The Writer's Studio: Six Beginnings in Sixty Minutes with Brittany Perham

The Writer’s Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You’ll leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

Six Beginnings in Sixty Minutes

Every writer faces the blank page. Sometimes the blank page feels like an invitation; sometimes it feels like an overwhelming challenge. This workshop will help us combat those challenging days, when beginning feels impossible. Participants will have the opportunity to make a series of six quick and easy starts, generating first lines and paragraphs from found materials and source texts, sonic play, syntactical patterns, and more. Our prompts will be both flexible and reusable, suitable for both poetry and prose, so that participants may return to them to begin a variety of creative projects. Our aim will be to make the start of the writing day fun and anxiety-free, a time to be playful and curious. At the end of the workshop, students will have six new beginnings, as well as new strategies for enjoying the blank page in their own writing practice.

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton, 2017), which received the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was nominated for a Northern California Book Award; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions, 2012); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative chapbook The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP, 2016). She is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program.