Teen Creative Writing Workshop with Christian Wilburn (Nov 13-Dec 5)

As part of its year-round Young Playwrights Project fostering creative expression among Bay Area youth, PlayGround is offering a limited-capacity six-session Creative Writing Workshop for area teens, led by PlayGround playwright and two-time Best of PlayGround alumnus Christian Wilburn. The class will take place over eight online sessions, Saturdays and Sundays, 2pm-4pm, November 13, 14, 20, 21, and December 4, 5 (no sessions Nov 27-28). To register for the free workshop, students can sign up through this Google Form. For more information about PlayGround’s Young Playwrights Project, click here.

This class is centered on teaching storytellers (fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, screenwriting) how to find and develop artistic identity. Every writer has a voice, something about our  writing that is authentically us . This voice is more than our writing style. It is our writerly identity, the genres we traverse, the themes we  explore and the questions our  work asks again and again. However, many of us don’t understand what makes our  voices distinct or how to develop them. In “Finding Your Voice,” we will discover our writerly identity, by looking at our past and present work, as well as our inspirations and influences. We will learn to think deeply and critically on craft skills and see them not as inalienable decrees from the writing gods, but as tools to help create art that fully expresses ourselves. With these skills, we will understand both the writers we are and the writers we wish to become. The discussion and lecture-based workshop will involve in-class writing and brainstorming as well as in-class explorations of student work.

Christian Wilburn (Instructor) is a local educator, playwright, and fiction writer, born and raised in San Francisco. He has taught workshops for students in devised theater and playwriting at the Marsh Theater. In his two years in the Playground Writer’s Pool he received three Monday Night Playground People’s Choice Awards, two Best of Playground selections, the Inaugural Best of Playground People’s Choice award, and commission for his full-length play Starlight.  Starlight is currently in development as a part of the Playground Playwright Residency Program. Christian’s full-length devised play love stories premiered at Santa Clara University in 2018.  Christian also is concluding his MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco in December.

PlayGround, California’s leading playwright incubator, provides unique development opportunities for the Bay Area’s (and now Los Angeles’) best new playwrights, including the monthly Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series, annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, full-length play commissions and support for the production of new plays by local playwrights through the New Play Production Fund. To date, PlayGround has supported over 250 early career playwrights, developing and staging more than 1000 of their original short plays through the Monday Night PlayGround staged reading series and the PlayGround Festival. PlayGround has also commissioned 90 new full-length plays by 60 of these writers through its Commissioning Initiative and, through the innovative New Play Production Fund, has directly facilitated the premiere of 32 plays at theatres of every size, including three that have gone on to NYC and other major theater communities. More recently, PlayGround renovated and relaunched the former Thick House Theater in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill as Potrero Stage, a state-of-the-art center for new plays, home to PlayGround’s expanding artistic programs and some of the Bay Area’s most distinguished new play developers and producers. Over the past twenty-seven years, PlayGround has served to identify some of the most important new local voices for the theatre. PlayGround’s alumni have gone on to win local, national, and international honors for their short and full-length work, including recognition at the Steinberg Awards, Humana Festival, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and The Lark’s Playwrights’ Week, among others. PlayGround received the 2009 Paine Knickerbocker Award for outstanding contributions to Bay Area theatre, 3 BATCC Awards for Best Original Script for PlayGround commissions, a 2014 National Theatre Company Grant from the American Theatre Wing (founder of the Tony Awards®), and a 2016 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. Visit https://playground-sf.org for more information.