TMWW Summer: Course Descriptions, Faculty, and Craft Seminar Info

2025 Available Workshops

• Sense of Place and Time:  Fiction and the Craft of World-Building – Amanda Cockrell, all levels
• Fiction Tutorial – Fred Leebron, all levels
• Fiction Writers’ Retreat – Dan Mueller, all levels
• Radical Presence: Poetry as an Art of Attention – Rebecca Lindenberg, all levels
• Start Your Writing Journey – Dorothy Hassan, multigenre, all levels
• The Middle Place, a Workshop for Book-Length Works in Progress – Barbara Jones, multigenre, all levels
• Write Now: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop – James McKean, all levels
• Fiction Workshop – Rachele Salvini, all levels
• Nonfiction Tutorial – Kristin Dombek, all levels

Amanda Cockrell

Sense of Place and Time: Fiction and the Craft of World-Building, all levels

It’s tricky to create a fully realized world, whether it’s a fantastical land, an ancient era, or the endless variations of our modern one, but a sense of place is the heart of a good story. This write-now workshop will focus on developing your fictional setting as a way to enrich your story and anchor your reader in its landscape. We’ll use prompts suggested by the nature of each participant’s work to learn the power of the perfect detail and how each can advance the plot and develop character at the same time. You’ll either research your setting or design it from scratch, and then practice painting that world on each page. You can bring a work in progress or start something entirely new, and all levels of experience are welcome. You’ll write daily and respond to each other’s work.

Amanda Cockrell is the author of numerous historical novels, among them Coyote Weather, set during the years of the Vietnam War, and six novels of the pre-Columbian Southwest. Writing as Damion Hunter, she is the author of nine novels set in ancient Rome, including Shadow of the Eagle, which Simon Scarrow called “a brilliantly realised world.” During her tenure as founding director of the graduate program in children’s and adolescent literature at Hollins, she taught literature and creative writing and wrote the young adult novel What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay. She has been the recipient of an NEA literature grant and a grant from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and lives in Roanoke. Her current projects include novels about Hadrian’s Wall and the Hollywood Blacklist.

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Fred Leebron

Fiction Tutorial, all levels

Fred will meet with each student one-on-one two times over the course of the week, in 30-minute sessions. You’ll get abundant prompts and guidance for you to continue the work during the day throughout the week. In addition, Fred will offer two hour-long craft seminars on the elements of fiction writing for all his tutorial students and lead a three-hour field trip in Roanoke one afternoon.  All levels and forms welcome, including short story and the novel, and any genre writing. Twenty pages (12 pt., double spaced).

Fred Leebron has published three novels, a novella, and numerous short stories, winning both an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize. He has founded and directed writing programs in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, and has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate level for nearly 30 years. His second novel, Six Figures, was made into a feature length, award-winning film in Canada, and he has worked on a number of film and television projects. He is coauthor of a Harcourt Brace textbook on fiction writing and coeditor of the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction. His collection of short fiction, The News Said It Was, was published in 2022.

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Dan Mueller

Fiction Writers’ Retreat, all levels

In this write-now workshop, we will focus predominantly on fiction and embody the practice of writing daily. During meeting times we’ll discuss matters of craft derived from reading a variety of pieces of contemporary fiction; read aloud to one another from our own newly written work and respond to it as a community of artists intent on helping one another find a larger audience; write from prompts; approach publishing as a part of the creative process; and address any and all concerns related to the writing life from writer’s block to sources of inspiration to submission strategies. While conventional creative writing workshops privilege the critique, the quality of them hinging upon the amount of time and thought outside of meeting times writers put into reading and responding to each other’s manuscripts, in ours we’ll honor the act of writing by putting the time, space, and camaraderie to use in the drafting of new work. For your first prompt, write a scene of no more than 1000 words in which a character finds themselves in a place they shouldn’t be.  Attend to the particular sense impressions and concrete, specific details that bridge the distance between reader and character.  Please bring what you’ve written to our first meeting. This workshop is open to writers of all skill levels and degrees of experience.

Daniel Mueller is the author of three collections of short fiction: Anything You Recognize, (Outpost 19 Books 2023), Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey (Outpost 19 Books 2013), winner of a Santa Fe Writers’ Project Book Award, and How Animals Mate (Overlook Press 1999), winner of the Sewanee Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Pithead Chapel, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Gargoyle, Story Quarterly, CutBank, Joyland, Booth Journal, Solstice, Free State Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Manzano Mountain Review, The Writing Disorder, Another Chicago Magazine, Mississippi Review, Story, Playboy, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of New Mexico and low-residency M.F.A. program at Queens University of Charlotte.

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Rebecca Lindenberg

Radical Presence: Poetry As an Art of Attention, all levels

This write-now workshop is designed to be generative, exploratory, and hopefully, empowering. We’ll do all sorts of writing activities ranging from automatic or “free” writing to carefully crafted aphorism, writing en pleine aire (inspired by the Impressionist painters) to creating “photo negatives” of published work (substituting each word with a seeming opposite to see what emerges). We’ll engage in poetic collaborations with each other, and with poets whose work we’ll read—a diverse array of North American and international writers across the ages, an inclusive host of voices bringing different subject matter, artistic strategy, and aesthetic style to our conversation. We’ll free ourselves from the pressure to “improve upon the blank page,” as Nicanor Parra has said, and let ourselves access some of our most primal lyric impulses, deep images and symbols, sensate speaking selves, so we’ll never again wonder (when we find it challenging to write), “What do I do now?” We’ll workshop, but in some new and nontraditional ways designed to teach us to be as spontaneous as readers as we can be as writers, responding not with our opinions but with our intuitions. Consider this an opportunity for serious whimsy, for meaningful play, and for personal and artistic discovery.

Rebecca Lindenberg is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Our Splendid Failure to Do the Impossible (BOA Editions, 2024). She’s also the author of Love, an Index (McSweeney’s) and The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series), winner of the 2015 Utah Book Award. She’s the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, an NEA literature grant, a seven-month fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among other awards. Her work appears most recently in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Missouri Review, Tin House, The Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a member of the full-time poetry faculty at the University of Cincinnati, where she is also director of graduate programs in English and the poetry editor of the Cincinnati Review.

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Dorothy Hassan

Starting Your Writing Journey, multigenre, all levels

“I want to write my story and would like to know where to start.” “I’ve written a story, but how can I make it better?” If these questions are yours, this is the workshop for you. Whether you want to write fiction or nonfiction, come learn some of the major building blocks of the craft, including character and setting development, sensory detail, and story structure. Move your story from mind to paper by unleashing your creativity on memorable characters and settings. In-class writing exercises will set participants on their way to producing pieces that may stand alone or become part of a larger work. In addition, learning how to give feedback on the work of others will teach you to effectively revise your own work. Guidance will be provided in daily review sessions of the previous day’s work.

Dorothy Hassan, writing as D. A. Spruzen, earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte and teaches creative writing in Northern Virginia. Publications include a historical novel, The Blitz Business, and a poetry collection, Long in the Tooth. In addition, her poems and short stories have appeared in many online and print publications.

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Barbara Jones

The Middle Place, A Workshop for Book-length Works in Progress, multigenre, all levels

Please prepare 15-20 pages (12 pt, double spaced) from a longer work in progress; this could be a story collection, novel, memoir, or collection of essays. We’ll read the samples from each work in advance, then spend workshop time considering which kinds of inspiration and which sorts of technical assistance might benefit each writing project now; that is, we’ll investigate how to nourish and sustain each of these projects to completion. And, overall, we’ll share the trials and joys of being in the sometimes vast-seeming middle of a book-length piece as well as the notable benefits of reaching the end.

Barbara Jones is a literary agent with Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, a leading, independent New York literary agency representing a distinguished list of bestselling and award-winning authors. Jones represents authors behind a range of fiction and nonfiction, from highly literary works to much more commercial fare, with an emphasis across all forms on voices from previously underrepresented communities and on durable talents and stories. Previously, she spent several decades as an editor, first in magazines (Grand Street, Harper’s, Vogue, Real Simple) and then in books (as editorial director at Hyperion Books and, most recently, as executive editor at Henry Holt). She has also led writing workshops for 30 years, at Yale University, New York University, Queens University of Charlotte, and elsewhere.

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James McKean

Write Now: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop, all levels

This write-now workshop will address looking at our own artifacts and physical objects (whether they be letters, scrapbooks, tools, or hand-me-downs) as sources and prompts for our personal narratives. After drafting moments, lines and images, scenes, portraits, anecdotes, and flashes of memory, we’ll explore how we might combine these fragments into more-finished work. Through readings and discussion, we’ll investigate elements of creative nonfiction such as dual-time frames, the narrative impulse versus reflection, character development, scenes, voice, rhythm, and effective prose.

But the main focus of the workshop will be on your writing process, the material you generate, and sharing that material with a sympathetic audience. Class time will be dedicated to sharing work, discussing the art and craft of writing, and perhaps working on an exercise or two. Outside of class, you’ll be asked to write in response to prompts or wherever the muse takes you. In writing our lives, Annie Dillard says that we must “fashion a text.” The goal at the end of our week is to develop new material and new resources for fashioning your personal essays, stories, and/or memoirs. Open to all levels.

James McKean writes poetry and nonfiction. He has published two books of essays: Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports, and Bound; and three books of poems, Headlong (1987 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writer Award), Tree of Heaven (1994 Iowa Poetry Award), and We Are the Bus (the 2011 X.J. Kennedy poetry prize from Texas Review Press). His work has appeared in magazines and collections such as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, the Southern Review, and the Best American Sports Writing 2003, and has received a Pushcart Prize.

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Rachele Salvini

Fiction Workshop, all levels

Writing fiction is an act of fabrication: we are making stuff up. But where does the “stuff” come from? How do writers create complex characters, vivid settings, intricate plots, and dynamic scenes? In this class, we will discuss the key elements of fiction writing, such as conflict, time, and subtext, and we will examine some strategies that established and emerging writers have used in their works of fiction. Participants are encouraged to present stand-alone stories or novel excerpts; during meeting times, we will share and respond to each other’s work as in a traditional creative writing workshop, but we will also take the time to generate new ideas, focusing on the process of invention as we try our hand at creating and developing the stories that lie within us. The workshop will run from Monday to Thursday, but Rachele will also meet with each student in an individual conference. The workshop is open to writers of all degrees of experience, and both the form of the short story and novel are welcome. Submission limits for the workshop pieces are approximately 20 pages, double spaced, 12 point font.

Rachele Salvini is currently the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. She received a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University and an MA in Creative Writing from University of Westminster, in London. She grew up in Italy, and writes fiction and nonfiction both in English and Italian. In 2022, she published a collection of translated works, and her first novel, No Big Deal, came out in Italy in 2024. She was the runner-up for the Quarterly West 2023 Chapbook Prize, and her fiction chapbook Oklahoma Bestiary is coming out in 2025. Her stories and essays have been published in Prairie Schooner, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, and others. 

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Kristrin Dombek

Nonfiction Tutorial, all levels

Kristin will read up to twenty pages of nonfiction (12 pt., double spaced), and meet twice with you over the course of the week in 30-minute sessions: once to respond to your pages and offer prompts, and once to discuss revisions, expansions, and new directions drafted during your time on the mountain. In addition, Kristin will gather all tutorial students for two one-hour craft workshops on elements of nonfiction writing. All levels of experience and kinds of nonfiction are welcome, including memoir, essay, journalism, and experimental and hybrid forms.  

Kristin Dombek’s essays can be found in Best American Essays and magazines such as n+1, Vice, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, the London Review of Books, the Paris Review, and the Financial Times. She is the author of The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism (FSG, 2016), and has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award in Nonfiction, a Calderwood Journalism Fellowship, a n+1 Foundation fellowship, and fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. She’s taught the craft of essay, memoir, journalism, and rhetoric in the MFA programs at Queens College/CUNY and Queens University of Charlotte, in the Princeton Writing Program, and in workshops and master classes all over the place.

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