CrossLit Pilot Program

Build

Loosen your writing muscles and build raw material without worrying about polish or perfection. Each session begins with a playful, unexpected provocation designed to stir creative energy, encourage associative thinking, and open a new line of thought. Write fast, follow odd turns, make strange connections. Keep generating until something has charge – a line, image, rhythm, voice or idea worth taking further.

For writers who want to shake up their process, get past their inner critic, and work with more instinct and freedom.

Core

Take one element of craft – voice, point of view, syntax, tension, rhythm, time, structure – and stretch what you would usually do with it. Get inside the heat of a metaphor. Shift tense. Strip a passage back to image and action. Push a quiet moment towards tension. Core enlarges the range of choices you can make on the page.

For writers comfortable with the fundamentals who want to sharpen technique and widen their range.

The edit room

Bring existing material and learn how to revise with intention: diagnose what is not working, decide what the piece needs, then test different options. Cut, compress, reorder, expand, or remove what you thought was essential, and compare what each choice does to the work.

For writers with a draft on the page who want to sharpen editorial judgement, and revise with more confidence.

Sprint

Log on, set a goal, and write. The midday Sprint gives you a clear block of time in the middle of the day. Timed rounds, no feedback, just other writers working alongside you. Use it to push a draft forwards and get the words down.

For writers who want a regular habit, a bit of accountability, and a way to carve out time in a busy day.

Cross-train

Borrow methods from other genres and artforms. Move between poetry and prose, fiction and essay, text and image, or try montage from film, repetition from music, and collage from visual art. Each session takes a compositional idea from somewhere else and pushes it through language. Break habitual patterns, make hybrid forms and find structures, rhythms and ways of making meaning that live outside your usual form.

For writers who want to take creative risks and discover new ways of shaping language and meaning.

A beautiful practice

Writing does not begin and end at the desk. These sessions explore the practices that keep a creative life alive: noticing, reading, listening, wandering, collecting, playing and making room for wonder, curiosity and rest. Each one offers a different way to replenish your attention, gather material and connect with your creative flow.

For writers who want to sustain a rich creative life, and bring more pleasure, and possibility to their practice.

Endurance

Bring a work in progress and stay with it. Long, uninterrupted writing blocks build concentration and stamina, so you can keep going past the point you would usually stop. The facilitator helps you set a focus, holds the structure of the session, and offers brief cues to help you return when attention drifts or resistance appears.

What to bring: A work in progress with enough unfinished business to keep you writing.

For writers who want to build focus, work through resistance, and finish what they start.

Community exchange

A member of the community shares one technique, tool or way of working that has changed their writing. See how they use it, try it yourself, and keep what works for your own practice. Less show-and-tell, more show-and-try.