by Writing Workshops Staff
55 minutes ago
In every room Rosalie Morales Kearns has taught in, the same strange thing happens. She offers a prompt open enough to go anywhere, the writers scatter, and when they read aloud, a garden shed turns up in three different drafts. Or someone's character spills coffee. Or walks across a bridge. It happened in adult education classes, in university classrooms full of students fulfilling a requirement, and, to her surprise, on Zoom. "I don't know how to explain it," she says, "but we were tapping in to each other's creativity."
That shared current runs through A Winter Retreat, a Winter Feast, a two-day online writing retreat Rosalie is leading on December 12 and 13 at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature. Twelve writers at most. Cameras on, nothing recorded, no critique. Fiction writers, poets, and memoirists will leave with early drafts of new material, a habit of mining each other's read-alouds for the next prompt, and some unorthodox ways into a work in progress, like telling it backward or breaking it into fragments.
Rosalie is the author of the novel Kingdom of Women and the story collection Virgins and Tricksters, and she founded Shade Mountain Press, whose books made NPR's Best Books of the Year. Her widely cited article "Voice of Authority" examines power and privilege in creative writing pedagogy. It goes a long way toward explaining why her workshop runs on applause.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Rosalie:
Writing Workshops: This retreat is built around writing together in real time, with prompts made specifically for a group. What happens in a room full of writers that doesn't happen when we're working alone?
Rosalie Morales Kearns: The first creative writing classes I taught were in adult education venues. Participants were adults, showing up in the evenings after work. I would suggest a prompt that could be taken in many different directions, but what we found when we read out loud to each other, is that a similar element or phrase or situation had popped up in our work, something quite random: a garden shed, or a character spills coffee, or walks across a bridge. We always had a good laugh about this synchronicity.
Then I started teaching at the university level, with college-age students who often were there only to fulfill a requirement rather than from a passion for writing. I didn't expect the same thing to happen, but it did.
Then I taught some creative writing classes via Zoom. These were adults, very motivated to learn, but I figured that since we weren't physically in the same room, the "magic" wouldn't happen. It did.
I don't know how to explain it, but we were tapping in to each other's creativity.
Here's another thing that can happen in a group setting. When we do a writing exercise and then listen to each other read what they've written, I encourage everyone to take note of anything that resonates with them—a phrase, an image, a situation—that another writer mentions, and use that as the basis of their own writing exercise. This is one of the simplest ways to generate writing prompts in a group.
In an online creative writing class I taught, a participant used the phrase "lacking a moral compass" in a writing exercise, and I used that to launch my next freewrite. A whole scene came to me out of nowhere, fully formed. The situation, the characters, the dialogue are now an important part of the novel I'm working on.
Writing Workshops: You've said you feel strongly that writers should listen to their own voice and be as unconventional as they like when revising. Where does that conviction come from, and how does it shape a weekend like this one?
Rosalie Morales Kearns: I've seen firsthand how creative writing is taught at the MFA level and at the undergraduate level, and also in books on creative writing. The writing advice and critique tend to be prescriptive, producing a specific type of fiction and reinforcing an assumption about what "good" fiction looks like. That stifles creativity.
Often people incorporate that into their "inner editor" or "inner critic." I'd like us to tune out that inner critic, especially on the first draft.
Also, when I suggest a writing prompt, I always remind people that they can ignore it and write something else entirely. The point is to write, not to produce something that others (or your inner critic) would approve of.
Writing Workshops: There's no critique in this workshop, only praise and applause. Why did you design it that way, and what does removing critique free writers up to do?
Rosalie Morales Kearns: I feel very strongly that a first draft should never be critiqued. A critiquer's assumption about what "good" literature looks like could be very different from the writer's own preferences, and shouldn't be imposed on them. It could stifle the writer's own vision for where that draft is headed, what it's in the process of becoming.
As she describes in her classic book If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland saw firsthand how students lost the joy of creating as soon as they were told that their project would be given a grade. Evaluation killed their creative spark.
"I feel very strongly that a first draft should never be critiqued. A critiquer's assumption about what 'good' literature looks like could be very different from the writer's own preferences, and shouldn't be imposed on them."
Writing Workshops: You mention that a deep knowledge of world literature can give writers the confidence to try more than what MFA programs typically expect. Can you give an example of an unexpected option a writer might discover here?
Rosalie Morales Kearns: I often tell people about Francine Prose's essay "Learning from Chekhov," in which she describes the "rules" she was instilling in her creative writing students, only to find story after story in which Anton Chekhov broke those rules. For example, the idea that a short story has to be "about" something; that it has to be clear right from the beginning whose story this is; that the main character must change or learn; that point of view mustn't change.
Reading the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges is another great experience of "rule" breaking. His stories meander around, resist the "realist" expectation of deep psychological portraits of characters, eschew resolution or change at the end.
Matthew Salesses discusses all of this brilliantly in his book Craft in the Real World. For example, he discusses how plot structure in East Asian fiction can feature a twist or a surprise rather than confrontation or conflict.
I'll be talking about this more in depth in my one-session class "Plot Twists" in January.
Chekhov broke the rules. So did Borges. Spend a December weekend writing as if the rules were optional, with a dozen writers who will cheer you on.
Enroll in the Winter Retreat →Writing Workshops: A few of your prompts invite writers to approach a work in progress from a totally different angle: telling it backward, from a new POV, in kaleidoscopic fragments. What's one of these you love most, and what tends to shake loose when people try it?
Rosalie Morales Kearns: I think these prompts are another way to help people become more relaxed about their writing, to not worry so much about whether they're doing it "right," to be willing to play around more with their writing.
The best way to start trying these different angles is by playing around with a storyline that isn't your own. In the longer fiction-writing classes I teach, I like to assign a few fairy tales that we all read, and those become our lingua franca. Instead of just carrying out a thought experiment (What if this story was written in first person? What if the backstory was presented earlier? etc.), we can actually write a few paragraphs of, say, "Mr. Fox" from the perspective of Lady Mary or a random wedding guest, or an alternate beginning of "The Frog King" in which the information about the witch's curse is presented immediately. Then we can look at these rewritings and think about how they change the story. It helps writers see that the elements of a story are there to be played with, that there's no one perfect form of "Mr. Fox" or "The Frog King" or your own story.
As to which ones are my own favorite, I'm combining a couple of them in the novel I'm working on now: both telling it backward and arranging it in kaleidoscopic fragments. I'm definitely having fun with it.
Writing Workshops: This is a winter retreat as much as a workshop, with hot cider, ginger cookies, and good company. What mood are you hoping to create over these two days, and why does that matter for the writing?
Rosalie Morales Kearns: What I love about winter is that the long nights and cold weather are perfect for introspection and solitude, and also perfect for feasting—enjoying the company of others in a celebratory way, with food, music, candles or a fireplace, shiny decorations that catch the light. This two-day retreat combines those two modes: we write, then we come together to read what we've written, applaud each other, and talk in-depth about our writing lives. And hopefully eat lots of cookies.
"It helps writers see that the elements of a story are there to be played with, that there's no one perfect form of 'Mr. Fox' or 'The Frog King' or your own story."
Writing Workshops: Cameras stay on, sessions aren't recorded, and everyone's writing live together. What do writers gain from showing up fully present that they'd miss from a recording or a more passive class?
Rosalie Morales Kearns: I know I would feel self-conscious if I thought that our spontaneous interactions were going to be viewed later by someone who hadn't participated, someone none of us had met. It would feel like we were performing for the benefit of an anonymous observer.
This retreat is really about writing together and talking to each other, being with each other, in the moment.
No anonymous observer, no recording, no one grading the draft. That is the promise of A Winter Retreat, a Winter Feast: a small group writing in real time, reading aloud, and borrowing each other's stray phrases for the next prompt, the way "lacking a moral compass" became a scene in Rosalie's novel. If this year left your manuscript feeling like homework, give it two December afternoons among writers who applaud. Bring cider. Bring the draft you've been avoiding. Twelve seats, and they go to whoever shows up first.
Write with Rosalie on December 12 and 13, noon to 3 p.m. ET, and carry fresh pages into the new year.
Save Your Seat in the Winter Retreat →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
