Programs Digital Residencies Welcome to The Cohort, where Seventh Wave alum can find accountability, community, and a creative reset for the […]

Joan Didion

Writing is in and of itself a solo endeavor. But it doesn’t have to be a lonely one. During this session, we’ll talk about the importance of building community through our words, and share resources for how to plug into existing spaces or to create our own. We’ll also share tips and tricks for writing routines and practices that can help you sustain your craft beyond what happens on the page.

In this session, we look at the “rules” of form and genre in an effort to bend or break them to the will of our own creations. In this session, we’ll explore different kinds of creativity that can help loosen our grip on specific forms and see constraints as an invitation for play and creativity.

This session places residents inside the soft architecture of imagination, looking at the ways that creators across genres build, rebuild, and unbuild worlds. This session will look at built worlds, real and imagined, to examine the limits and the possibilities of our imagination.

How do we know when we’re ready to write about something? For all kinds of reasons, the idea of “permission” can play a key role in our writing and our approach to it. In this session, we will dive into the world of dreams, obsessions, and subtext in an effort to surface with a sense of permission to put shape to the stories we know we need to tell.

Every writer walks with, into, through, and/or away from a dizzying array of archives: emotional, historical, familial, and otherwise. Here, we will dig into our deep storages — the experiences, behaviors, and patterns we inherit — while also interrogating accessibility: who gets to have an archive, and what happens when an archive is erased or taken from us?

This first session introduces residents to the Seventh Wave’s signature workshop model, The Mini Manifesto, which centers the writer — and two very specific questions — as a way to discuss, wield, and dissect the heart of our individual and collective work.