Creative Writing Workshops
Our motto is “Write Your Truth.”
Creative writing workshops at the Cherry Tree Young Writers' Conference are designed to help you discover the stories that matter to you. What is your truth? What is the voice you will use to tell it?
Fiction Workshops
Mentors in Craft
In our generative workshop, we'll read excerpts from across the genres—Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Kelly Link's Get in Trouble, Tananarive Due's The Reformatory, and more—all as a way of advancing our studies in craft. Students will write daily, engaging in a variety of prompts that are born out of our readings and discussions. From this initial work, students will be supported in completing a draft of a short story—a work of fiction born out of our time together and in conversation with, not only the excerpts that we will be reading, but the stories that each of us admire.
Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Fiction Inspired by Our Lives
Writing from life can be a tricky business. There are people to protect, faulty memories of events, and the pitfalls of self-censorship and self-aggrandizement. In this craft workshop, we will discuss how our lives can inspire fiction and how to overcome emotional writing blocks. Because our lives are too rich not to write about, and our imaginations are too strong to ignore.
Journalizm Workshop
Writing Place
In this workshop, we are going to explore how you write about place—whether that is your hometown, a city or country you have traveled to, your bedroom, or your soccer field. Place is fun to write about because it allows a writer to explore so much than just a physical location and to use all their journalistic skills. You can write about people, history, emotion and use interviews, reporting, and research to create dynamic stories about place. We will explore all of these possibilities, learn to heighten your physical and emotional descriptions, and think about the relationship between the past, present, and future when writing about place. Though this will be designed for journalists, fiction writers and poets will also benefit from many of these discussions.
Poetry Workshop
Spontaneous Combustion: A Generative Poetry Workshop
How does a poem get sparked? How does one find and fan the flame that invites readers to sit by the poem's hearth? Surprise and heat may be found in details as small as syllables or as vast as space. We will sharpen our focus and practice a variety of techniques including line breaks, deep image, metaphor, and more. Through spark exercises and immersive class discussion, we can crush writer's block, unleash creativity, and re-envision ourselves and our poems.