Registration is rolling until October 15 at 11:59PM EST. No application is required (except for financial aid— Applications for financial aid are due October 11 at 5PM EST).

$400 w/financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)

8 week class: Sundays 4-6PM EST, 10/22, 10/29, 11/5, 11/12, 11/19, 11/26, 12/3, 12/10 (optional makeup date 12/17)

A poem, short story or memoir can be a lament or a rant, a flight of nostalgia or a deep dive into another world. It can make us laugh, weep and remember. But it is also, always, a made thing, crafted and revised, the result of deliberate (and sometimes subconscious) choices on the part of its creator. In this class, we’ll read an eclectic range of material—some poetry, some short fiction, some brief memoir—with our focus tuned to those choices. How do writers use tone, verb tense, sentence/line length, word choice, pacing, figurative language and other tools in the literary tool box to create meaningful, resonant work? What are the “rules” of each genre; what happens when they’re broken? Then we’ll try out those tools, writing to emulate, respond to (or resist!) those model texts. You’ll leave this class with the skills to read more deeply and write more intentionally.

Anndee Hochman is a journalist, essayist, storyteller and teaching artist. Her column, “The Parent Trip,” appears weekly in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and her work has also been published in WebMD, Poets & Writers, Broad Street Review and numerous journals and anthologies, including the recently-published Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation. Anndee is also a seven-time winner of Moth Story Slams. Her books include Anatomies: A Novella and Stories (Picador USA) and Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home (The Eighth Mountain Press). More at www.anndeehochman.com