The Path of Perseverance: Writing No Matter What

This class is for serious writers who are ready to reclaim their commitment to writing. The writing journey, exhilarating and wondrous as it is, can be punctuated with delays and disappointments. Sometimes the demands of daily life or an unexpected crisis can send us into a tailspin. How do we keep writing through chaos or a stressful live event? For many of us, 2020 threw various hurdles in the way of our ability to write consistently. Yet, we pressed on. Still, some of us have yet to regain our footing, and need encouragement to keep going. If you are tired of not writing, and want to cultivate the “stick-to-it-ness” necessary for meeting your goals–no matter the challenges–this workshop is for you. Gleaning inspiration and guidance from writers like Annie Dillard, Julia Cameron, and Rumi, along with mining the well of our own life experiences, this ​four-part workshop​ will help us identify the obstacles that keep us from writing, and provide tools to help us stay the course so we can keep writing, no matter what.

By the end of this ​four-part workshop​, students will be able to:
● Identify the specific obstacles to their writing.
● Use specific tools to channel chaos, stress, and hardship into actual writing.
● Create and implement a writing schedule that works well for their needs.
● Approach old work with renewed vision.
● Identify their unique inspiration and implement it for work progression.

Access Program
We want our writing classes to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class registrations at a reduced rate. The access program for writing classes covers 60% of the class tuition. Most writing classses have at least one access spot available. Contact Susan Moore at susan@literary-arts.org if you would like to take a writing class at the Access Rate.

Olufunke Grace Bankole, a 2020 Oregon Literary Fellow, is a first-generation American of Nigerian parentage. After graduating from Harvard Law School, and completing a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, she left law to write. Her works have appeared in ​Glimmer Train Stories, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, ​and​ AGNI ​among others. She won the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholarship in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She was also awarded a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center. Olufunke is near completing a novel-in-stories depicting how secrets, lies, and prophecies upend the lives of a Nigerian mother and daughter.

[Register Here]