. From the “pillow books” of ancient Japan to Kafka and Virginia Woolf, the diary has helped to form our experience of time. The discipline of being fully present to the quotidian wonders of life, with all its weathers, encounters, headlines, and daydreams, sharpens our writerly skills. Diaries can become planted fields of possible topics to feed a larger writing practice. Beyond its power as a generative writing tool, the diary can become a powerful form for stand-alone works. In this class students may choose to complete a five-week “focused diary” that will be of chapbook length (35–50 pages) and to edit it for possible publication.
Whether focused on the personal or the political, on a journey or a life passage, the diary brings readers into immediate contact with the drama of the days we share.
Barbara Roether is the author of the novel This Earth You’ll Come Back To, winner of an Independent Press Award and a finalist for Foreword Magazine’s Indiefab Book of the Year Award. She has published two poetry collections, Saraswati’s Lament and The Middle Atlas. Her essays on reading have been published in Blaze Vox, The Swan, The Kyoto Journal, and Lost. She writes book reviews for Rain Taxi and The New York Journal of Books.
For class pricing, see our Tuition & Policies page.