REVISION BOOTCAMP: All-Genre Intensive with Elmaz Abinader and Faith Adiele

Let’s put your writing through the workout it needs! Elmaz Abinader and Faith Adiele will coach you through editing and revising work of any genre. As multi-genre authors and master teachers, they will take your work through tried-and-true exercises to sculpt and refine your writing. They will help you understand what style of writer you are and which of the five stages of creative work your draft is in. Then they will show you revision strategies for every mode–developmental, stylistic, and structural.

Plan to bring a draft manuscript that needs a workout (limited to 10 pages of poetry or 3,000 words of prose) and a laptop. The process will help you explore perspective and point of view, develop and deepen characters, and create contexts and build worlds. You will identify the work’s central questions and emotions, flush out scenes/forms, and harden the structure of your story or poems. You will pump up beginnings and endings and polish your language and metaphors to make your writing more powerful.

The two days will be broken into team-taught craft lectures, writing exercises led by each teaching artist, lively Q&A, in-class writing, small group work and shares.

Class meets in person Friday and Saturday, October 27 and 28, 9 am – 4 pm. This includes afternoon group work and writing time. Lunch and other breaks will be scheduled.

Class size: Maximum 15; minimum 5.

Member discount: Members of Write On receive a 10% discount on all classes and workshops. To become a member, please click here. To receive the discount, members must log in to the website using their unique password and enter member10 in the promotion code box. The code is case sensitive.

Teaching Artists:

Elmaz Abinader is an author and a performer. Her most recent poetry collection, This House, My Bones, was The Editor’s Selection from 2014 from Willow Books/Aquarius. Her books include the memoir Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon and a book of poetry, In the Country of My Dreams, which won the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award. A finalist in the Rita Dove Poetry Contest, Elmaz’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Mizna, Michigan Quarterly Review, PRISM International, Al-Jazeera UK, Nimrod, and in many anthologies. A winner of several residencies and grants, Elmaz is one of the co-founders of The Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices). She teaches at Mills College and has offered workshops for the Sonoma Writers Camp, Hedgebrook, and the Center for Cultural Power. Find her at @elmazabinader and www.elmazabinader.com. 

Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith, a memoir about being ordained as Thailand’s first Black Buddhist nun, winner of a PEN Award, and several chapbooks about being Nigerian-Nordic-American. She is a travel columnist for Detour and the Miami Herald, co-editor of a multicultural international anthology, and a writer for HBO-Max, PBS, the Calm meditation app, O: The Oprah Magazine, Smithsonian Folklife, and others. Named one of Marie Claire magazine’s “Five Women to Learn From,” Faith teaches workshops in memoir and travel writing around the world and is a professor at California College of the Arts and the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA program in Maine. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where she co-founded a writing group with Elmaz Abinader. Last year, her “Change Your Life, Change the World” writing workshop was a hit at Write On’s Health and Healing Conference. Find her at @meetingfaith and adiele.com.