Workshops and Seminars
New classes added all the time.
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New classes added all the time. 〰️
Funny on a Sentence Level: A Seminar
In this three-hour seminar, we'll turn regular sentences into jokes using comedic and stylistic tools. To write funny, you don't need to write about something that's funny or someone who is funny — because you can write jokes if you can use a dictionary.
Comedy writing isn't writing joke after joke. It's a series of syntactical decisions and rearranging sentences until they end on a punch line. It's also learning and practicing comedic tools like wordplay, profanity, absurdity, contrast, contradiction, and neologism, alongside style tools like diction and syntax, imagery and figurative language, rhythm and punctuation, voice and tone. Humor writing — and its tools and hacks — is a skill, not an innate talent, so we'll practice to perfect it.
October 11th (Sunday)
2-5pm ET
Online and recorded for the memories
Good on a Sentence Level: A Seminar
Good writing becomes great writing at the sentence level. Diction, syntax, rhythm, image, and description can bring your voice to life and make your work more memorable, more beautiful, and more meaningful.
In this practical and flirty seminar, you’ll learn how to write and revise sentences with confidence through lecture, discussion, handouts, and writing exercises.
Our goal is what James Baldwin says is The Goal: “…to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
In class you’ll go on a guided line-editing process that you can repeat for every draft, if you’re brave enough.
August 30th (Sunday)
3:30-5:30pm ET
Online and recorded for the memories
Short Humor and Satire Writing: A 5-Week Workshop
You don’t have to be born with a sense of humor to be funny and to write funny. Funny is a skill like any other. In this 5-week writing workshop, we’ll break down the skill and practice it every week.
We’ll focus on the short comedy piece and talk about how to write and publish your own in venues like The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and more, a lot more.
Students and writers of any level will learn about comedic premise, structure, speaker, target, point of view, heightening, and comedic tools and concrete ways to be funnier in writing.
By the end of our time together, everyone will know 50-ish secrets to joke with confidence about yourself, your life, and your world on the page and at parties. If that doesn’t happen, then you blew it.
September 9th-October 7th (Wednesdays)
6:30-9:00pm ET
Online and recorded for the memories
This could be you/us. Learn to weaponize comedy in my very good writing workshops, seminars, and prayer circles.
This photo was taken moments before we made a
human centipede.