Fall Term 2025

Carleton College, Department of English

Do you love to write, and also love to craft? In this hands-on, creative class, we’ll spend half our time writing and the other half crafting our words into pieces of art. We’ll write a series of poems and then compile them into zines or chapbooks using beautiful papers, all as a means of self-publishing our words–craftily!

Join local writer, editor, and Loft Literary Center education manager Marianne Manzler for this workshop at 826MSP, where we’ll discover the power of personal and collective storytelling. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

Register here!

Writers group with current medical students, physicians, and residents

From books and memories to the world around us, inspiration for a story can come from anywhere. Join this Teen Maker Break workshop in the Art Lab between 2 and 5 pm to explore the power of the personal and collective narrative with Marianne Manzler, local writer, editor, and education manager at the Loft Literary Center. Participants are encouraged to share their work in writing and verbally in response to prompts and artwork on view in the galleries. Co-hosted in partnership with the Loft Literary Center, this program is open to teen writers of all genres and levels. Free, no registration required.

Photo by Walker Art Museum

https://walkerart.org/visit/teen-program/

https://walkerart.org/calendar/2025/free-thursday-nights

Art Club invites you to join Marianne Manzler from the Loft Literary Center for a night of dynamic interactive writing workshops. Enjoy drop-in activities connected to the Walker’s permanent collection This Must Be the Place and creative opportunities for writers to participate in purposeful free-writing.

Materials are provided and distributed on a first-come, first-served basis; supplies are limited. Activities are designed for all skill levels. No prior registration is required for Art Club. The more you visit, the more you’ll discover.

Gallery admission is free on Thursday nights, 5 to 9 pm. Save time and reserve your gallery admission tickets online. Please note: Individual events during Free Thursday Nights are first-come, first-serve

Photo by Walker Art Museum

Writers group with current medical students, physicians, and residents

Whether you're working on a book-length memoir or a series of essays, this class will guide you from raw memory or idea to a polished piece in twelve weeks. We'll move through a structured progression of writing exercises and assignments inspired by six weekly craft talks. Topics will include: point of view, voice, scene, character, sensory detail, setting, and revision.

The second half of the course is given over to exhaustive workshopping, during which each student will have the opportunity to showcase their work. This is an intensive class for serious writers, but students should expect a supportive, inclusive, anti-racist, and energetic virtual experience. If you cannot commit yourself to the full twelve-week plan, please reconsider whether this is the right class for you, and explore other Loft class options. Please come to class prepared to engage in writing, workshopping, and conversation on craft.

Class is appropriate for those hoping to generate new work, as well as those who want to bring finished work in to revise. If the latter describes you, please be willing to disassemble and reimagine the manuscript you plan to bring to the table later this winter. For the purposes of completing a manuscript for this class, in our allotted time together, students should aim to write a minimum of 1,000 words per week.

In this workshop, we’ll use our words as tools for change. We’ll examine the ways writers and writing can impact communities, and the role that writers and literature play in effecting social change and justice. By the end of the session, we’ll have several new pieces of writing that reflect the change we want in our community and world, and we’ll find creative ways to share these pieces with the world, too.

Join us for a day of theater fun! We'll write our own plays, then create original scenery and costumes. At the end of class, we'll perform our plays in front of a small, invited audience.