We are partnering with the Church Street Park Downtown to bring you free writing workshops!

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Wednesdays, 12pm - 1pm

July 21 & August 4

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Spend an hour getting your creativity flowing. Pens and notepads provided. Feel free to bring your lunch.

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Workshops made possible by the Historic Capitol Corridor Foundation.

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When it comes to mental and emotional wellness, writing can be both a life jacket and a hole in your boat. How do we maintain healthy creative boundaries when we are often asked in our work to plumb the depths of violence, bigotry, political unrest, and existential dread? How can we access joy, even as we look clear-eyed at the world around us? And how do we push back against the fetishization of writerly distress? In this brown bag lunch session, we will explore these ideas through brief writing exercises and open-hearted discussion using the language of creativity, justice, and wellness.

Anna B. Sutton is a Nashville native living in North Carolina. Her book Savage Flower won the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Prize and was published this year by Black Lawrence Press. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, Third Coast, Copper Nickel, Booth, Los Angeles Review, and other journals. A graduate of Hume-Fogg and Appalachian Center for Craft at TN Tech, Anna moved to North Carolina to pursue a MFA in Poetry from UNC Wilmington, which she received in 2013, along with a James Merrill Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. She currently works at UNC School of the Arts and is a LCMHC-intern at Lifeologie Raleigh as part of her degree program in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at NC State University.

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Book proposals can be overwhelming. Where to start? What to include? How long should it be? How much time to spend on it? Is it really that important? How to craft a book proposal that stands out above the scores being pitched?

Join author Michael McRay for a walkthrough of how to put together a nonfiction book proposal that will make publishers pay attention. With four book publications to his name, McRay will draw on personal experience to pull back the curtain on how he's built proposals that have landed publishers every time.

We all love storytelling. There is not a human being alive who does not love a good story. It's wired into our brains. Therefore, it's easy to give three cheers for storytelling without any reservations. We often don't stop to ask ourselves ethical questions about the stories we are telling or listening to.

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In this 90 minute facilitated discussion with award-winning author Michael McRay, you will explore the dark side of storytelling. When is storytelling actually harmful? What ethical questions should we be asking about storytelling? Are there stories we should not tell? Stories we should even stifle? What's the rubric for making such decisions?

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This is not a class that will offer definitive answers. It will explore the questions and invite curiosity. It's about shaping our frameworks.