New!
Two Session Courses: Our popular one month group courses are now available on an individual basis. Work one-to-one with the instructor at your own convenience. Tuition: $45 or 180 shekels. To register, click here

Here's how it works:

1. Look over our courses and see what interests you. Do you want to sample a one session workshop or sign up for a six session writing experience? Interested in creating a poem or writing a memoir?

2. After you select your course & register for it, your instructor will contact you within two weeks.

3. She will send you the course material and the first assignment.

4. When you complete it, you send it back to her.


5. She will offer you her comments, designed to help you realize your potential as a writer, and then you move on to the next session.

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Two Session Courses
Six Session Courses
One Session Intensive Workshops
Critique and Editing Services

 

1. Creative Tension (Instructor: Esther Susan Heller)

Through comprehensive exercises we will be working to: Uncover patterns in our writing, Overcome pat and simplistic conclusions, Integrate contradictions. Creative Tension will give your writing depth, intensity, and discovery of the new and unexpected.

2. Description (Esther Susan Heller)

Develop your awareness of sensory detail, Choose which descriptive details to use and which to omit. Use description to create vivid moods for your stories. Learn how to revise your descriptions.

3. Writing Weave (Esther Susan Heller)

Weave richness and texture into your writing. Do you ever feel you've fallen into a writing rut and use the same words, images, sentence patterns and style over and over again? Do you feel that your writing falls flat? Do you want to wake it up, deepen it, make it richer, vary it?

4. Writing with Subtlety (Esther Susan Heller)

It's so tempting to tell the readers what you have to say rather than make them work a little, think a little, but your readers are intelligent human beings and will get more out of your writing if give them an experience rather than an overt message. In this course you will learn to show the reader rather than tell through the use of selecting significant details by starting scenes in the middle of the action (thereby omitting opening explanations) and by creating a work for your reader to experience rather than merely read.

5. Creative Non Fiction: The Art of Discovery (Esther Susan Heller)

An article should be an adventure that the writer takes the reader along on. How do you choose a topic? What makes an article compelling? How do you apply fiction techniques that will enhance your story?

6. Theme: The Hidden Structure (Esther Susan Heller)

Theme is the chief idea that guides and directs a piece of writing. Understanding your theme helps you select what details, plot lines and characters belong and which are interfering. Theme gives your writing the professionalism and polish that can turn promising writing into publishable work. For writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

7. Creating Characters To Care About (Instructor: Shifrah Devorah Witt)

Every piece of writing has a character, whether it is journalism, fiction, poetry or a play. We will engage readers in new ways and bring the connection between writing and readers to a whole new level. You will develop characters that your reader will not only read, but will connect with. You will learn how to remove the fourth wall between author and reader and create writing so vivid your readers will feel like they are living through the experience with the characters.

8. Exploring Voice (Shifra Devorah Witt)

All stories are transmitted through "Voice." Whether the reader hears the voice of the author, or of the characters, voice is the medium in which the writer transmits her work. We will discover new ways to cultivate voice. We will create scenes so vivid our readers will not only hear them, but will feel them as well. We will learn how to create memorable characters that interact in such an energetic and lively way our readers will love reading about them and we will love writing about them.

9. Poetry in Writing (Shifra Devorah Witt)

Every writer can improve their writing by learning poetic techniques and incorporating them into their writing. In this course we will begin to develop the poetic skills needed to create images so vibrant and lines so powerful your readers will never forget them.

10. Poetic Skills (Shifra Devorah Witt)

Poetry is an age-old art. But how many of us use the techniques of advanced poetics to enliven, improve, and renew every aspect of our writing when we sit down to write? In this course we will learn the skills of master poets and see how to implement theme into our writing to create new work that will not only awaken our readers, but will awaken our selves as writers as well.

The Art of Interviewing
By Leah Kotkes

Learn how to create and polish articles. The emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual aspects of interviewing for publication create the foundation for this practical course. Tried and tested, insightful and inspiring methods will be presented in each lesson and will add value and appeal to your writing.

1. Eyes and ears, the tools of our trade. Listening, the key that opens new doors. Preparing your communication skills for the interviewing process.
2. Reading the inner map of your interviewee's world, understanding verbal and non-verbal communication, acceptance and presentation.
3. Interviewing preparations: Plan, methods, techniques, writers' codes and contingency planning for when things don't go according to the rules.
4. Interviewing options and the marketplace. Getting starting, broadening your horizons.
5. Who, what, when, where, why and how: Brainstorming for interviewing ideas and approaches. Developing your writing for publication.
6. Step by step guidelines, checklist and methods to take you from concept to publication.

Advanced Fiction Tutorial
By Esther Susan Heller

This course is for the fiction writer with a work-in-progress, either short story or a novel. We will be examining some of the elements that are crucial for developing compelling fiction. It is assumed that you have some experience working with fiction techniques such as characterization, plot, setting, dialogue and description. The goal of this course is to deepen, expand and fine tune the fiction that you are already involved in creating.

1. Getting off to the right start: inner excitement
2. Your main character's life
3. Setting as character
4. Levels of distance and discovering your voice
5. Dialogue and multi-tasking
6. Meaning, theme and metaphor

How to Write a Grant Proposal
By Rena Cohen

In this course you will learn what you need to know in order to prepare a professional grant proposal.

1. Introduction: Know your organization and understand why you are writing the grant. Do your research, regarding foundations that are willing to accept your proposal such as how to identify foundations that would be willing to accept your proposal.
2. Writing a letter proposal: Why write a letter? The difference between a letter proposal and an overview. What to include in the letter.
3. The Overview
This is not the proposal, but the reason you are making it. It has many sections and you will need to understand them in order to get all the relevant information together.
4. Preparing the Budget and other financial information.
5. Additional items that need to be submitted along with your proposal. Follow-up.
6. Special characteristics of grants for Jewish Foundations. Further questions and conclusion. Putting it all together.

Publishing Your Work Part 1
By Avriel Adler

This course is an introductory guide to publishing manuscripts, both fiction and non-fiction. It will cover the technical aspects of publishing your first work,. The course is open to those who have completed, or have nearly completed manuscripts.

1. Dotting your i's and crossing your t's - a guide to final revision.
2. Manuscript presentation: style and format.
3. Agents and genre: how to choose the agents who will best represent your work.
4. Query letters.
5. Sending your work out: multiple queries and submissions, learning from rejections.
6. Working with your agent and editor.

Publishing Your Work: Part II
By Avriel Adler

Topics included in this course are: submission techniques for experienced authors, selling your work in today's restricted market, working with your agent and editor, contract negotiation, and publicity techniques. This course is open to those who have
completed manuscripts or non-fiction book proposals.

1. Polished presentation: generating interest.
2 Market surveys: how best to present your work in light of recent publishing trends.
3. Multiple submissions, auctions and agent management.
4. Contracts: negotiation techniques, understanding all that fine print.
5. Publicity: Who pays? Who benefits?
6. Conferences and Writers' Workshops: How to get the most from them.

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The Hidden World of Being Funny
By Danya Boksenboim

Learn how to write humor through self discovery. In this course we will explore how any situation that affects us, can be turned, twisted and played with until it is transformed. Through stretching our emotions, we will embark upon a treasure hunt for that elusive thing we call funny.

Tapping the Underground River: Writing as a Bridge to the Unconscious by Varda Branfman

This workshop will explore pathways to your interior. Often, the roadblocks are signs that you are on the right track. How to gently press right there and then make yourself paper-thin so that you can slide in. When you scan your mind and find emblematic scenes that represent whole chapters of your life, how to enter those scenes and reclaim the vast surroundings. You'll learn about deep relaxation to get you to the underground river and techniques for navigating once you're there. And of course, how to trust the waters and the lilt of your own voice.

Reaching Kedusha (Holiness) Through Creativity
By Esther Chana Stromberg

The Secrets of Challah
Using creative techniques, we will explore the holiness of the mitzvah of separating challah and discover our hidden potential as Jewish women.

Private Tutorial with Sarah Shapiro

(note this tutorial is not offered via email or mail. It is being offered in Jerusalem only and its content will be tailored to meet the individual needs of each student.)

Over time, one of the happy things that has become apparent to me is that anyone who's consistently bothered by a desire to write is also equipped with a gift for doing so. My goal as a teacher is to create an environment in the person's mind in which the writing self can dare to emerge.

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Fiction and nonfiction- Esther Susan Heller
Memoir- Dr. Judy Belsky
Creative Non Fiction- Shoshana Lepon
Poetry- Dr. Judy Belsky

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