University of New England

A Gathering of Writers:
Creative Writing Workshops

An eight-week series of workshops hosted by the Maine Women Writers Collection, in the Abplanalp Library on the Westbrook College Campus of the University of New England, in Portland.

Each writing workshop will be inspired by the heritage of Maine women writers such as May Sarton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Sarah Orne Jewett. But the true focus of the workshops will be on creating a supportive community of writers and using a variety of prompts to foster the development of each writer's own individual voice.

The series is open to men and women writers, from beginners to advanced.

Workshop Format

Each workshop focuses on a different craft involved in writing creatively: one week we will work on point-of-view, another week we will work on dialogue, a third on setting, a fourth on character.

For the first approximately 20 minutes of each workshop, we model: we examine how one particular Maine woman writer works one particular aspect of her craft.

We are then given a prompt to stimulate our own writing (which we are free to follow or not), and we write for approximately an hour. All genres of writing are welcome, from haiku to memoir to short story, from the first beginnings of a mystery to the climax of an epic poem.

After a brief break, we go around the room and read what we wrote. Since what we have written is first-draft material, we give only positive feedback to each other, encouraging each other by finding the strengths in our writing.

The end result is we work on our craft, work on the stories we want to tell, and find a supportive community in which to find our voices and share our stories.