Todos Santos - Winter Session 2025 Workshops
Each workshop is limited to no more than eight participants to ensure maximum individual attention. Workshops run for 3 ½ hours each morning through the week; the instructor will be available after the workshop concludes each day to answer any questions.
The last afternoon will be devoted to “Office Hours”—an in-depth one-on-one conversation with your instructor, scheduled by appointment.
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- Consultations with other TSWW instructors are also available and can be arranged and paid for directly with that instructor. We encourage these mentor sessions, as new eyes on your work will bring new insights.
Memoir with Jeanne McCulloch
Memoir with Karen Karbo
TSWW offers two memoir classes. Memoir creatively spins the stuff of one’s personal life into a story. This is a three-part process: first hearing, then trusting, and finally shaping one’s own voice into a compelling personal narrative. Through a series of writing prompts and class feedback, students in the TSWW memoir workshop will be guided and supported as they craft their own stories. Selections from recently published memoirs will be assigned for class discussion on occasion, and will be available all week to borrow. Students need not have a story in mind when they come to class, but they should expect to leave with one or two or more by week’s end.
Poetry
Christopher Merrill
Fiction - Writing from the Inside
Gina Frangello
It's long been an adage that good literature should "disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed" and that stories have the power to save. These days, however, far too many readers assume that only "true stories" possess the power to change lives...whereas did you know that creative nonfiction/memoir is, as a genre, actually fairly new? Long before reality TV and the rise of the personal essay and memoir, readers have for centuries turned to fiction to help them decipher the world and their own emotional lives...and studies show that reading literary fiction helps readers grow in empathy. How, then, do we as fiction writers achieve true intimacy when writing so-called make believe people? Whether your fiction is somewhat autobiographical or entirely based in imagination, fiction has a vast capacity to achieve immediacy and life-changing emotional truths, but to get there, we have to learn to write from the inside out rather than from the outside in. In my workshop, we will discuss moving beyond "types" and binaries like "sympathetic vs. unsympathetic" and work on creating (or deepening) nuanced, complex, deeply embodied, and messy characters who are psychologically relatable rather than two-dimensional, and who can make readers feel less alone in the world. Appropriate for fiction writers of all stages, as well as novelists and short story writers alike.
Strategies in Storytelling
Rex Weiner
That novel you’ve been writing forever—or intending to start. The short story that just needs a bit more work before submission. The screenplay stalled somewhere in the second act—or needing a first act. And what about that memoir you started a while ago? Why not get started (or get unstuck)? In this session, we'll use practical methods--writing prompts and a bag of tried-and-true writers tricks to connect with your original inspiration, locate your authentic voice and through-line, and get fired up to complete the work within a deadline (setting a deadline—your first step!) Recommended for writers at all levels in all genres.
Todos Paris - May 19 - 24, 2025
Two classes each limited to 10 participants, focusing on fiction, with Karen Karbo, and memoir, with Jeanne McCulloch. This workshop for writers at all levels in the inspiring setting of springtime in Paris will meet you where you are in your project, whether it's a work-in-progress or something new.