This workshop is open to writers of all genres and all levels. We’re approaching the end of winter, and setting our clocks forward to return to daylight savings. In that spirit, we will draw on a variety of prompts to spring forward in our writing. These include randomness, set forms, and techniques drawn from other creative arts. We shall use short writing sprints to generate new work and/or revise a draft of what we’re working on, and take it in an unexpected direction. We shall look at brief examples, and share our own efforts, as well as talk about how writing with prompts can help us to surprise ourselves.

Cheryl J. Fish’s debut novel Off the Yoga Mat, the story of three characters coming-of-middle age, was published by Livingston Press/UWA in 2022. She is the author of The Sauna is Full of Maids, poems and photographs celebrating Finnish sauna culture, the natural world, and friendship, and Crater & Tower, poems reflecting on trauma and ecology after Mount the St. Helens Volcanic eruption and the terrorist attack of 9/11 which will be re-issued in Fall, 2025. Fish has been a Fulbright professor in Finland and is a co-editor with Farah Griffin of A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Literature. Fish’s poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Maintenant, Terrain, Mom Egg Review, New American Writing, Reed, Postcard poems, Santa Monica Review, Volt, About Place Journal, ISLE and Poetics for the More-than-Human-World. Her short fiction has appeared in Cheap Pop, Iron Horse Literary Review, Liars League, Spank the Carp, Boog City, Gargoyle, New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confront the Holocaust, and KGB Bar Lit. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and is a creative writing editor at the journal Ecocene. Fish has taught writing and literature at City University of New York, Art in the Basin, Queens Public Library, and Hobart Festival of Women Writers. She is a coordinator of the new prose reading series,@VillageStorySalon, a monthly themed event at the NYPL Hudson Park Branch. Website: www.cheryljfish.com