Creative Writing Classes

I offer generative classes that help writers tap into the liberating power of constraints, the complexities of aliveness, and creative practices that encourage lifelong learning, risk-taking, and artistic expression. My classes are always convened live and mainly offered online, which allows us to gather from around the world in a common space.

My upcoming classes and workshops include:

• Creative Renewal: Recharge Your Writing Life | Thurs, Feb 5 to 26, 5 to 7 p.m. PT | Online via Hugo House ~ 3 seats open!
  A mix of strategic reflection and generative writing in community, this class will help writers deepen self-knowledge and craft artistic habits that nourish. This class is a good fit for writers who want to reimagine their creative life as part of disentangling artistic expression from capitalist production. Each session will offer prompts for reflection and simple practices that unite body, heart, and intellect. We’ll transform intentions into actions and end with a generative session of writing constraints that invite experimentation and play.

• Close Reading (& Writing): “Some Day, I’ll Love…” | Sat, February 14 from 1 to 3 p.m. PT | Online
  Frank O’Hara’s small-but-mighty poem “Katy” contains a line that’s proven surprisingly fertile: Some day, I’ll love Frank O’Hara. Roger Reeves adapted it (“Some day, I’ll love Roger Reeves”), which sparked poems by Ocean Vuong, Leila Chatti, and many others. In this way, “Katy” has become an ancestor poem. Its children and grandchildren inspire us to explore tenderness and to reckon with how we write about—or, maybe, shy away from—love (particularly self-love), sentiment, and sentimentality on the page. We’ll read and discuss the O’Hara-Reeves-Vuong-Chatti gene line and where love fits into our creative practices, then we’ll try our hand at writing into this lineage. $40 (plus sales tax for WA residents). 1 seat open! Email me at gATgabrieladenisefrankDOTcom to register.

• Spring Writing Circle: Manifesto! | Tuesdays, March 10, 17, and 24, 5 to 7 p.m. PT | Online
  Writing circles are intimate creative cohorts designed to spark new writing and convivial critical discussion. This circle focuses on the form of the manifesto: a public declaration that illustrates reasons and motives for actions done or planned. To manifest is to bring to light—to make clear, apparent, and palpable. The manifesto is a communication and organizing tool for expressing and consolidating an ethos that guides and frames physical action, whether constructive or destructive. We will explore a range of manifesto, discuss how they’ve been used individually and collectively, and write our own. Registration opens in February.

• Hybrid and Haunted: Exploring Occult Ecopoetics | Thursdays, Apr 9 to May 14, 5 to 7 p.m. PT | Online via Literary Arts

  In this generative writing class, poet Joyelle McSweeney’s vivid notion of the Necropastoral will guide us into creative engagement with environmental writing, mortality, spells, and unconventional poetics. Biological principles such as mutation, contamination, and decay are transformed into artistic forces in works by McSweeney, Don Mee Choi, Kim Hyesoon, Jane Wong, CAConrad, and Maya Jewell Zeller. Their hybrid and haunted poetry and prose will help us explore the paradoxic beauty and harm of climate change, species loss, eco grief, and environmental disruption. What is the power of poetry in decadent times? “It’s what Plato wants to put back in the bottle,” McSweeney says, “the pharmakon—the cure that harms, the poison that heals.” We’ll consume heady draughts of inspiration from readings and discussions, then brew our own unexpected literary elixirs.

• Thanatopoeisis: Generative Poetics of Death | Tuesdays, May 19 to June 16 ~ 4 p.m. PT / 7 p.m. ET | Online via Morbid Anatomy - seats open
  “The duty of the writer is to remind us that we will die—and that we aren’t dead yet,” notes poet Solmaz Sharif. This generative class is a mix of close reading, in-class writing, and critical conversation. Together, we will explore a range of literary forms, constraints, and creative approaches inspired by and related to death, including narrative, lyric, and hybrid works by Joyelle McSweeney, Victoria Chang, Denise Riley, Martha Silano, and Elias Canetti. Attendees will leave each session with new writing starts, a sense of self-exploration, and artistic experimentation on and off the page with this greatest of mysteries.

• Oulipian Experiments in Generative Writing | June 29 to 30 | In Person at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology
  Formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, the members of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle / Workshop for Potential Literature) found inspiration at the intersection of creative constraints and the freedom to break form. This workshop offers generative writing exercises designed to free the mind and creative spirit so that we may shape and release new and unexpected literary creatures into the world.

  We’ll explore the history of Oulipo and a range of constraints and nontraditional forms with a spirit of experimentation through readings and generative prompts. Attendees will leave this hands-on workshop with a portfolio of new starts that include lipograms, palindromes, anaphora, erasure, “found” texts, intaglio portraits, sestinas, and other constraint-based writing. As a collective, we will drink mightily from the Oulipo spirit of playful postures and endless outcomes to create the strange, the haunted, and the inspired. We will attempt new structures and patterns, which writers may shape and develop in any way they enjoy. Together we will become, as Queneau described, “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.” Registration opens February 2026.

• Finishing School: Writing in Community | Online
  Sometimes, to get writing done, we need camaraderie—and a calendar appointment. Finishing School is a space to work on individual projects in community. Think of it as a supportive virtual cafe or an accountability date. We show up, say a warm hello and share what we’re working on, and get crackin’. Finishing School is my gratis offering to the community of writers who join my writing circles each year.
  

• Sales tax for Washington residents: Beginning October 1, 2025, a new Washington state law (ESSB 5814) requires sales tax to be collected on live and recorded classes and workshops taught by cultural organizations and freelance educators. Sales tax for online classes hosted by me will be calculated based on the student’s billing location. (If you live outside of Washington state, no sales tax is applied.) As a small business owner, I truly appreciate your patience and continued support as I navigate this unexpected impact to our creative ecosystem. Note: This sales tax does not apply to one-on-one coaching or editorial consulting services.