The InnerSpark Creative Writing Program offers highly personalized and interactive workshops for approximately seventy gifted and motivated young writers. A faculty of four professional writers guides and instructs students in the techniques of fiction, poetry, and screen and play writing. The curriculum has seven basic components:

• Core Class
• Focus Section
• Independent Collaborative Project
• Discussions and Presentations
• Writers Stage
• Individualized Master Class
• Literary Anthology

The Core Class is a departmental writing workshop that meets four mornings per week. In this class Creative Writers develop the skills and tools needed for all genres of writing. They learn techniques of character development, plot, dialogue, narrative, voice and setting. Poetic forms, experimental writing and elements of screen and play writing are also practiced.

Each Creative Writer chooses a Focus Section which meets four afternoons each week. These workshops are designed to provide in-depth study of a particular genre of writing. Focus Sections on Poetry and the Poetic Voice, Visions of Childhood (short story), the Art of Making Scenes (scriptwriting) and Elements of Fiction are offered.

All Creative Writing students are required to design and carry out an independent collaborative project involving a student from one of the other departments at the school. The collaborative encourages the exploration and merging of two disciplines, enabling the writer to experience the creative processes of another artist. The writer will recruit an actor, animator, dancer, musician, filmmaker or visual artist, and together they will develop and present a work, which could be anything from a film to an art exhibit to a performance event, in the latter half of the summer session. Sometimes these projects are finished to a high degree of professionalism, and sometimes they are interesting works-in-progress. The aim is not to create a masterpiece, but to examine artistic collaboration.

Published writers and select panels are invited to InnerSpark for discussions and presentations. Some of the guests who visited the Creative Writing Department in recent years include California Poet Laureate Al Young, Novelists Maria Dhavana Headley, The Year of Yes, and Iris Rainier Dart, Beaches and other novels; screenwriters Pam Wallace, an Academy Award winner for the screenplay for Witness, and Mike Shiffer, who wrote the screenplays for Colors and Crimson Tide; renowned poets Lewis MacAdams and Mario Ellis Hill; and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer. InnerSpark Creative Writers have the rare opportunity to participate in lively discussions regarding the lives and creative strategies of nationally recognized writers.

On Saturday mornings at the end of Weeks I, II and III of the session, the Creative Writing and Theatre departments gather for Writers Stage. This weekly event is an opportunity for students to share the works created during the prior week in Core Class and Focus Sections. Faculty members describe the writing exercises, their purposes, and the problems and discoveries made by the writers. The works presented usually concern techniques that have challenged many writers.

The Individualized Master Class provides each writer the weekly opportunity to discuss a work- in-progress with a faculty member. The Master Class is very similar to an MFA creative thesis conference. Faculty members mentor students one-on-one through the inception, revision and completion of an original piece of writing. Creative Writing students remain with their faculty mentors throughout the four-week session.

Creative Writing students gain experience planning, editing and publishing a collection of original work. The annual Literary Anthology is distributed on the final day of the session.

Traci L. Gourdine chairs the Creative Writing Department. She is Professor of English at American River College in Sacramento, and chairs the Poet Laureate Program for the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. Ms. Gourdine is co-editor of an anthology of Native American teenage writing for Candlewick Press, and has published her poetry and short stories in anthologies and national literary magazines. In November of 2000, she was inducted into The Poet's Hall of Fame, and recognized as an influential writer within the teaching profession

Anni Amberg is a writer fascinated with histories and memories that have guided her work on a current project based in memoir. She journeyed abroad in 1999 to Mexico, India, Sweden, England and Iceland where she studied ancient Sanskrit texts, started schools in rural areas, and wrote extensively. In 2005, she returned to New York City and co-founded The Big Elephant Works, a company that includes writing workshops, adaptations of classical texts, film, international collaborations and physical theatre. She was an artist in residence at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, teaching creative writing and acting. She has studied at UC Davis, The American Conservatory Theatre and Dell'Arte School of Physical Theatre, and is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in English and Theater Arts.

Zay Amsbury is a New York-based playwright and screenwriter. Last fall he received a screenwriting award from the prestigious international film academy Group ESRA for his adaptation of his original theatrical musical Au Claire De La Lune. He is currently working under commission from MCC Theater in New York to write a full-length version of the musical. Other production credits include An Alan Turing Fantasy at The New School for Drama, New York, Sweet Self at Impact Theater Company, Berkeley, and 10,000 Light-Years from Home with Small Change Theater, Boston. He has won best of show at the NYU's Festival of New Works and twice at the UC Santa Cruz Chautauqua festival. Zay earned his B.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and his M.F.A. in Playwriting from the New School for Drama. Zay attended InnerSpark as a student in 1990, 1991, and 1992.

Ruth McKee is a writer and playwright. She is the 2009 Stanley Drama Award Recipient for her play Stray which recently received a reading at the Black Dahlia Theatre in Los Angeles. Her play The Nightshade Family, a 2007 Stanley Award Finalist, was produced in the 2007 Summer Play Festival New York City and received readings at the Playwrights Horizons and the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta. Other recent works include: Otherwise Engaged, Actors Theatre of Louisville; Security Check, Six Figures Theatre Company, Mail Returned, University of California San Diego and The Noise Room, HB Playwrights Foundation. Originally from Canada by way of Bangladesh and Kenya, Ruth holds a BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU and earned her MFA in playwriting from the University of San Diego. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches playwriting at University of California, San Diego and Idyllwild Arts Academy.