If you’re looking for a creative writing experience this summer, check out CSU Summer Arts which is being hosted at CSU Fresno. I attended in July of 2008 and had an amazing experience with writers like: Doug Rice, Carole Maso, Steven Church and Bill Vollmann. I highly recommend attending.

Read about my experience:
Writing the Memoir: Part 1
Writing the Memoir: Part 2

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Applications are being accepted for CSU Summer Arts 2011 classes, including a class on Poetic Prose/Flash Fiction (description below). The class takes place June 27, 2011 to July 7, 2011 on the campus of CSU Fresno.

Contact Doug Rice (drice@csus.edu) and/or check out the website

The class transfers as 3 undergraduate or graduate credits. There is financial aid and scholarship money available. If you have already graduated, this is an incredible experience and you are still eligible for financial aid and scholarship money.

Students will learn the craft of writing poetic prose and flash fiction. They will gain analytical tools for revising their prose in terms of the aesthetics of imaginative writing. Students will deepen their understanding of narrative voice, of creating scenes, of describing settings, of developing characters, of further exploring plot and themes, of writing dialogue, of experimenting with point of view and so on. Students will play with the sound and shape of
sentences. Students will explore the brevity of flash fiction, of shaping a whole narrative form in the briefest of moments. Students will be required to write short assignments as given by the visiting artists and they will submit these for workshops as well as submit these to me. By the end of the two weeks, students will have written 15 pages of poetic prose/flash fiction in addition to these short assignments. Students will also be given a short assignment to complete prior to the beginning of the workshop. There will also be short assigned readings.

Guest artists this year are:

Renee Gladman is the author of one collection of poetry, A Picture-Feeling (Roof Books, 2005), and four works of prose, Juice (Kelsey St. Press, 2000), The Activist (Krupskaya, 2003), Newcomer Can’t Swim (2007), and most recently Toaf (Atelos, 2008). She is the publisher of Leon Works, a press for experimental prose and other thought projects based in the sentence, and teaches at Brown University.

Anna Joy Springer is the author of The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir and The Birdwisher. Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including ArtXX: Women in Art, Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About A Changing Industry, Chills,
Pills, Thrills, and Heartache: Adventures In The First Person, Suspect Thoughts: A Journal of Subversive Writing She teaches and writes graphic texts (including sculptural poetry, intermedia installations, digital literatures, and comics), punk rock, feminist ethics,
non-traditional literary structures, and radical literary arts pedagogies at UC San Diego.

Sharon Doubiago is the author of My Father’s Love/Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, Volume One, November 2009, Wild Ocean Press, was a finalist in the Northern California Book Awards in Creative Non Fiction, 2010. Volume Two is forthcoming. Love on the Streets, Selected and New Poems, was published by the University of Pittsburgh, November 2008, and received the Glenna Luschei Distinguished Poet Award, and was a finalist in the Paterson NJ Poetry Prize, Feb 2010. She has written two dozen books of  poetry and prose, most notably the epic poem Hard Country (West End Press), the booklength poem South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh) which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, and the story collections, El Niño (Lost Roads Press), and The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (Graywolf Press) which was selected to the Oregon Culture Heritage list:  Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000. She holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry for Psyche Drives the Coast and a California Arts Council Award.

Peter Grandbois is the author of the novel The Gravedigger, a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” and Borders’ “Original Voices” selection, The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, chosen as one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review, and the
forthcoming novel, Nahoonkara (Etruscan Press 2011), as well as the PEN nominated translator of San Juan: Memoir of a City. His short stories have appeared in many journals, including: Boulevard, The Mississippi Review, Post Road, New Orleans Review, The Denver Quarterly, and Gargoyle. He is a professor of creative writing and contemporary literature at Denison University in Ohio.