Do you want to write stories about your life that resonate with audiences and can be read and performed? Learn how to go beyond a personal essay to create a Solo Performance piece? Create a Moth Hour story that you can perform at Story Slams? Develop your voice, experiment with playing characters, and gain chops as both a writer and performer? Students at all levels will sharpen their writing and performance skills through exercises and regular sharing of new writing. Through creative prompts, assignments, and group exercises, students will create and hone monologues and stories.

Actor / Writer / Creator of Journalistic Theater Dan Hoyle will share the secrets of his process, including sparking inspiration, close observation, point of view as comedy, building out a physical character, creating a dynamic setting, the difference between truth and fact, relationship to the audience, subtext versus actual text, sharpening narrative arc, finding the funny, and heightening the stakes.

We will also survey the different styles of storytelling and solo performance based on one's own life story, as both inspiration and critical study. In a warm and supportive environment, you will create a 10-minute story/performance piece that will be read/performed in the final and will be ready to take on the road.Literary Forms courses are designed for Writing and Literature Majors and Minors and are focused on a specific genre, medium, form, or technique specific to their disciplines. Lit Forms courses might focus on a genre (fiction, SF, poetry, CNF, etc.) or might focus on a technique (i.e. dialogue, character, setting, image, research). Literary Forms classes explore similarities and differences across mediums and genres, involve reading and writing, and multi-modal approaches to critical inquiry including creative responses. Literary Forms courses typically balance seminar and workshop activities.

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