Writers' Café

About the Café

Writing can be a solitary art. Whether you are a Writing major or are simply deeply interested in writing, you can find an informal community of Pitt writers at the Writers' Café. Make contacts with other writers, try your hand at different genres, let guided freewriting exercises jumpstart your process, and share feedback on works-in-progress with peers from all over campus. At the Writers' Café, you'll get leads on publishing opportunities and contests and enjoy a supportive environment for trying out your work on new readers and listeners. 

Sessions are held on various Friday afternoons from 3:30-5:30 and are facilitated by practicing creative writers, often from the Pitt faculty. Typical sessions include craft talks, writing in response to prompts, and sharing that writing. Start your weekend the "write" way by being part of the Writers' Café.

Writers’ Café sessions are held in a mix of zoom and in-person sessions; see details below for each café.

The Writing Center has a number of creative writing faculty on staff as tutors, and you are ALWAYS WELCOME to get one-on-one feedback on poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by making an appointment at the Writing Center. 

If you have questions, contact April Flynn or Sarah Leavens, the Writers' Café coordinators, via email or at 412-624-6556.

 

Spring 2024 Sessions: 

 

1/26/24

"Endless Invention" with CATHERINE GAMMON
In person in the Writing Center 

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable)

Come prepared to play – with idiosyncracy and obsession – in any form, poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction, play or screenplay, or any sort of hybrid in between.

Catherine Gammon's new story collection, The Gunman and the Carnival, will be available February 6 from Baobab Press, and launches in Pittsburgh with a February 17 reading at Bottom Feeder Books. Catherine is author of the novels The Martyrs, The Lovers (55 Fathoms, 2023), China Blue (Bridge Eight Press, 2021), Sorrow (Braddock Avenue Books, 2013) and Isabel Out of the Rain (Mercury House, 1991). Her fiction has appeared in literary magazines and received fellowship support since 1977. After growing up in Los Angeles, Catherine lived in Berkeley, Yellow Springs, Iowa City, Provincetown, and Brooklyn, before joining the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh in 1992. In 2000 she returned to California for many years of residential Zen training. She lives again in Pittsburgh, with her garden and her cat.

 

2/9/24: 

"Creativity in Constraints" with NORA FUSSNER
In person in the Writing Center 

We often think of creativity as that initial burst of inspiration, an innovative idea, but there's a lot of creativity in problem-solving as well. The Oulipo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, is a French-borne literary movement that writes within pre-determined constraints. One of its founding members wrote an entire novel without using the letter e!

In this workshop we'll try some exercises from the Oulipo, using rules to constrain brief compositions, as well as generate ideas for longer plots using mathematical formulas. It sounds complicated, and the results could be strange, goofy, even mind-bending. But we'll also talk about how to apply these techniques to your own work--how setting limitations can help you solve a problem in something you've been working on, or brainstorm new ideas.
These techniques can be applied to fiction or poetry (and, in truth, may defy genre altogether).

Nora Fussner's debut novel, The Invisible World, was published by Vintage in September 2023. Other work has appeared in LitHub, Crime Reads, Longleaf Review, and Electric Literature. She moved to Pittsburgh in 2018, and still isn't totally used to the winters.
 

2/23/24:

"Finding Your Inner Dragon: Writing Fantasy for Fun" with MICHAEL SIMMS
In person in the Writing Center 

It's your fantasy, so you can do whatever you want. There are no rules. However, if you want to write (and perhaps publish) in the fantasy genre of literature, then there are certain characters which your readers are expecting. Dragons, heroes and wizards/witches are de rigueur, and there are other types such as kings, dwarves, trolls, unicorns, demons and verbose animals and trees which often appear as well. There are also settings, such as towers, dungeons, magical forests, and dismal swamps which are standard, as well as props, such as swords, stones, hooded capes and wands.

For the fantasy writer, the challenge is in using some (not all) of these characters, settings and props, so the reader can recognize the familiar tropes, and yet and yet... we need to use them in new ways. So in genre fiction, whether it is fantasy, sci-fi, crime, suspense or horror, the art lies in balancing the familiar with the creative. Originality is essential, but only within the boundaries of the genre. Fusing two genres, such as Sci-fi and Western (think Firefly and Cowboys and Aliens), or coming-of-age and fantasy (think Harry Potter and Earthsea Trilogy) can work, but the writer needs to master both genres before mixing them; otherwise you have a mess. In this session, we’ll experiment with using these familiar tropes in a new way, so show up ready to write in this fascinating popular genre.

Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi, an online forum for poetry, politics and nature, as well as the founding editor emeritus of Autumn House Press, a nonprofit publisher of books. He’s the author of three full-length collections of poetry published by Ragged Sky Press: American Ash, Nightjar, and Strange Meadowlark. Simms has three novels published by Madville: Bicycles of the Gods, The Green Mage and Windkeep, and another novel The Blessed Isle is scheduled for release in late 2024. His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Poem-a-Day published by The Academy of American Poets, The Southwest Review, Black Warrior Review and Plume Poetry. In 2011, Simms was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his service to the arts. He lives with his wife Eva, a philosopher and psychologist, in the historic neighborhood of Mount Washington overlooking the city of Pittsburgh.

 

Save the dates for our last Spring session! 

4/12/24: JESSIE MALE 

 

Fall 2023 Sessions: 

11/3/23

"Tell It Slant???: Artistic & practical dilemmas we face when trying to write the truth" with R/B MERTZ

In person, *512 Cathedral of Learning *please note the different location!

This workshop will address writing about hard truths, writing about trauma, telling the “truth” in poetry vs. prose, and the existential (then suddenly very practical) problem of writing and publishing about things you don’t even want to talk about. We’ll discuss writing for ourselves vs. writing for an audience, and the benefits of making both part of a writing practice. 

R/B Mertz (they/them) was homeschooled by Catholic fundamentalists and attended one of the most conservative colleges in the U.S. before coming out as a queer butch dyke poet in 2007 and as trans/non-binary in 2015. Their memoir, Burning Butch, was published in 2022 by Unnamed Press and was a finalist for Memoir Magazine's Grand Prize for Memoir. They have published work in Another Chicago ReviewGuernica MagazineArc Poetry MagazineFenceAutostraddleChristian Century, and elsewhere. Their book of poems, CU T, will be released in early 2024 by Threadsuns Press. They now live in Toronto and are at work on a second memoir, Boy or Girl, which has been supported by a grant from the Toronto Arts Council. They teach writing at Sheridan College. Learn more about R/B

 

10/20/23
"Mining Your Life for Laughs: Using Your Personal Identity to Write Humor" with SHANNON REED

Humor writing follows a specific formula in its generative process, but the magic comes when you add in your own unique personality. In this workshop, Shannon will introduce you to three structures for writing humor pieces and help you develop your specific voice, using your interests, hobbies, obsessions and characteristics to spark your work.

Shannon Reed is the author of the forthcoming Why We Read: On Libraries, Bookworms, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out, as well as Why Did I Get a B? And Other Mysteries We're Discussing in the Faculty Lounge which was a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor. A frequent contributor to McSweeney's Internet Tendency and The New Yorker, Shannon is a Teaching Associate Professor and the Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Writing Program. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Pitt in 2015. 

 

9/29/23
"Oblique Strategies: Approaches to Writing from Other Avenues of Expertise" with BILL LYCHACK

The musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt developed a series of playing cards meant to encourage creativity and lateral thinking. On each card they wrote a directive or observation intended to prompt a new direction or opening for whatever work was at hand:

  • HONOUR THY ERROR AS A HIDDEN INTENTION
  • WHAT WOULD YOUR CLOSEST FRIEND DO?
  • STATE THE PROBLEM IN WORDS AS CLEARLY AS POSSIBLE
  • TRY FAKING IT

And so on…As Eno and Schmidt put it, “These cards evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), sometimes they were identified as they were happening, sometimes they were formulated.” 

In much the same way, we can appreciate and learn from other disciplines and art forms, and this outside knowledge can be brought into the writing workshop and our own writing practice. We can extrapolate from the way luthiers build cellos or the process painters use to create portraits, and we can often use outside techniques in our writing, revealing fresh directions for our own work. To put it another way: not everything needs to be a steel-cage death match of will. Sometimes we can sneak up on our work and pounce by surprise. It can be fun, maybe, and in our time together we will explore how other disciplines approach their craft, borrowing techniques and observations to not only expand our range of experience with the world but to also make progress in our own writing and our own selves.

William Lychack’s books include The Wasp Eater, The Architect of Flowers, Cargill Falls, a cultural history of cement, two titles for children, and most recently a collection of stories, Sounds of the Night. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and on public radio’s This American Life, and he is currently an Associate Professor in English at the University of Pittsburgh.

 

Recent Past Sessions:

"Writing the Bodymind: Locating the Story Within the Self" with Jessie Male

Writing is often identified as an embodied practice, but what does it mean to write embodiment, to translate the experiences of the bodymind onto the page? Through a series of prompts and engagement with sample texts, participants will explore ways to write the lived experience evocatively and tangibly, to engage with sensory description to develop characters (including the self as character) that feel and move in complex—often messy—ways. Prompts will be complemented by discussion on what it means to write what is deemed "beyond language," and on how writing the bodymind can be an act of resistance against imposed notions of "appropriate" or idealized ways of being. 

Jessie Male is the Postdoctoral Associate in Disability Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has a PhD in English from Ohio State and an MFA in memoir from Hunter College. Her creative writing, interdisciplinary, and academic scholarhsip appears in Guernica, BOMB Magazine, Lateral, Palaver Journal, Constellations, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Writing, among many other print and online publications. She is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation Disability Memoir: A Study in Pedagogy and Practice

 

"Syntax and Surprise" with Barbara Edelman and Ellen McGrath Smith

Good writing is full of surprises—from unexpected imagery to plot twists to seemingly out-of-the-blue word choices. At the level of the sentence, writers often surprise both themselves and their readers by throwing a wrench into the workings of syntax. Sometimes, it's a verb in the place of a noun or a noun where a verb should be. Sometimes a sentence does a flip-turn, or one word spins off from another. What do such surprises make possible? How can we keep ourselves open to these swerves while we compose and revise our work? This session will present great examples of syntactical shake-ups from poetry and prose—along with exercises that invite you to torque your syntax in ways that stop, even jaw-drop, your readers.

Barbara Edelman’s poetry collections include All the Hanging Wrenches (longlisted by Publisher’s Weekly as a notable book of poetry for 2022) and Dream of the Gone-From City (2017), both from Carnegie Mellon University Press; and the chapbooks Exposure (Finishing Line Press) and A Girl in Water (Parallel Press). Her poems and short prose have appeared in PleiadesPrairie SchoonerRaleigh ReviewRattle, and Spillway, among other journals, and in several anthologies. A professor emerita and current part time instructor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, Edelman has taught courses in creative writing, literature, and composition.

Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her poetry has appeared in The Georgia ReviewThe New York TimesThe American Poetry ReviewTalking WritingLos Angeles Review, and other journals and anthologies. Books include Scatter, Feed (Seven Kitchens 2014) and Nobody's Jackknife (West End Press 2015). Her chapbook Lie Low, Goaded Lamb was released in January 2023 from Seven Kitchens Press as part of its Keystone Series.

"Ars Cinema" with Xan Phillips

What can we as poets learn from non-verbal modes of storytelling? This workshop will explore image building by testing the relationship between poetics and cinematography. If you have ever been curious about the ekphrastic mode (writing in response to art), sampling, or experimental poetry this class will serve as a gateway into those creative endeavors. This session will include a dynamic discussion about a brief curated selection of poetry and film, with ample time to write and share work.

Xan Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of a Whiting Award, Lambda Literary Award, and The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers, Xan is the author of HULL (Nightboat Books 2019) and Reasons for Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. He has received fellowships from Brown University, Callaloo, Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Xan’s poetry is featured in Berlin Quarterly Review, Bomb Magazine, Crazyhorse, Poets.org, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Find him online at xanphillips.com.