The creative-writing workshop manifests differently relative to time. That is, a one-time masterclass will be conducted differently than a class that repeats over the course of a semester or quarter, and yet still differently over an intense three-week summer session. In a masterclass, the usual seminar structure of a workshop will be rather one centered almost exclusively on the voice of the workshop leader. It is over the course of a semester that workshops settle into the characteristic give-and-take of a communal discourse, the seminar-like egalitarian conversation centered on compassionate criticism, positive and negative, that is the ideal of arts pedagogy.

The Prague Summer Program is a blending of culture studies and creative writing, the former enhancing, enriching the latter, and the three weeks of nine two-and-a-half hour workshops should not be mentor-centric, we’ll call it, as in a master class, though cannot be, at twenty-two and a half hours, as egalitarian as a forty-six-hour workshop spread over more than three months. Workshop mentors in the Prague Summer Program tend to guide the workshop discourse with a hurrying hand, attempt to focus the classroom discourse such that there is greater emphasis on a work in question than on a conversation about it, the dynamics of the discourse.

This is simply to say that PSP mentors understand that anyone who chooses to cross the Atlantic Ocean (in most cases) to spend just over three weeks absorbing the majesty, mystery, and history of one of the planet’s most beautiful and storied cities and its people, and in the midst of that majesty, mystery and beauty intensely regard their own lives as artists, deserves the mentor’s most honest, professional evaluations of their efforts. This is simply to say that every workshop member will have an honored voice, but the judgments, the voice of the mentor will predominate as gracefully as possible.

At its best--a state of being that it almost always assumes--the PSP workshop is both intense and relaxed, focused on participants’ creative efforts with the casual passion that should be the hallmark of fellowship among artists. Following the traditional Iowa-workshop model, the PSP workshop is uniquely positioned, in space and regarding time, to facilitate genuine breakthroughs in a literary artist’s apprenticeship. PSP mentors attempt to articulate the issues on which each program participant should be monomaniacally focused regarding their personal artistic and intellectual journey.

The value of the Prague Summer Program workshop regime, to a greater extent than is true of workshops anywhere else, we believe and more than thirty years of past participants have testified, will resonate most powerfully in the months and years following the experience, once the bedazzlement of three weeks in Prague has mellowed, even as it never ends. As Prague’s native son Franz Kafka put it, “Prague never lets you go. That dear little mother has claws.” Prague’s velvet claws, we hope, will cling to the soul of every writer who experiences the Prague Summer Program, such that what the writer learns about her/him/themselves over the course of the program will be positively determinative, at least in some small part, regarding their lives and artistic careers.