2023 Yearlong Workshop with Perrin Kerns

Fishtrap’s 2023-2024 Yearlong Writers Workshop
with Perrin Kerns
Applications open November 1, 2022.

Generate: A Year of Creative Nonfiction Practice and Production

Have you longed to dedicate yourself to a writing project or to develop a sustained creative practice? Or are you already in the midst of a project but need further support? In this year-long course, we will form a community of writers and creators who will sustain and inspire each other in a process of generation. We will start the year with a week together at Summer Fishtrap by gathering work from professional writers we love who can serve as models for our own work; we will also read practitioners who explore the craft of creative nonfiction to spark our understanding; and, most importantly, we will each establish our own creative practice plan for the year ahead.

After Summer Fishtrap you will be supported with two monthly meetings with your peers via zoom video conferencing and feedback from me. The first meeting will be as a whole group for generative writing — with prompts– and the second meeting will be a small group of peers to workshop your writing. After revision each month, you will share your work-in-progress with me (including a letter about your process) for comment and support. By the end of the year, when we meet again at Summer Fishtrap, you will have a finished project (or projects) to share and celebrate, and you will also have a sustainable creative practice to help you generate electric production for many years to come. 

This course welcomes all forms of creative nonfiction production. You might be writing a complete memoir manuscript, composing a series of essays or lyric essays, making personal narrative documentaries, combining text and image in other creative ways, or exploring all these forms during the course of the year, as you choose. This is a year of generative play and productivity that you gift to yourself. You are precious and have stories that only you can tell.

Perrin Kerns has been teaching creative writing for over 30 years. For many of those years, she served as the Director of Writing at Marylhurst University. More recently she has been teaching literature, creative nonfiction, and digital storytelling at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, Prescott College, PNCA’s MFA, Portland State University, Literary Arts, and Fishtrap. Her own creative work has taken her from the lyric essay to digital storytelling to personal narrative documentaries based on her lyric essays. She is excited to teach a sustained year long creative nonfiction workshop at Fishtrap and can’t wait to work with you!

The 2023-2024 Yearlong Writers Workshop with Perrin Kerns

Yearlong Writers Workshop Tuition

$7,500

A $625 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your spot in the class.

Tuition is due in monthly payments of $625 starting July 10, 2023. Receive a 10% discount if tuition is paid in full by July 10, 2023.

Tuition Includes:

• Registration and Workshop instruction for the July 10-16, 2023 and July 8-14, 2024 Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers.
• All individual monthly instruction during the Yearlong Writers Workshop course.

Tuition does NOT include:

• Lodging or meals for the 2023 and 2024 Weeklong Summer Fishtrap Gatherings
• Transportation to or from Summer Fishtrap
• Materials and postage expenses
• Communications expenses

About Fishtrap’s Yearlong Writers Workshop

Fishtrap’s Yearlong Writers Workshop is a 13-month intensive distance-learning program that focuses on one-on-one instruction to help you reach your goals as a writer. During the year, students work closely with their instructor exchanging monthly packets of writing for review and improvement. With each packet, the writer moves closer toward the development of a full-length manuscript. 

What makes Fishtrap’s Yearlong program unique from other distance learning programs is how it begins and concludes with a week of in-person instruction at the annual Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers. Summer Fishtrap is a weeklong writers’ conference featuring workshops, craft talks, readings, conversations, and opportunities to connect all in the inspiring setting of Wallowa Lake. The Yearlong program is modeled after low residency MFA programs at about half the cost. So if you don’t need a degree but want high-quality sustained support for your writing, this program could be the perfect fit for you.