Creative Writing Faculty Teaching Philosophies

Tony Abbott - Writing for Young People

Every student entering Lesley's WFYP program offers a fresh voice for young readers, one that hasn't been heard before. Each semester is a journey to reveal and nurture that voice. Because children and young adults are defined by their openness, their playful imaginations, their uncertainty about themselves, their vulnerability to ignorance, and their awareness of so very much, I challenge WFYP students to write at the highest level.

Our workshops are honest and deep, rarely heartbreaking, often hilarious, incisive, and energizing. In our weeks of distance learning, I respond to each manuscript as a writer who has suffered/enjoyed much editing. Throughout, I challenge my students to look deeply into how one writes successfully for the most vibrant-tender-weak-funny-intelligent-confused-open-strong-snarky audience there is. Students learn to scrutinize every word, sentence, and paragraph, dissect character and emotional thread, and shape scenes, chapters, and overall story in the tradition of the best writing for young people.

I've written fantasy and realistic novels; I also have an interest in comedic writing at all age levels. My passions include 20th century American literature (which students certainly hear about), music, and art, as well as British and Irish poetry of the last half-century.

• See Tony Abbott's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: tonyabbottbooks.com

Anne Bernays - Fiction, Nonfiction

I have no philosophy of teaching. I can offer a few observations and guidelines I've managed to collect over the years.

• Imagination is like a muscle. It can be stretched and strengthened with exercise.
• The best stories and novels are about sex, money, power. One, two, or all three of them.
• No one wants to read polite fiction; it's boring.
• The writer must take emotional risks.
• The teacher's job is to free the student from his/her reluctance to deal in prose with the sort of pain and uncertainty they often face in real life.
• Strong fiction is the result of the combination of craft, attitude, and courage.
• This paradox: focus fiercely and relax.

See Anne Bernays' books, awards, and affiliations.

Jami Brandli - Writing for Stage and Screen

To be an effective dramatist, I believe you must do three things:

• Know what your characters want
• Never make it too easy on your characters
• You, the dramatist, must love your characters, even the most despicable ones.

Writing a script, play or screenplay, is a journey, and as your teacher/mentor, I'll do my best to guide you in writing the script you want to write. At the same time, I'll be asking all the hard questions of the script. No doubt, my main focus will be on character, for the core of all drama is "character in action." "Character in action" applies to every script, from a high-concept action-adventure screenplay to an intimate two-person play.

• See Jami Brandli's productions, awards, and affiliations.

Barry Brodsky - Writing for Stage and Screen

I have been teaching playwriting since 1990 and screenwriting since 1998. My total love for theatre and movies (and TV too) as well as the history of these genres, drives my instruction. I'm always intrigued at the seemingly infinite number of ways people want to tell a visual story. Just when I thought I'd seen it all, some student will come to a class, or send me an assignment, that will test the boundaries of everything I thought I knew about writing for the Stage and Screen. And that's when the fun begins. As I read something I'm working on, I'll often stop and think "I'd never accept this from a student," shake my head, hit the "delete" button, and try it again.

It all pays off when I'm sitting in a theatre, or a classroom, and watching (or listening) to a student's work being read or performed. I remember the piece's various drafts. I marvel when something I told the student wouldn't work does work after all. I can feel the attention being paid to the spoken word. And I can't imagine doing anything else.

• See Barry Brodsky's productions, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: barrybrodskywriter.com

Jane Brox - Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is a wonderfully open genre, which also possesses ongoing questions of its own: What are the responsibilities of writing from one's life? Of writing of another's life.? What is "the truth"? How might a writer best negotiate the complex relationship between truth and memory? There may be no definitive answers to these questions, but I think that any writer who is serious about the genre must live with their complexities.

As much as an apprenticeship in nonfiction involves grappling with these questions, no less essential is a thorough attention to craft - shape and syntax, image and metaphor, voice and structure. I believe students gain their greatest understanding of craft by learning to read as a writer, and that exploring the literary tradition - nonfiction, fiction, and poetry – as well as contemporary works is essential to a writer's education.

The one-on-one structure of a low-residency program is ideal in that it allows for both the support and the solitude essential to developing one's voice. I value most of all the way it allows me, as an advisor, to tailor the work and reading to the needs of each individual student.

• See Jane Brox's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: janebrox.com

Sharon Bryan - Poetry

Can creativity be taught? When I took modern dance lessons as a child, we spent the first half of each class practicing technique (craft). Then we took a break, lay on the floor, and closed our eyes. Music played softly in the background, and our teacher began to tell a story about a snowflake falling, a caterpillar, a woman planting corn. When we wanted to, we got up and danced how we felt - and of course when we did, we used the techniques we'd been practicing. I believe craft and creativity are inseparable. I teach craft. Then I do everything I can to encourage creativity.

My special interests in poetry include translation, point of view, the free verse line, traditional forms, form in free verse, the invention of free verse, poetry and painting, poetry and science. I have a BA in Philosophy and an MA in Physical Anthropology, so I'm always glad to have students with backgrounds outside literature.

• See Sharon Bryan's books, awards, and affiliations.

Teresa Cader - Poetry

I develop an individual mentoring relationship for each student, according to his or her level of experience. Teaching this way allows me to understand not just what is on the page, but what could emerge. I urge my students to write the poems only they could write. This requires a willingness to be brutally honest with oneself, push past inhibitions, and let the poem-in-process take charge. One wants to hear the poet's deepest self through the poem's idiosyncratic speech. I believe this can only be achieved by rigorous study of poetic craft and extensive reading across the centuries. I require my students to pay attention to every word they read or write - for its sound as well as its meaning.

My special interests are innovations in world poetry - especially the poets of Eastern Europe, their mastery of craft enabling them to address urgent public issues artistically - and emerging hybrid forms. I am affiliated as an alumna with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and am interested in international and historical work. I have been on the board of the Concord Poetry Center and am on the board of Tuesday: An Art Project. Many of my students have published their work and won prizes, and three have founded literary magazines.

See Teresa Cader's books, awards, and affiliations.

Rafael Campo - Poetry

My interest in poetry is fundamentally engaged with my work as a healer, and this interrelationship informs my approach to teaching. The best poems invite us into an empathetic space, the voice of another consciousness. Thus I try to teach empathically, entering my students' poems with my sensibilities attuned to what - in both craft and content - abets my participation sensuously and intelligently. Spending as much time as I do listening to bodies through my stethoscope, I likewise try to auscultate my students' poems, paying close attention to their music. For this reason, I've long been drawn to so-called formal poetry, so I can help students rediscover meter, rhyme, and other elements of prosody in a way that feels embodied, not imposed.

See Rafael Campo's books, awards, and affiliations.

Leah Hager Cohen - Nonfiction

As a teacher, my first roles are to encourage a rich and varied range of readings, and to demystify the basic tenets of good writing. No amount of art or imagination will carry a piece of prose if its grammar, syntax, diction or logic falter, and here I strive not only to be a good editor, but to help students internalize the process and increase their own self-editing capabilities. In the workshop, I see my role as mediator, setting the tone and ensuring the forum is intellectually precise, creatively curious, and deeply respectful of the spiritual impulse to create with language. Above all I strive to help my students uncouple process from product, granting themselves permission to experiment, to invest, to reach, to fail – all of which do more to enable growth than would an exclusive emphasis on product.

Neither writing, nor the teaching of it, can be rightly considered separate from the practice of compassion. That practice not only lies at the heart of writing and teaching, it may be the principle reason writers are called to tell stories in the first place.

See Leah Hager Cohen's books, awards, and affiliations.

Pat Lowery Collins - Writing for Young People

The roots of my teaching style and philosophy are in a childhood influenced by the educational ideas of Maria Montessori. In our house, curiosity and imagination reigned supreme, and my sisters and I were encouraged to pursue any and all interests.

This same freedom of exploration is what I offer my students. As their mentor I also try to be approachable and encouraging, respectful of each individual's artistic process, and as honest as possible within a climate where the student is truly heard and acknowledged. There are opportunities to take risks, to seek solutions independently, and to determine one's own goals.

Never a full time teaching professional, I was invited to teach at Lesley because of a level of success in the children's book industry. Perhaps because of my background in visual art and poetry, I continue to stress attention to imagery, to the choice and sound of words and their rhythmic patterns, and to the close observation of detail. There are many important elements of craft, such as development of plot and characters, that can be learned, but a strong piece of prose needs the distinct signature of its author, something that, with proper guidance, will evolve over time and must be honored and nurtured.

See Pat Lowery Collins' books, awards, and affiliations.

Steven Cramer - Poetry

From twenty-eight years of working with poetry students, I've developed some central beliefs about teaching writing as an art. Despite what teachers can't do (implant talent; stoke "fire in the belly" without the help of embers), they can nurture, through attentive challenge, the promise of apprentice writers. That dynamic involves clear expectations and mutual trust, and the teacher's fair and honest estimate of a poem's merits, articulated with "respect for the emotional tissues" (Seamus Heaney). Of course, we all weep for our limitations.

Good teachers encourage. But they also say when a poem relies on cliché, hokey sentiment, platitudes, melodrama, or writing that lacks formal virtue. They don't mean that you are a cliché, hokey, melodramatic, or lacking in formal virtue. They mean your poem is not (yet) an event of language. When a poem is finished, it no longer belongs to the poet.

I'm interested in how certain poetic traditions - the sonnet, the Romantic odes, the inventions of Whitman and Dickinson, et al. - influence our own work even if we don't know it. I love the dispute between free verse and traditional form, especially when it takes place in the poem itself. I teach with an editor's eye.

See Steven Cramer's books, awards, and affiliations.

Jacqueline Davies - Writing for Young People

There are two elements to writing: craft and art. Teaching craft is relatively easy and enormously satisfying. A well-delivered lecture on pacing, an engaging seminar discussion of themes and meta-themes, a roundtable focused on character - as a teacher, it's a pleasure to delve into these topics in the classroom and pick them apart until their bones lay exposed on the table for all to see.

But the element of art springs from the individual writer, and so teaching art is a much messier, more involved, and personal undertaking. I try as a teacher to ascertain the artistic needs of each of my students. That means getting to know the emotional, psychological, intellectual being who is creating stories. Making art is essentially about facing fear, and I consider it a primary role of mine to help students understand that connection and push through whatever resistance they face in their art. Witnessing a student at that moment of breakthrough, when resistance is overcome and something truly remarkable emerges, is my greatest satisfaction as a teacher.

I am, first and foremost, a working writer who struggles on a daily basis with the nearly impossible task of translating my flesh and blood onto the clean, white page. I try to bring a sense of comradeship to my teaching. I like the idea that as we travel on our individual paths, our time at Lesley gives us a chance to walk alongside each other for a mile or two. As the famous clown-activist Wavy Gravy once said, "We're all bozos on the bus. We might as well sit back and enjoy the ride."

See Jacqueline Davies' books, awards, and affiliations.

David Elliott - Writing for Young People

Recently, a student asked me for "sharp rules" and was gravely disappointed when I told her I didn't know any. Every piece of writing– picture book, chapter book, or YA novel - is a world unto itself, idiosyncratic, difficult, maybe even impossible, to fathom fully. My job, as I see it, is to act as a reliable witness for the less experienced writer as she brings that world and its residents, whoever they might be, to the page.

But to make something from nothing is a mysterious , often frustrating, endeavor. In the inventive stages especially, both teacher and student must be vigilant, open to change, and hopefully good-humored. (If you are a sourpuss, I probably am not the right guy for you.) Later, when revising (and revising, and revising) resilience is the quality I look for in both the writer and her work. Throughout our time together, I try not to pretend that I have answers (I don't), but work to ask those questions intended to help the student find her own.

• See David Elliott's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: davidelliottbooks.com

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Thomas Sayers Ellis - Poetry

I like to find out who each student is, what books are in them, what their writing strengths and weaknesses are, what their "aesthetic ceilings" are. I like to shake things up, to roam percussively through their safe zones and their house styles, if any. Teaching is an exchange, a two-way internal and external stretching. Courage and surrender in service of Care are expected. The workshop, near or distance, must exceed the Socratic operating table; it must live in the creative process, continually, pre every poem.

I am interested in many forms of literacy; not just writing and reading, but the common denominator in all of them - "nuance," the unexplainable poetic essence. I love most forms of art, especially photography, and cinema and sound. My favorite film is Les Enfant du Paradis; my favorite photography is still being taken, the long exposure between the last stanzas in the universe; and my favorite poem is always the one that is working on me. I live to make a draft live, to escape its own, usually linear, life.

Teaching has never felt like struggle; mostly it is love.

• See Thomas Sayers Ellis' books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: tsellis.com

Tony Eprile - Fiction

My teaching philosophy is constantly evolving...in response to what I'm reading, encountering in daily life and in the classroom, or learning from my students. My basic goal is to provide my students with the tools to teach themselves. Some of these tools have to do with how we gain access to the creative, inspired, subconscious sides of ourselves; others have to do with our critical faculties. The writing workshops are particularly useful to help people learn to become their own best editors through editing the work of others.

Beyond that, I'm strongly interested in questions of how we live in, engage with, and observe the world. I teach a seminar on the art of observation or "seeing like a writer." Understanding our own habits of mind and how these affect what and how we see is vital to also understanding that others see differently, and that you can show a great deal about who people are by what it is that they notice or fail to notice.

My aim is to encourage my students to move their own work to its highest level, not to write like me or according to some prerequisite standard of what makes a good story. There are always a variety of styles and approaches to writing in my workshop, and I'm delighted when someone "goes too far." Beyond that, I have to agree with Henry James that "the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of (a work of fiction) is, that it be interesting."

• See Tony Eprile's books, awards, and affiliations.

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Laurie Foos - Fiction

My philosophies regarding the teaching of writing are these: that the gateway to the unconscious must be opened, through habit and practice, in the production of creative material, or the wri ting cannot succeed. As a mentor, I ask students to describe the actual process that goes on in the writing of a story (or novel), and specifically how the story or novel idea came to be, how it germinated. Often stories succeed or fail when they are conceived in the rational part of the mind, or when the rational mind is too soon engaged.

I encourage students to risk themselves in their work, to be bold, for only in the act of risk can there be growth. The two years in an MFA program is in and of itself a permission slip, perhaps the one time they've been afforded to place writing in the center of their lives, and therefore students should use this time to try as many different styles as possible. In this way it is also important that they be exposed to many different types of writing, both contemporary and from the canon. In this way they are exposed to the many ways other writers approach the craft. What matters, I always tell students, is what has been gained in the process of taking risks.

• See Laurie Foos' books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: lauriefoos.net

Susan Goodman - Writing for Young People

My teaching philosophy? Number one: figure out what my students are really trying to accomplish in their writing, including all the intellectual and emotional undercurrents. Number two: help them find a way to get there - or, closer anyway.

Of course, that simple formula is never quite so simple; it takes time to understand what is getting in their way. The need to improve skills like pacing or narrative distance is obvious. But does this student give herself enough room to think things through? Can another combine his easy wit with depth so his characters have enough dimension to live the story he has imagined for them?

Are they ready to dig deeper? I hope so because the next part of my job is to challenge my students to go past what is easy, congratulate their accomplishments, then continue to push - all the while, standing alongside ready to help.

• See Susan Goodman's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: susangoodmanbooks.com

Joan Houlihan - Poetry

With every poet I teach, I engage each poem on its own terms, taking it as far (and deep) as possible, while respecting limits and personal aesthetics. Some of my methods include: tailoring readings based on what I see as a student's affinities to, and differences from, contemporary poems, as well as on what I think the poet's work lacks. I ask students to challenge their own style with new models and to examine their assumptions about what a poem is. I focus on the small elements of craft (line, syntax and line break, image and metaphor, sound and diction) as a way to inform the large - inspiration, author intention and reader response, innovation and communication. I also assign exercises that focus on a particular element of craft and demonstrate how to radically re-envision a poem as an editor.

My special interests include the persona poem, the poetic sequence, and the relationship between cognitive science and writing.

• See Joan Houlihan's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: joanhoulihan.com

Alexandra Johnson - Nonfiction

My first book, The Hidden Writer (Doubleday), won the PEN/Jerard Award for nonfiction. Here's what you need to know: I was so terrified and perfectionist a writer beforehand that a writer friend told me to submit a chapter to a national contest. "Just to get moving," she said. And so I did. Of course I didn't include a return self-addressed stamped envelope. Why do that? It was only coming back. When I got the call with good news, something happened - I began to trust what's now become the core of my teaching process: shatter isolation. Connect. A community of skilled writers, lead by a creative mentor, will save you years. Literally. Question: do you prefer to spend ten years working alone at home or on weekends or spend two years with others who will help you shape that manuscript into being?

My teaching philosophy: passing on the things I wish someone had taught me. Passing on the craft and confidence that I, like every writer, have developed on our own as we've produced books.

For me, unlocking process is the key to producing. Process and product cannot be separated. In teaching nonfiction, I help identify the story or crucial angle that's hidden deep in the subject matter. That means helping students get to the core of their project and hone craft. For memoir writers, my focus is on how to shape narrative, frame scenes, advance the storyline through dialogue and concrete sensory detail. I began my writing career as a literary journalist, publishing essays, profiles and long travel pieces. I bring those hands-on journalistic and magazine skills to students who already have a long nonfiction project in mind or who are writing essays for what might eventually be a collection.

I won the James Conway Award for the teaching of memoir and nonfiction at Harvard. But it's the publication rate of Lesley's nonfiction students, both current and grads, that's perhaps the true proof of the nonfiction faculty's teaching skills. To have a student listed in Best American Essays, or have his piece read on NPR, or have her first book acceptance is why we teach. It's why teaching is a pleasure: it creates a community of writers helping one another, a network that continues long after the degree is awarded.

My first editor, a noted writer of seven books, was then in her early 70s. "The best advice I can give you," she told me, " is that a writer's confidence never entirely comes. But it can be learned." That's why I teach writing. As Eudora Welty said: all serious daring starts within.

• See Alexandra Johnson's books, awards, and affiliations.

Rachel Kadish - Fiction

Good writing makes us our most honest selves, and as a faculty mentor I'm fundamentally committed to coaching students as they work to set down the truth - whether it takes the form of fiction or nonfiction. When I work with a student, my most important job is to notice everything I can about that student's writing. Because the best way I know to understand writing is through detail - what Ryszard Kapuscinski called "the universe in the raindrop" - I focus on very close readings of student manuscripts. I try to read not only the story that's on the page, but also the story that might only be hinted at, because the writer hasn't yet dared write it. Sometimes this kind of reading leads us to focus together on what initially seemed only a faint tracery on the page - but might in fact be the barely audible heartbeat of the story that the writer truly needs to tell. My students know I'd rather they take risks and fail than write safe stories that leave no mark on either reader or writer. I congratulate my students on attempting each big leap, even if they fall hard - that sort of failure is productive, necessary, catalyzing.

I write fiction and nonfiction and have edited radio drama, but I learn a great deal from other genres and art forms, and I encourage my students to do the same - to attend playwriting workshops, read craft books written for sculptors. Art should always be surprising, and I want my students to surprise themselves; to raise the bar again and again; to be delighted by their own and others' contributions to the fledgling writing community that is a workshop. I believe in taking a student's writing more seriously than he or she may have dared take it... I tend to focus intensely on character development, as so much of a story's structure and plot grow out of character... I have a particular interest in the ways in which history and politics are metabolized through art. That said, I try to leaven seriousness with humor, with compassion, and with the sense that good writing is absolutely essential, though producing it can feel like pulling one's soul through a sieve.

If we do this work well together, then the heartbeat of a story, perhaps only faintly audible in the first draft, strengthens. These are the best moments. A student revises and I critique, the student revises and revises again... and then abruptly the student is off and running without need of more advice, and we're looking at a draft together, and we can all of us hear that heart beating.

• See Rachel Kadish's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website:rachelkadish.com

Hester Kaplan - Fiction

My most valuable teaching tool is the work itself, whether it's a piece of student writing, or the published work of a seasoned author. I'm interested in how and why a piece of fiction engages the reader, and I ask my students to consider what elements make a story and lead them feel a certain way. I ask them where the engagement is happening on the page, and what dynamic is taking place between the reader and the words. This search is often where the student, transferring this consideration to his own work, discovers what his story is really about. This exploration, if we take a risk and allow it to, will lead the writer to discover the truth in and about his own writing.

I stress revision as the time when a piece of work finds its form and meaning, and when all the elements of fiction we talk about in seminars and workshops and submissions come together to serve the story. Revision - that process of chipping away, fine-tuning, and rethinking - is also about looking at the language and considering the cadence and the music of the writing. It's during revision that we feel ourselves itching to leave the work and run away, but it's those drops of sweat, that racing heart, that lets us know we're about to get to the true and genuine stuff.

I love teaching in Lesley's program and find my students enormously inspiring.

• See Hester Kaplan's books, awards, and affiliations.

Michael Lowenthal - Fiction

To walk a fictional mile in someone else's fictional shoes, first you have to make that pair of shoes; it helps to know something about cobbling. After many years in the footwear trade, as it were, I'm happy to share with students anything I've learned about uppers and soles (or even, on a good day, maybe, souls).

• See Michael Lowenthal's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website:MichaelLowenthal.com

William Lychack - Fiction

If it's true, as Saul Bellow said, that writers are readers moved to emulation, then surely teachers are students moved by a similar compulsion. I shudder to think where I'd be without Charlie, or Blanche, or Nick, or Ms. Forbath. Not a day goes by I don't think of some teacher, and still I cannot recall with confidence a single thing that even my best instructors taught me, except, perhaps, how to be in the world.

Maybe that was the greatest service they performed. The most affecting teachers became models for a kind of process - this process of being an artist or scholar - that strange, beguiling process of becoming oneself. The most gifted teachers were persistence and passion come to life, teaching an extension of their devotion as they paid the bills. The distinction wasn't lost on us: our finest instructors might want to teach, but they needed to do their science or philosophy. We sniffed for this authenticity - it's what we gossiped about - certain classrooms like sources of light.

How could one not wish to emulate such a life?

And on my best days, I find no way to separate my life as a student from my life as a writer from my life as a teacher. I'm not sure one can teach anyone how to write, but I believe one can show someone how to love to write. I preach generosity and clarity, because I struggle to find such qualities in my own work. I want my students to bring out the best in me, just as I need them to coax what's best from their writing.

• See William Lychack's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: lychack.com

Chris Lynch - Writing for Young People

Having worked with quite a few editors over the past twenty years, I feel my strongest work as a teacher is when I bring the best of those experiences to my students. The most energizing exchanges always came when I realized a great editor was in fact pouring her energy into channelling me, rather than battling me. I believe new writers come to us wanting to sound like their best selves, I believe they are right to feel this way, and I believe it is my duty to help them achieve this. (We may sometimes have to debate what that best self might actually be, but that too is part of the fun.)

In workshop there is one horse I feel is never too dead to beat: our objective is to get the writer back to the keyboard. All feedback does not need to be cheerleading but it does need to be designed to leave the writer with the ideas - and the will - to go back and make the work stronger.

• See Chris Lynch's books, awards, and affiliations.

Rachel Manley - Nonfiction

I do not have a teaching philosophy. Maybe empathy. But that's not philosophy. As a mentor I try to intuit what's in the minds and hearts of the writers I work with, hoping to help sharpen their philosophy, their thoughts, their words, and their meaning, so that they can achieve whatever special literary goal they have set for themselves. In the end, if I do have to define a philosophy of teaching, or the technique I use to buttress that philosophy, then simply, it is to use my experience as a writer in guiding and assisting my students along their journey to fulfill their imagination.

• See Rachel Manley's books, awards, and affiliations.

Cate Marvin - Poetry

To my mind, poetry is perhaps the most precise creative genre, in that the writer has the options to create his or her own rules, and while this is certainly a liberty, it is one that requires skill and the writer's awareness of his or her responsibility to the reader. I'm particularly invested in the formal strategies poems may undertake, the integrity of the line, the rearrangement and/or derangement of language and syntax, and invention. I believe all writers should have a solid foundational knowledge of the work of their predecessors, so that their own poetry may take part of larger, ongoing literary conversations.

My areas of expertise are Twentieth-Century American and British poetry, the theory of Poetics, and Contemporary American Women's poetry.

• See Cate Marvin's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: catemarvin.com

Kyoko Mori - Fiction

In the early drafts, I'm mostly interested in helping you see what is at the heart of the story. Who is this character, what does he or she want, and why do you, the writer, see him or her in that particular place doing that particular thing? I try to get you to understand the elements of the story that interest you the most - the characters, the place and the time setting, the images that started you thinking about the story in the first place, the one sentence that seemed right and important from the beginning - in order to sort out what is essential and what is not. My job is to help you figure out which things you started out with are worth keeping and developing, and (just as importantly) to encourage you to be utterly ruthless about throwing out the rest.

In the middle stages, I try to help you with the overall structure of the narrative: where to begin, what to explain right away, what to reveal more gradually along the way, how much to leave open-ended. This is a good time to consider and reconsider what is plausible and what is not, what is confusing to the reader and what is so clear that it doesn't need to be explained, where the story happens too fast and where it bogs down. With every subsequent draft, more attention can be paid to each paragraph, each sentence, each word. The final revision in which we get to scrutinize every word is a real pleasure and reward. I enjoy teaching because I like to see the story come into focus over time; it's both a pleasure and an honor to be part of that process.

See Kyoko Mori's books, awards, and affiliations.

Pamela Petro - Nonfiction

I view the mentoring relationship as a dialogue rather than a traditional, hierarchal teaching experience. I often learn as much from my students as they do from me. Because I see non-fiction as the great Renaissance-person's field - it incorporates all fields of knowledge, spans everything from memoir to science writing to biography, and uses craft techniques available to writers across genres - I encourage my students to experiment. If they've been writing memoir, I might ask them to look at their subject matter as if they're writing a travel piece or a personal profile. And I encourage them to think in a global sense when it comes to their writing; we create genres in order to tidy the teaching experience, but the imagination is far less tidy. Inspiration may begin as poetry and wind up as narrative non-fiction, which is why I encourage students to experiment, read widely across genres, and always view literary expression as a sliding scale.

As I'm also a visual artist, I have a special interest in graphic novels/memoirs and word-and-image pairings (my MA is in Word and Image Studies). I also speak Welsh and often write about Wales and Welsh literature, and have a background in travel writing.

• See Pamela Petro's books, awards, and affiliations.
• Author website: petrographs.blogspot.com

Christina Shea - Fiction

I don't have a philosophy of teaching, I have a method. It is a conversation between you and me, author and reader, writer to writer. I dedicate myself to this meta-cognitive exchange. Complex communication we are up to: challenging, influential, instructional, transparent. Our work together requires focus, humility, and not a small amount of courage. That smooth sheet of paper you have typed up is now a tactile geological surface, and there are no rules except those to be broken, nor is there a compass. Still there is navigation, you can feel your way, and I can orient you to the star filled dark.

I like to know what you do when you write. I like to examine this process and help you articulate it and foster self-determination in your work. I want to know what you read and why you write. I want to give new definition to what inspires your learning.

• See Christina Shea's books, awards, and affiliations.

Kate Snodgrass - Writing for Stage and Screen

At its core, teaching is a partnership (it's just you and me). I have a passion for storytelling - whether it's on the stage or on the screen, and my favorite thing to do is to talk about the infinite varieties of story. As a teacher I consider it my calling to open doors, not to close them. I try to listen, not only to you and what you want to accomplish and why you're writing and what you want the audience to understand, but also to what the play/screenplay itself wants to do, say, accomplish. Sometimes we writers are not sure what we're writing about or even why we're writing it; we're simply trying to get something out onto the page so we can understand it and then shape it in a meaningful way. And sometimes our intellects get in the way of our instincts - especially in the first drafts. I try to listen to the play's instincts most of all - sometimes they are smarter than we are. And I ask a lot of questions. Answers are not so helpful in the long run - they're an easy fix, but questions are helpful. Questions open doors to solutions. Finally, I want you to come away knowing your strengths and weaknesses so you can continue to grow in the "real" world. Therefore, I revere so-called "failure." It's where we learn the most, and it sets us on a path toward success. I hate to mention the dreaded word "process," but writing is one, and once we understand this, we retain power over our writing. And we should all be so very powerful.

• See Kate Snodgrass's productions, awards, and affiliations.

Sinan Ünel - Writing for Stage and Screen

In the movie Julia, Lillian Hellman, brilliantly portrayed by Jane Fonda, gets so frustrated that she flings her typewriter out the window. It's 1934 and she's working on her first play, The Children's Hour, which will go on to win her the Pulitzer and make her famous. As a largely self-taught playwright, I've thrown a few typewriters out the window myself. As a teacher, my job is to help you realize your own brilliance, no matter how many typewriters get flung about. What I try to convey to my students is that playwriting is a private, solitary, and sacred occupation. Each play is a problem the playwright poses herself and sets out to solve. With each play, the writer must learn how to write a play all over again. Your best assets are your instincts and subconscious. Your greatest tool is craft.

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A.J. Verdelle - Fiction, Nonfiction

My teaching passion involves revision. Period. When I first began to write, I was completely daunted by my heroically obtained but completely unsatisfactory drafts. I went, as I do always, in search of references to instruct me, and found nothing I could really use on revision. This challenged me. I have spent all my teaching energies of the last fifteen years coming up with a strategy for communicating revision. My work as a teacher is all about answering this critical question: What do you do now that you have a good draft? How do you move a draft from "done", to beautiful.

I teach a method of revision that has been page-tested by my students. Beginning with defining the hot center, or the passion source, of each manuscript, and radiating out, we refine everything down to where you place your commas and periods. I teach students to revise with acuity, and I teach students to consider and reconsider every word they choose to use. I encourage students to refresh their understanding of the narrative and poetic elements we employ to write fiction, and to make choices among those of which elements to scour, polish and/or re-envision.

Once you know what you're doing revision is the revelator. Watching a manuscript begin to glisten from the muck of an early draft is like finding an emerald in the mud.

• See A.J. Verdelle's books, awards, and affiliations.