Writing Workshops

Sustained Writing: A Practice in Creative Endurance with Nardine Taleb

$175

2 Sessions

Out of stock

Saturday & Sunday 12:00 pm EDT - 3:00 pm EDT January 31 to February 1, 2026

Online via Zoom

This writing workshop is now sold out. Please email [email protected] to join the waitlist—and become a member for early access to future programming.

Like all art, writing is a mental game. By discussing readings and completing writing sprints, participants in this two-day generative workshop will increase their creative writing endurance and feel more confident in their ability to sit and write for long periods of time. This workshop is meant to inspire and light the fire under writers so that they do the work they feel called to do. Participants will leave with at least one short story and several flash stories to revise later.

Our mental practice will be guided by several writers, including Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Baldwin, Anne Carson, Ted Chiang, and many others with timeless, electric writing.

Course Outline:

Day One: Participants will discuss excerpts from Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and craft essays by Lydia Davis that center on the art of endurance. With the guidance of writing prompts, participants will be led into a series of writing sprints that increase in five-minute increments (5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes). Participants will have the opportunity to share their work with the class. During breaks, we’ll review works by Ursula K. Le Guin, James Baldwin, and Anne Carson that showcase deep thinking and sentences that are as “clean as a bone” (Baldwin). Finally, we’ll discuss what has worked for us when writing and how we can be attentive to writing on a sentence level.
Day Two: Participants will read interviews and advice from Anne Carson, Ted Chiang, and more before starting a second day of generative work. Participants will discuss writing that moves and inspires them to write, and review the components of short story writing, including style, voice, and form—all of which can heavily impact our ability to move forward in our story. There will be writing sprints and prompts, and we will end the second day by sharing our work and setting goals for the future.

Teaching Style: My teaching style is built on the idea that a welcoming, playful space encourages creativity and taking risks. With my experience as a Prose Editor at Gordon Square Review and instructing countless writing workshops around Cleveland and at conferences, I present new ideas to my students, knowing that they will also share their own experiences and perspectives. I act as a guide, mentioning certain craft examples and allowing the class to change as it needs to.

My aim as an instructor is to empower writers to recognize their own ability and feel inspired to work on their stories with the foundation of community. Sometimes we need to remember that writing is playing on the page, that it is our “playground” — even if it is a serious matter. We must go to the page and dance. My teaching has also been instructed by the important work of David Mura and Matthew Salesses’ “Craft In the Real World,” which means I allow the workshop to be flexible to the needs of its students and always an inclusive, welcoming community.

Level: Introductory

This course is held online via Zoom.

Led by

Nardine Taleb

Nardine Taleb

Nardine Taleb is an Egyptian-American writer and speech therapist. Her fiction has been published in the Offing, the Rumpus, and Electric Literature. Her poetry chapbook, warda, was published in 2023 by Passengers Press. Her work has won multiple Best of the Net nominations and her poem “Six Days” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She served as a Prose Editor at Gordon Square Review for several issues.

About this series

Writing Workshops

We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.

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