Creative Writing Courses, Writing Classes and Workshops - San Francisco Bay Area, Oakland, Berkeley

Course Location

CREATIVE NON-FICTION AND LIFE STORY
True story,memoir, literary essay, travel writing, personal narrative and impressionistic vignette: the field of Creative Non-Fiction is open and rich. In this course we explore ways to access the places in your mind that produce powerful writing; ways to create powerful movement and intriguing jumps; and ways to revise from the improvisational mind that you compose from.

Learn how to:
• Create anticipation and excitement through creative organization
• Craft and hone your work without the dredge and purge that most people use to revise
• Create different tonalities through using different word and sentence textures
• Give and receive specific, useful feedback on your piece that keeps you writing

This is a course for writers with projects that they want to work on in a non-traditional way. Using freewriting (as in Writing from the Subconscious) but also getting more precise and specific feedback on your work, the Creative Nonfiction course helps you start and complete writing on a topic you want to explore. If you want, there's an opportunity to bring in typed-up works-in-progress to get a detailed response from your classmates and the instructor.

Time in the course is equally balanced between:

(1) innovative, usable exercises to get at the part of the mind that creates good writing,
(2) discussions of topics that arise in the process, and
(3) copious feedback on the written work you bring in.

This format works great for fiction and poetry writers as well.

(For more information on this course, see--especially-- Chapter 9 of Writing Open the Mind )

EIGHT WEEKS: Monday nights starting Sept. 10, 7-10 pm (No class 9/17, 9/24, and 10/22).

EIGHT WEEKS: Tuesday mornings starting October 9, 9-12 am (No class 9/18, 9/25, and 10/23).
Course Fee:
$390 for 8 week course

Call 510-594-1905 for more information

WRITING FROM THE SUBCONSCIOUS
Accessing the Intuitive Mind

The core course of The Opening. Experiment with consciousness and play with the texture of language and your words will emit from a space of unpredictability and surprise. Here we have discovery by means of imagination. Enjoyment is what it's all about. The mind likes that. It responds well to indulgence.

In Writing from the Subconscious, each time we meet we experiment with two or three freewriting techniques such as:

• Scrambling and splicing: the power of fragmented meaning
• Playing with the many pleasures and resonances of word sounds themselves
• Associative listing and intuitive juxtapositions
• The surrealist technique of "automatic writing" to write what you don't know
• Dilating the mind with image, scent and sound

Throughout the process, we emphasize play, surprise and connection with others, and finding the startling and hilarious power of our own minds.

This is unlike any other writing class you've ever taken.

(For more information about this course, see Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5 of Writing Open the Mind.)

Evening Course - Eight Weeks
Tuesdays, starting Sept 11, 7-10pm (No class 9/18, 9/25, and 10/23).
Course Fee $390

Call 510-594-1905 for more information

New Course: REVISE, FINISH AND PUBLISH: Get It Out the Door!

Revising a chore not a joy? Getting published a mystery, or worse, a bogeyman?

The Opening will be offering a brand new course that will give you both the information to revise well, the encouragement to get your piece actually finished, and the knowhow on how writing gets published out in the world.

• Get intensive "finishing" type of feedback on a selected piece of yours (or two),
• Receive insightful readings to do at home on the theory and practice of revision
• Get help with proofreading and formatting and micro-revisions
• Receive tons of practical guidance on how to get writing published.

Depending on the kind of work, that may be in a literary magazine, a newspaper, or towards a book proposal (you might work on a sample chapter in class, or some other materials for the proposal). At the end of the series in late November, we'll all walk down to the mailbox together and send off our work!

Andy wrote his Masters thesis on revision, and with this full-length course,
we will really be able to devote some solid time to understanding how it works,
and how to get really joy out of it. Remember it's a good thing for you
(and for the world!) for your good writing out there. And it feels great too.

REVISE, FINISH AND PUBLISH : Get it out the door !
Monday Afternoons, August 27, 1-4 PM (No class 9/17, 9/24, and 10/22).
Course Fee $390

Call 510-594-1905 for more information

WRITING IN NATURE

water Writing can connect you to the intimacy of the natural world. On each of our six delicious spring afternoons we travel to a different magical spot around the Bay Area. Each location--shoreline, redwood forest, bird sanctuary, canyon, rolling pasture land-- has been selected for its access to a particular kind of magic. Your sprite-ly guide and writing exercise connoisseur, Andy Couturier, will bring you to each mystery spot (you don't know where we are going until we get there!) and lead you through unique writing experiments to bring your subconscious mind alive and into vivid connection with the shimmering natural world.

Afternoon Course - Six Weeks
Tuesdays starting Sept. 11, 1-5:30pm: including transportation time (Skip 9/18, 9/25, 10/23)
Course Fee $390

Call 510-594-1905 for more information

WRITING RETREAT IN BALI
October 19-28

Travel to the flower-bedecked, haunting island of Bali and, amid the tropical breezes and the terraced rice paddies, write, write, write. Work on a long-awaited project or explore the power of freewriting using the powerful techniques from Writing Open the Mind, the new book on tapping the subconscious to access the unexpected in your writing and yourself.

For ten days in the artists’ village of Ubud, enjoy incredible food, amazing traditional music and dance, ancient temples, and–with a group of other writers—really deepen into your writing practice.

Find out more by downloading the PDF brochure here.

WRITING JOURNEY THROUGH RURAL JAPAN
June and October 2008

Travel to the deep lush mountains of rural Japan and meet Japanese artists, craftspeople, activists and farmers. Live with them and walk in their valleys, share meals with them, make art, and write. Visit temples, gardens, shrines and waterfalls in the Japan Alps, Kyoto and the southern island of Shikoku. Join writer and teacher Andy Couturier, author of a series of profiles of these extraordinary craftspeople and activists in The Japan Times (theopening.org/luxury) for an incomparable journey into another world.

By combining this journey with inter-cultural exchange, personal inquiry and writing, we will have an opportunity to interact with the real treasures of an ancient Japanese way of life as interpreted by modern people today. The journey will combine time for writing and reflection with encounters with these artists, craftspeople, activists and farmers. There will be time for long walks in the mountains, visits to Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and waterfalls. We will also spend several days visiting the gardens, tea houses, and temples of the ancient capital of Kyoto. Throughout, the pace will be slow, the food delicious, the lifeway simple.

Find out more by downloading the PDF brochure for the 2007 journey here.

BOOK COMPLETION GROUP

A group of committed writers with a book or other large project well underway meet to help each other break through the basic barriers they are experiencing to having a finished book. In this intensive format, at least 2.5 hours of each session are spent in class doing writing.

When blocks or problems arise, you can have one-on-one consultations with the instructor, and there will also be short periods when we read our work aloud and get feedback. You will receive check-in calls once or twice a week at your home, if you wish. Minimum 5 people, maximum 8.

Evening Course - Eight Weeks
CALL FOR NEXT START DATE
Course Fee $475 (4 hours a week) for 2 months

Call 510-594-1905 for more information

WRITING AND THE BODY
The Body as a Gateway to Writing

Words come out of our bodies, and our bodies respond to words. The more attention we give to this spiraling circuit, the more vividly it plays out on the stage of our awareness.

Imagine crumpled up little bits of What You Know scattered throughout an unknown, uncharted place. These bits are camping out in crevices, hidden from view. They might be wisdom, or facts, or the story you will write, or the turn of phrase that you need. This uncharted place is, in fact, your body. It can produce different textures of energy--silky, deep quiet, gonzo--each of which can give you access to writing that you had no idea that you had.

By using gentle movement, improvisational games, physicalizations of language and different energy textures, we can explore how the body both responds to and creates writing.

• How does gesture move to trance?
• What is it like to imagine with our bodies?
• How can the body echo the movement of dreams?

By using our physicality to access energy states, to embody ideas and feelings and stories, we will create and transform writing that is powerful and clear. (For more information on this course, see Chapter 8 of Writing Open the Mind, p. 146 )

Next Eight Week Course Now Forming
Call with your day of the week and time preferences!

Course Fee $390

Call 510-594-1905 for more information

WEEKEND WRITING RETREAT IN POINT REYES

Tomales Bay Retreat

Spend two rich days of writing in a house built on stilts right out on the waters of Tomales Bay (Near Pt. Reyes). By heightening perception we can write ourselves closer to the shimmering natural world and touch nature more intimately and intensely.

Nature is one of our gateways to the subconscious realm, and we'll be exploring the places that our internal world meets the luminous intelligences of water, sky, birds, fish and wind. What questions are they asking us? How are they drawing us into relation? How do you receive or block their solicitations? What is your pre-human self? How can you feel it? Where exactly do our internal voices meet with those of the wild?

Call For Next Start Date
Course Fee: $275 including two overnights on the bay

Call 510-594-1905 for more information

Scholarships and work trade available for low-income folks. Call 510-594-1905 for details.

ONE-ON-ONE WRITING GUIDANCE

Individualized writing guidance helps writers with idea generation and the fleshing out of concepts, with creative organization strategies and new techniques for revising, with creating sentences with clarity and panache and with creating overall coherence, as well as with cleaning up any proofreading and copyediting errors. Sessions are available in person, over the phone, or by email. Sessions sensitize writers to potential reader responses to their work, help them make their writing process more efficient, and show them to move through emotional obstacles to produce finishing writing they can feel proud of. The writing coach helps by providing options, giving relevant, professional feedback and by asking the right questions at the right time. Clients are provided with a cassette tape of the sessions and a written synthesis of what has been covered.

Reading and consultation will be charged at an hourly rate of $95.

Call 510-594-1905 for more information.

LOCATION

Near the corner of College and Claremont and accessible from BART in less than ten minutes.

Click here for a MapQuest Map

Courses take place in a warm living room in the Rockridge area of Oakland with oriental rugs, tropical plants, rustic driftwood furniture, couches, and huge throw floor pillows.