Monday, June 8, 2026 - Sunday, June 14, 2026

Saint Mary's College, Moraga, CA

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The Storyboard Residency is an immersive week of generative workshops, craft seminars and literary events organized to give writers new ideas, proven research methods and fresh ways of approaching their fact-based creative projects. Whether you’re an experienced writer or someone just conceptualizing their first project, Storyboard provides the time and space necessary to develop, plan, revise  and reflect upon your idea, your craft, and the path to publication.  

This residential intensive promises deeper connections with fellow writers working at the intersection of research, reporting and imagination—and editors who help those projects find an audience. 

Your days and nights at the residency will include:  Four, two-hour generative workshops geared toward revision and generating new work; Daily craft talks and presentations that shed light on new ways of approaching research, reporting, storytelling, ethics and language; A manuscript consultation (up to 3,000 words) ; Panels with writers and editors to demystify the publication and editorial processes, understand how to plan and fund our research, and build stamina for a long-haul creative endeavor; Conversations with writers, filmmakers and visual artists on their work, how it was made, and its reverberations in the world; Ample time for writing, reading, reflecting and connecting with faculty and your fellow participants 

Why Storyboard? 

Writing a creative work rooted in facts is a long-term project that requires a blend of inspiration and discipline, spontaneity and process, isolation and co-conspiracy. 

The goal is for this six-day period to catalyze the next steps in your research, writing and creation.  

This residency is for experienced journalists looking to expand their work into an artful, book-length project'; creative writers (fiction writers, memoirists, poets, etc) looking to infuse their art with reporting or research methods; academics looking to broader their writing to a more general audience ; writers knee-deep in an ambitious, long-form writing project looking for community, guidance and inspiration; writers at the early stages of a  project who need support figuring out how to chart a path forward; writers who didn’t attend an MFA or journalism program and who are looking for structure and support for their project; anyone working in isolation on an ambitious, fact-based writing project who is seeking community and connection 

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Saturday, March 7th & Saturday, March 14th, 2026 (this is a two-session class)

9:30-12:00 PST / 10:30 - 1:00 MST / 11:30 - 2:00 CST / 12:30-3:00 EST both days

The beginning stages of a writing project can feel like an ecstatic mess: all possibility and promise. When I started my new book, Immemorial, I was working on pure instinct and a sense that the various stories, research interests and ethical pursuits that preoccupied me might hang together in a book. That was a nice few months. But ultimately I had to shape all this material into something cohesive. For it to be a book, there needed to be some structure that held it all together and allowed the reader to move forward with clarity and ease. The same had been true for my previous book, A Map of Future Ruins, and the same vexing drama is playing out yet again as I work my way toward finishing Pageant, my new historical novel. And truth be told, structure is a hurts-so-good challenge even in my longform journalism work. It turns out that ordering the mess is often the hardest work there is — and yet sorting out structure helps us better understand the thing we’re making, and what it needs from us. 

In this class, which will meet twice, we’ll be looking at various strategies and methods to help us develop a structure for our long form prose projects (be they books, long essays, novels, or something else). How do we order and organize our ideas? How do we figure out how various elements contained in the text–research, reporting, memoir and personal narrative, expository writing–  fit together? How do we balance story and idea, and create a structure that moves the reader forward? How do we figure out a project’s shape? 

This class is appropriate for anyone working on a long, ambitious prose project (fiction or nonfiction) at any stage–and will be particularly useful for folks working on books that don’t lend themselves to linear structures or clear narrative arcs (but hey, I wrote a narrative book too - The Far Away Brothers- and that had its own structural challenges and opportunities!) The two 2.5 hour sessions will include a combination of lectures, in-class writing and mapping activities, small group conversations and Q&A, with some optional exercises to undertake in the week between.  

Recordings will be made available after the class. 

Limited scholarships are available for folks in need.

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