Week Three Writers’ Center workshops offer three tremendous opportunities to explore one’s past through poetry and creative nonfiction and generate stories inspired from visual art.
Nicole Cooley will serve as the poetry faculty for the week, and both Mary Hall Surface and Sejal Shah will teach prose workshops.
Cooley’s workshop is titled “Writing the Difficult and Finding the Grace in Poetry;” Surface will teach “Find Your Muse: Creative Writing Inspired by Visual Art;” and Shah will instruct “The Stories You Need to Write.” All three workshops are available through Special Studies.
Cooley and Surface will read from their work at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at the Hall of Philosophy and Shah will read from her work and deliver a craft talk at 12:15 p.m. Friday on the porch of the Literary Arts Center at Alumni Hall.
Cooley, Master of Fine Arts professor at University College of New York, said that when teaching, she encourages students to embrace the process of writing rather than the final product.
“In my workshop, I’m less interested in (saying), ‘Let’s polish something and make it perfect,’ than I am in (saying), ‘Let’s try something new and really crack it open — let’s take a risk,’ ” she said.
Cooley is the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Discovery/The Nation Award, an NEA, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, among others. She said that the best way to approach a poem is often by jumping headfirst into writing, no matter how messy it is.
“I’m all about weird, generative writing exercises because if I sat around and waited till I was ‘inspired’ to write, I would have written one poem in my life,” said Cooley.
Instead of waiting for inspiration, Cooley said that she encourages her students to find interesting access points to poems, particularly when the subject matter revolves around a sensitive subject or experience.
“Sometimes I think the best way to access difficult subject matter is to just sort of let yourself go, not censor yourself and give into a spirit of play and see what happens,” Cooley said.
In the workshop, she plans on offering rhetorical models from poem examples, stirring generative writing exercises and workshopping poems in a group.
On Sunday, Cooley will read from her fall 2024 poetry collection titled Mother Water Ash and an upcoming book of poems titled Trash — the product of piqued curiosity during the COVID-19 lockdown that turned into an extensively researched exploration of the fate of landfills in New Jersey and New York City.
She will be joined by Surface, who will teach creative writing inspired by visual art in her Week Three workshop.
Surface is a theater director, teaching artist, museum educator and award-winning playwright of 15 plays. She previously taught in Chautauqua as a visiting artist in a partnered program with the Kennedy Center.
Fitting into the theme of “Art in Action: Building Community Through the Arts,” Surface said, in her work, she builds community through every art form. Drawing on experience from her work with museum docents and educators across the country, Surface said she finds community when combining art forms.
“Gathering around works of art and turning our reflective writing toward them is a tool for building empathy, because we can begin to see through one another’s eyes when you stand in front of a work of art and engage with one another around the piece,” she said.
Examining the works of American painters such as Cecilia Beaux, Kenjiro Nomura and Edward Hopper, Surface will guide participants to work against their instincts to immediately interpret a piece.
“Keep your mind and heart open to give you the largest imaginative canvas possible,” she said. “I think that skill is essential to us as writers, but even more essential to us as humans.”
Alongside Cooley’s poetry workshop and Surface’s workshop, Shah will teach a creative nonfiction workshop titled “Stories You Need to Write.”
Shah is a writer, educator and interdisciplinary artist based in Rochester, New York. Her 2020 collection of essays, titled This Is One Way to Dance, was listed as a Best Book by NPR and her 2024 book How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions was shortlisted for The Story Prize in 2025.
Shah is also the recent recipient of the 2025 New York Council on the Arts’ Support for Artists grant, sponsored by Chautauqua Institution. She will deliver a reading and craft talk at 12:15 p.m. Friday on the porch of Alumni Hall as part of the Summer on the Steps programming.
In her workshop, Shah will introduce smaller stories to participants to read and discuss, and she will prioritize time for generative writing.
“These small stories, I think of them almost like little diamonds,” Shah said. “Because it’s a short workshop, I wanted to give us the chance to look at these pieces in full, so I chose small pieces. Then we have a lot of time to write and some time to share.”
Shah brings experience as an instructor at the organization Writers and Books in Rochester and online through the Writers in Progress program.
Working within the flexible genre of creative nonfiction, Shah said that she looks forward to leading her first Chautauqua workshop and connecting with writers that bring a variety of stories to the experience.
“We’re all coming from our various lives and our busy lives,” Shah said. “So I think that to have a time that’s special and generative is a unique experience, and it’s a treasure, really.”
After a week of generative exercises and craft discussion, Shah said she hopes participants realize that they can get a lot of writing done in a short amount of time.
“You might not have two hours … maybe it’s more possible that you’re going to have 10 minutes,” Shah said, “but we can make space in time for writing in our lives, and we are the richer for it.”
