Rosemont Writer’s Studio

Instructor: Carla Spataro

Course description: Students will evaluate their own and others' work in a supportive atmosphere, while examining the tools of the fiction writer's art. We will read the published work of successful short story writers with a particular emphasis on craft. Exemplary exercises and prompts will enable students to put into practice what they’ve learned.

This class is open to all levels of writers.

Instructor Bio: Carla “C.J.” Spataro is the MFA program director at Rosemont College and the editorial director of Philadelphia Stories and PS Books. She is an award-winning short story writer, Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant winner.

Her short fiction has appeared in Phantom Drift, december magazine, Italian Americana, Iron Horse Literary Review, Pithead Chapel, Permafrost, The Baltimore Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and others. her poetry has appeared in Ovunque Siamo.

Her work has also been anthologized in Another Breath, Forgotten Philadelphia, Extraordinary Gifts, and 50 Over 50. Her students have had books published by big five publishers and have won nationally recognized awards.

Instructor: Tori Bond

Course description: Whether you’ve always wanted to write a screenplay or you’re a budding filmmaker, the process starts with a great story and what better way to learn the art of visual story telling than to start small. We’ll use brainstorming exercises to help you create a new story idea for your short screenplay or build on an existing idea. Through writing exercises, classroom discussion, viewing successful shorts, and critiquing each other’s work, we will explore character development, story structure, dialog, and screenplay format. By the end of six weeks you’ll have a finished ten-minute screenplay.

This class is open to all levels of writers.

Instructor Bio: Tori Bond is a screenwriter, author, and comedy writer. Her feature screenplay was a second rounder at the Austin Film Festival (2019), her short screenplay was a quarter finalist in the Nashville Film Festival Screenwriting Contest, and her sitcom script won 3rd place in the Scriptapalooza TV contest. Her ten-minute play won the Outside the Box Writing Contest, and she had work included in the 2018 Mary Scruggs Works by Women Festival, both were performed at The Second City in Chicago. Familyism (Matter Press) is Tori’s collection of flash fiction and her short fiction has also been published in numerous literary journals including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Monkeybicycle, Atticus Review, Cease Cows, and anthologized in Flash Fiction Funny and Extraordinary Gifts. Tori is a graduate of the MFA program at Rosemont College and has studied comedy and screenplay writing at The Second City. Tori lives in Bucks County and is a Writing Tutor at a local college.

Instructor: Kristina Moriconi

Course description: Rules are meant to be broken sometimes. Lines meant to be blurred. And, while we’re at it, genres might as well be crossed here and there. That is the freedom the hybrid form gives us. It is unpredictable. It resists form. It goes by any number of names: the prose poem, lyric essay, nonlinear narrative, montage, collage, mosaic… In this class, we will explore these possibilities. We will fragment and thread, segment and braid. We will mix poetry and prose, fact and fiction, memoir and history, to construct our own hybrid pieces, discovering together the unexpected places of overlap and intersection. And, on our last night of class, we will discuss ideas for revision and look at some literary journals that specifically seek submissions of hybrid work.

This class is open to all levels of writers.

Instructor Bio:  Kristina Moriconi is a poet, essayist, and visual artist whose work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and magazines including Sonora Review, Brevity, Cobalt Review, Superstition Review as well as many others. Her work has also been selected as a finalist in terrain.org’s 2017 Nonfiction Contest, december’s 2018 & 2019 Curt Johnson Prose Award in Nonfiction, and awarded Honorable Mention in Juncture’s 2018 Memoir Contest. Moriconi’s work has been included in the anthology Flash Nonfiction Food, (Woodhall Press 2020) and her lyric narrative In the Cloakroom of Proper Musings was published by Atmosphere Press in August 2020.

Instructor: J.C. Todd

Course description: How do you write a poem about a compelling subject that feels too difficult to handle? In this poetry workshop we’ll explore ways to write into the difficult subject, one with which the poet has an uneasy relationship that throws them off-balance. Whether it is a public (social justice, environment, war, etc.) or a personal issue (relationships, life change, identity crisis, etc.), we will dig into it, combining  research, etymologies, print formats and writing strategies such as erasure, collage, counterpoint, recurrence and fragments. Poems from C. D. Wright, Solmaz Sharif, Stephanie Cawley, Jericho Brown and others will be our guides. Includes workshops, a class reading and a private conference with instructor.

This class is open to intermediate and advanced writers.

Instructor Bio:  J. C. Todd’s recent work explores the traumatic effects of war on women, both civilians and combatants. She is author of Beyond Repair, runner-up in the Able Muse Poetry Book Contest, forthcoming in 2020, The Damages of Morning, a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award finalist, and three other books. Winner of the 2016 Rita Dove Prize in Poetry and twice a finalist for Poetry Society of America contests, she has held fellowships in poetry from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bemis Center, and elsewhere. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Thrush, The Paris Review, and is forthcoming in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She lives in Philadelphia, where she has taught in the Rosemont MFA Program and the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College.

Instructor: Trish Rodriguez

Course description: In this class we’ll read and write speculative fiction including Afrofuturism and magical realism. We’ll explore possibilities and writing deeper meanings using the fantastical.

This class is open to all levels of writers.

Instructor Bio: Trish Rodriguez received her B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and MFA from Rosemont College where she served as the Managing Editor of MFA program’s literary magazine, Rathalla Review. Currently, she is the Fiction Editor of Philadelphia Stories and a prose editor at Typehouse Literary Magazine. She teaches fiction writing in the Rosemont Writers’ Studio. When she’s not working doing medical administration management, Trish writes mostly short fiction.

Instructor: Liz Abrams-Morley

Course description: Stalled? Stale? Looking to get started? This workshop is designed to jump-start post-graduate writers who find they aren’t writing as much, as often or as fluidly as they hoped after they leave the support of an MFA program, and, at the same time, create a launch pad for the “always loved writing but. . .” writers who want to get going and develop a writing life.

Focus will be on generating new material in response to weekly prompts, though participants will also enjoy opportunities to get feedback on work in progress in a supportive community. The instructor will introduce, and we will all have time to discuss, strategies for keeping going in those sometimes “slogging middles” of ongoing projects, or whenever the reason we aren’t writing is “you know—life.”

Instructor Bio: Liz Abrams-Morley's collection, Beholder, was published by Word Poetry, April, 2018. Her collection, Inventory, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014. Necessary Turns was published by Word Poetry in 2010 and won an Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Small Press Publishing that year.

Her poems and short stories have been published in a variety of nationally distributed anthologies, journals and ezines, and have been read on NPR. She is co-founder of Around the Block Writing Collaborative,(www.aroundtheblockwriters.org). A sometimes professor in Rosemont’s MFA program who also teaches children at all levels in literacy in the schools programs, Liz wades knee deep in the flow of everyday life from which she draws inspiration and, occasionally, exasperation.

Instructor: Chelsea Covington Maass

Course description: The best movies keep audiences hooked, desperate to know how it will all come together in the end. Great books do the same thing for readers. In this class, students will study "Save the Cat! Writes a Novel" by Jessica Brody and learn to apply successful screenwriting techniques to plotting a novel. By the end of this course, students will understand the method, discover their story genre, and begin laying the framework for their next big project.

Instructor Bio: Chelsea Covington Maass is a graduate of the MFA program at Rosemont College. An excerpt from her thesis won a 2016 Helen McCloy Scholarship from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2017, her flash fiction story "Refuge" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Newfound. Her work has also been published at HOOT, Shotgun Honey, and Literary Mama. She lives in the Philadelphia area and teaches writing at several local universities. 

Instructor: Grant Clauser

Course Description: Poetry is a type of communication, and communication requires a relationship. Just like the best relationships are based on trust, poetry also requires an element of trust. In this course we'll discuss the techniques that help create that sense of trust and honesty, so your readers will trust the experience of your poems.

We'll look at lots of example poems, work on in-class exercises and take-home prompts, and discuss your own poems in-depth as a group. This workshops would be good for both people just beginning to explore poetry as well as experienced writers looking to consider their art from a new perspective.

Instructor Bio: Grant Clauser is the author of four books, most recently The Magician's Handbook and Reckless Constellations. His awards include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize and the Montgomery County Poet Laureate.

His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review, The Journal, The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and others. He's a contributing editor to the online publication Cleaver and works as a senior editor for Wirecutter at the New York Times.

Instructor: Stacey Kucharik

Course description: Self-publishing has become more prevalent than traditional publishing. It is moderately simple, cheap, and can sometimes be lucrative. But, if you want to self-publish a manuscript, you’ll need to do it correctly.

That means that you’ll need to know a little bit about the publishing process, resources that will be available to you, and how to create a finalized product that doesn’t “look” like it was self-published. This course will guide you in a step-by-step fashion how to take a manuscript and turn it into a book. We will cover all the bases from editing to formatting to self-marketingInstructor

Instructor Bio: Stacey Kucharik began her editing company, Polished Print, twelve years ago. She has worked with hundreds of authors to polish their manuscripts into publishable novels. Though her background began with academic editing, Stacey works with fiction authors exclusively and edits between ten and fifteen novels per year.

Stacey holds two Bachelor’s degrees in English with a focus on creative writing and Communications as well as a Master’s degree in Publishing with a focus on editing from Rosemont. Polished Print aspires to educate authors and posts frequent educational videos about the publishing process and improving writings on Facebook. Stacey participated in a panel discussion at Push to Publish writing conference in 2018. For more information about Stacey, visit www.polishedprint.com or find us on Facebook.

Instructor: Chelsea Covington Maass

Course Description: Over this six-week session, students will use the approach learned in Novel Writing I to plot and begin drafting a novel. Writers will create a novel road map and unleash their story-worthy heroes. We will spend two weeks on each of the three acts, taking time to discuss any roadblocks we encounter along the way.

Instructor Bio: Chelsea Covington Maass is a graduate of the MFA program at Rosemont College. An excerpt from her thesis won a 2016 Helen McCloy Scholarship from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2017, her flash fiction story "Refuge" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Newfound. Her work has also been published at HOOT, Shotgun Honey, and Literary Mama. She lives in the Philadelphia area and teaches writing at several local universities

Instructor: Trish Rodriguez

Course description: Flash Fiction is a complete story expressed through deftness of language. We’ll read published flash pieces and experiment with different forms of narrative. Join this generative class that will explore writing a beginning, middle, and ending in l000 words or less.

Instructor Bio: Trish Rodriguez lives, reads, and writes in Media, PA. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College. She has served as managing editor for Rathalla Review. Currently, Trish is a prose editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine and the fiction editor for Philadelphia Stories. Her writing has been published in Awakened Voices and Animal: A Beast of Literary Magazine. She lives in Media, PA with her family, including her cat, Elvis, and Samoyed, Rico Suave.