Live & Recorded Classes

Have you found yourself terrified and intimidated by the dreaded blank page? It’s a common problem for writers! Choreographer and dancer Twyla Tharp says, “in order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.” As a big believer in the value of pre-writing, I have developed several exercises and activities aimed at immersion and deep work before we begin the joyful task of creating new art. The result? Fresh, original drafts of surprising depth and beauty. In this engaging, interactive two-hour session we will begin with a series of fun and interesting activities and prompts that will prime our brains for creative expression.

Next, we’ll put together “toolboxes” for story writing, equipping ourselves with our own unique word banks, vocabulary, images, characters, settings, even titles. Finally, we’ll draw on these tools to draft rich, resonant stories that might not otherwise be written had we not arrived at the page primed, prepared, energized, and inspired. 

This generative workshop is aimed at anyone who has a difficult time getting started; writers who feel they must drum up an “idea” or a “plot” before they put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Come ready to write, play, dare, and dream. Expect to leave this session three exciting flash fiction length drafts and an abundance of tools and tricks to call upon the next time you face the blank page. 

Kathy Fish’s stories have been widely published in journals, anthologies, and textbooks. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Guernica, Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Denver Quarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Norton Reader, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America (2023). She has been honored with a Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize and multiple appearances in both the Wigleaf Top 50 and the Best Small Fictions series. The author of five short fiction collections, Fish teaches a variety of writing workshops online and in person worldwide. She also publishes a bestselling craft newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, which was recently named one of the 20 Best Creative Writing Substacks by Writers at Work. Her writing has been generously supported by fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation and the Kerouac Project.