The Iowa Young Writers' Studio offers 6-week online creative writing courses for high school students twice every year! We offer the online courses for 6 weeks every winter, mid-January through late February, and every summer, late June through early August.

Non-credit

Online, flexible schedule

Accepts International Students

Final project

The Iowa Young Writers' Studio offers 6-week online creative writing courses for high school students twice every year! We offer the online courses for 6 weeks every winter and every summer. We do not offer online courses in the fall.
All courses will be taught by graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
The online courses run independently of the Summer Residential Program, and though they're intended for students with a passionate interest in writing, admissions decisions for these courses are based less on writing ability than on enthusiasm and commitment to learning.
The online courses will require approximately 3-4 hours of engagement per week, which will include writing assignments, reading assigned materials, critiquing classmates’ writing, and participating in online discussions.
Please note that we do not offer these courses for college credit. Students who complete the course with a passing grade will receive a Letter of Completion from the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. Students will also be able to download a pdf of their final letter grade at the end of the course.

Winter 2024 Online Courses:

1 - Sense of Witness: Poetry and Perception. Poetry Writing

Sense of Witness: Poetry and Perception is an online poetry writing class for high school students. This course takes inspiration from the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who preferred to call her readers “witnesses” because it was more active: [it] “includes the act of seeing or knowing by experience.” In this six-week course, we’ll be witnesses: to each others writing, to the poems of poets like Rukeyser, Bei Dao, and Audre Lorde, to what is happening around us… and to our inner selves. We’ll ask ourselves: how does one witness the self? How have poets, historically, witnessed themselves and the world in their work? How do we witness what is happening the world? And how does this all influence our writing? Along the way, we’ll experiment with style, form, inspiration, and voice, and you’ll produce work that will be workshopped and considered by your instructor and your classmates. You'll learn basic concepts and techniques of poetic craft and emerge with some fresh writing and some workshopped pieces. No prior poetry writing experience is required, though it certainly can’t hurt. Come with a willingness to read, write, and thoughtfully consider the work of others. (Students will be required to complete weekly assignments and participate regularly in group discussions.)

2 - A Perusable Feast. Creative Writing

A Perusable Feast is an online creative writing class for high school students. A Perusable Feast is a genre-mashing, experimental writing course aimed at helping you ask yourself the questions: What sort of writer am I? What sort of reading inspires me? and, What are my artistic sensibilities, anyway? In it, you will test the boundaries between fiction, poetry, nonfiction, drama, journalism, and various other sorts of creative writing which, taken together, constitute a vast and intricate wonder-scape just waiting to be explored. John Crowley, in his novel Little Big, envisions a series of nested imaginative realms, each bigger than the one that contains it. In exploring the realms of the written word, we will take Crowley's model as our own; the farther in you go, the bigger it gets! We will find out how, by working through the nuts and bolts of specific challenges in various kinds of writing, we can gain access to larger ideas about writing in general, ideas that transcend distinctions of "genre" and allow us to make use of our words as tools for thinking, for seeing the world. We will put these tools to use in short, guided writing exercises, which we will discuss, along with published works by established authors, in a conversational online setting. Think of this course as a six-week literary potluck. You are the cook and the banqueter. On both accounts, welcome, and enjoy! (Students will be required to complete weekly assignments and participate regularly in group discussions.)

3 - Forget Ready, Forget Set, Go! Fiction writing

Forget Ready, Forget Set, Go! is an online fiction writing class for high school students. Over the course of six weeks, you'll learn about key aspects of fiction writing such as detail and image; voice and point of view; character, story, and plot; setting; and drafting and revision. You'll do this through a process of creative collaboration (or perhaps collaborative creativity)—each week, you'll read a short piece by one of your classmates and use it as a springboard for your own writing exercises, while simultaneously using your own writing as a tool for working through and appreciating that of your classmates. You’ll also read and respond to published short stories by exciting contemporary writers. The course takes a playful, generative, process-oriented approach to writing. This means you’ll be doing lots and lots of writing, and that, when you read, you’ll be reading as writers—teasing out what makes great stories work. (Students will be required to complete weekly assignments and participate regularly in group discussions.)

4 - Get Dusty. Fiction Writing

This course is about getting dusty. With a global pandemic that has drastically reduced the scope of our physical activities, it's crucial for young writers to hone their most precious tools: the five senses. Hands-on observatories will be a core feature of this class: you’ll do fieldwork exploring each sense, and discuss strategies for how best to render that sense on the page, with examples from successful fiction and playful experiments in your own writing.

We’ll be using sight to discuss character, sound to think about dialogue, smells to look at setting, taste and touch to gain insight into tension and point-of-view. You’ll come out of this course with craft tools to discuss fiction, several pieces of original writing, a daily writing practice to rely on, and a method for giving constructive feedback to to your peers.

5 - Ricochet Visions. Speculative Fiction Writing

In this course, you’ll be writing and exploring unreal worlds. You’ll visit the world of haunted paintings and dystopian summer camps, of sinister bugs and time-bending alien language. You’ll visit the land of the dead and the land of unsociable wizards. With any luck, these worlds will give you a way out of this one, an escape from the tedium of regular life. But escapism isn’t the only promise of speculative fiction; very often, our depictions of unreal worlds are less fabrication than warped mirror. They offer what Ray Bradbury calls “a ricochet vision”: a twisted reflection of our current world that reveals something true.

Over the course of six weeks, you and your peers will explore these fantastical worlds—and you’ll also create your own. Through weekly craft videos and creative writing prompts, you’ll learn the elements of fiction: character and dialogue, plot and point of view, setting and sensory detail. You’ll read short stories that draw from the spectrum of speculative fiction sub-genres: horror and sci-fi, fairytale and fantasy, apocalyptic and paranormal, and everything in between. You’ll also work as a group to create a shared, fantastical world, contributing week-by-week to the geographic and socio-cultural structure of this invented land. Come prepared to collaborate and play. By the end of the course, you'll have a solid understanding of the elements of fiction, and you'll have written your own short story set within this shared world.

6-week online courses

Jan 21 - Mar 03

6 weeks

Online

475 USD

The fee for each online course will be $475 payable by December 18th, 2023.