Interested in teaching a workshop with HerStry? Propose a new course here.
All events take place in the central time zone.
Through simple and creative exercises, participants will be invited to revisit their experiences, memories, and emotions, transforming them into a short written story. The workshop focuses on the joy of creating, discovering one’s voice, and sharing in a supportive environment rather than on performance or perfection.
Let’s make summer sizzle with stories.
Writing a short story doesn’t happen in one session. It takes multiple drafts to get it exactly right, to create characters that come to life for the reader and a world they can’t stop thinking about. In this seven week course we will work on a single short story from conception to submission ready.
Writing a memoir can be a great way to record your experiences and leave a legacy behind for your family. With our busy lives, however, it can be daunting to plot an entire book of memoirs. This course will provide you with exciting new ideas, examples, and strategies for writing memoirs in short (less than 1,000-word) pieces, guiding you through the process of sharing your memories.
We share in our writing the human condition, whether through compelling themes in fiction or real lived experiences in nonfiction. Both are art forms, and both often require gathering more than one’s viewpoint and experience to tell the story. Interviewing experts, witnesses, and avatars for character-building is its own art form, one many writers may find daunting.
Writing a sex scene can be delirious fun, a harrowing challenge, a literary milestone—possibly the most important part of building your book. In six weeks, you’ll experience just about every possible emotion as you explore the erotic in different modes: comic, tender, harrowing, soul-shattering … because it really is all about the characters’ feelings, not just the mechanics. So we’ll talk about tone. Vocabulary. Metaphor. Sensory detail. How to get emotion on the page … and when to pull back and let the reader’s imagination go to work.
This is a course for writers who want to explore the intersection between the novel and short stories, and would like to weave their short stories into a story cycle (or collection of "linked stories" or "composite novel"). This is also a class about the interaction of form and content, and how one influences the other.
Nature is all around us. Yet, we are slowly losing our connection with it. In a world where attention is fast eroding, and listening to the environment is more crucial than ever, what can writers do to rebel? Through this course, we will learn to look around us and notice the ways in which our love for nature is both personal and universal. How can we create art that inspires others to embrace that love too? How can we write about the grief of losing something important, and the slow beauty that surrounds us? This course will encourage attendees to look at nature writing through an interdisciplinary lens, both wide in its scope and deep in its engagement.
Make readers feel your story by crafting its atmosphere in a multilayered way from the sentences and words to the micro tension of your piece. In this 90-minute class, you’ll learn what contributes to a story’s atmosphere by analyzing published short stories and practice crafting different levels of atmosphere using exercises and prompts.
Writing a piece of flash fiction is like standing on the three-state spot: in 1,000 words or less you are employing the concision of poetry to tell a short story that evokes a world with the breadth of a Proustian novel. Out of breath? Good! Flash moves quickly. But it’s not as impossible as it sounds.
Have a rough draft but don't know how to make it better? This intensive revision workshop will guide you through the 3-step revision process that has helped thousands of writers craft their best drafts.
In an increasingly fragmented world, traditional forms of creative non-fiction feel worn and even outdated, but the lyric essay stands out as a way to express increasing uncertainty.
Anna North, author of Outlawed and the forthcoming Bog Queen, will join us via Zoom for a members only craft chat. We host craft chats with authors, editors, and agents every few months to give members an in-depth look at the industry and a chance to ask their burning questions about writing process, publication process, and more.
Despite a decade of social media dominance, email newsletters remain the most powerful tool in a writer's platform-building arsenal. Yet in the Substack era, many writers approach newsletters with confusion, reluctance, or half-hearted commitment—missing their true potential while chasing trends.
This six-week course guides writers through the literary submission process, offering insider insight and practical tools to help you get your work into the world. We’ll demystify everything from reading submission calls to writing cover letters and choosing the right journals.
We all know it’s too easy to get to the end of the day without getting a writing session in. So let’s build a sustainable habit together. We’ll write first thing in the morning, before our phones, inbox, loved ones, or professional lives have a chance to derail us. Build a habit in one month. In this class that meets Mondays through Fridays from 8:00-8:50 AM CST, we will focus on generating new writing—making headway on a current project, reviving an old project that’s been gathering dust, or writing based off of the daily prompts.
A literarily relevant sex scene must do two things, advance plot and convey character. Everything else is delicious/poisonous icing on the cake (Depending on the purpose and tone of the sex scene!) In this seminar we’ll learn how to craft sex scenes while maintaining our authentic voices. We'll discuss tips and tools and through short readings, collaborative discussion as well as in class writing prompts, we’ll discover together what makes a sex scene necessary and maybe even profound.
Anna Bliss, author of Bonfire Night will join us via Zoom for a members only craft chat. We host craft chats with authors, editors, and agents every few months to give members an in-depth look at the industry and a chance to ask their burning questions about writing process, publication process, and more.
Back by popular demand, our Ask an Agent series continues with Annie Hwang of Ayesha Pande Literary Agency. Annie will be with us for an hour to talk all things book agent. How to get an agent, tips for great query letters, how to know your agent is ‘the one’, what happens after your book gets sold, and so much more.
In this six-part class we'll explore the art and magic of writing as a healing process in a collaborative and supportive environment. Together, we will share our stories, read a variety of essays and short fiction in order to identify how others have utilized the written word to heal themselves, and then we will begin to develop and create our own pieces utilizing the techniques identified in classic and contemporary texts.
How can we as writers fight our own hopelessness and take a stand?
As creators we deal in empathy, so right now feels pretty tough. But by writing not just for ourselves but for the people who need to hear our voices, we can find a new vision and commitment to creating. In 2025 and beyond, it's time to make the weird art. Let's do it together.
The personal essay is…personal. It’s right there in the title. But adding those personal details can sometimes be tricky. Maybe you aren’t ready to explore the subject. Maybe you are just too close to it still. Maybe you think you are getting personal but everyone keeps telling you they want more.
Julie Buntin, author of Marlena and the forthcoming novel Famous Men will join us via Zoom for a members only craft chat. We host craft chats with authors, editors, and agents every few months to give members an in-depth look at the industry and a chance to ask their burning questions about writing process, publication process, and more.
Since the publication of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return in 2001, there has been a steady proliferation of memoirs that use the fragment as its main literary unit. These include The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch (2011), The White Book by Han Kang (2017), In the Dream House (2019) by Carmen Maria Machado, and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden (2019). Many of these nontraditional memoirs explore issues such as displacement and diaspora, gender and sexuality, grief and the body. Perhaps, the fragment as a form affords imaginative inquiry into these issues in ways that linear narrative cannot.
Toni Morrison was more than an essayist and novelist; she was a witness, a historian, and a master truth-teller. Her words unsettle, stir, illuminate, and challenge us to see what history tries to erase. This course explores Morrison’s fearless engagement with truth—about race, memory, trauma, and power—through two of her essential works: The Source of Self-Regard, a collection of speeches and essays that reveal her philosophy of the art of storytelling, and Home, a novel that excavates the buried wounds of war trauma, displacement, and Black survival.
Looking for a publisher to call home for your manuscript? So many roads are overwhelming. I can help narrow the view along the journey.
In Cultivating Your Creativity we will discuss and practice techniques to get your creativity flowing. This is an interactive workshop with a free write to identity your blocked areas, a mind mapping demo, art journaling, and tips to take on the dreaded writer’s block. There will be space to try out these techniques! Writers are guaranteed to leave this workshop inspired and ready to write.
From conception to submission. Let’s make summer sizzle with stories.
Writing a short story doesn’t happen in one session. It takes multiple drafts to get it exactly right, to create characters that come to life for the reader and a world they can’t stop thinking about. In this seven week course we will work on a single short story from conception to submission ready.
In this course, you will get information on how to submit to literary journals: what to include in your cover letter, how to craft the perfect bio, how to find and determine which journals are worth submitting to, and how to log your submissions. We will leave some time to submit to a journal together.
Ever sat down and written the beginning of a piece you absolutely
loved? Maybe it was in a workshop, and you read it aloud and everyone
loved it. Maybe you were on your own and you leaned back in your chair
and said, “This is AMAZING.”
Whether we're writing long-form or short fiction or memoir, we need to engage our readers via lively, memorable scenes that draw the reader in, make them care about our story and turn to the next page. This workshop will give you the skills to write, arrange and edit really memorable scenes in your nonfiction and fiction writing.
Come read what you’ve been working on. Things you’ve had published, things that are fresh off the printer. Or, if you don’t feel like reading this time around just come support your fellow Babes!
Whether your book is about to be published, or you’re developing a book proposal, or learning about the publishing process as you write, the question of how to market your book can feel confusing or intimidating. No matter the size of the press you are working with, authors are expected to bring their audience to the publisher and take an active, and often leading, role in promoting their book. So what, exactly, do you need to do? And do you really need to be on all those social media platforms? Book promotion doesn’t have to be a burden. In fact, it can be fun, sustainable, and a chance to strengthen your community and writing life.
Led by Christy Wopat, author of Almost a Mother: Love, Loss, and Finding Your People When Your Baby Dies, this workshop will walk you through several different techniques to use writing as a therapeutic tool for grief expression.
The Creativity Oasis is not a workshop, its an hour long guided brainstorming session in which you’ll have the chance to generate new writing.
Every day, different personas come out of us depending on many factors, including who we are interacting with and where we are. We should bring many versions of ourselves to the page too.
We think our lives are interesting, but do readers? How do you make your true story resonate with an audience in 1,000 words or less? In this workshop led by memoirist and personal essayist Nadine Kenney Johnstone, you will learn why it’s crucial for writers to write their truth and make readers care right away. Whether you are working on a full-length memoir or short essays, the techniques you’ll learn in this class will help elevate your personal essays or short memoir scenes.
