We all have amazing stories to tell!

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.

Get Back into Nature

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 Your Readers Feel Your Story!

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.

You’ve done the hard part. Or have you?

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.

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.

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby!

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.

Looking for a publisher to call home for your manuscript? So many roads are overwhelming. I can help narrow the view along the journey.

Does it feel like your creative well has run a bit dry?

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.

Get Those Submissions Under Control!

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.

Rescuing Your Abandoned Drafts.

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.”

Darling, You’re Making a Scene

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.

Writing Through Grief

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.

(un)Masking

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.

Tiny True Stories

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.

Playing with Poetry

In this workshop, we will go over examples of what is canonically understood to constitute a poem, and subsequently apply that logic to less traditional or “non-poetic” forms. Investigating the liminal space between what does and doesn’t count as a poem will breed rich conversations, and will inform the work generated in the free-write and workshopping parts of the session.

If you want to traditionally publish a nonfiction book, a completed manuscript usually isn't enough to land you a book deal. You'll also need a book proposal. A book proposal is essentially a business plan for your book; it convincingly argues why your book is a salable product in today's market.

Pssst, your characters have sex….

But is their sex germane to your story? Writing Sex, a one-night workshop will help you discover the answer to that question and more.

Queer is a huge spectrum and with changing language around gender identity and orientation, there are so many avenues to explore when it comes to writing queer characters. In this workshop, queer trans author Finnian Burnett will explore the divide between own voices and inclusive writing.

Find Your Creativity

SoulCollage® is a highly accessible expressive arts activity for exploring and enhancing our creative gifts and the innate wisdom that exists within us. Through the use of images, SoulCollage® helps fire up our creative juices and offers us a uniquely right-brained way to excavate knowledge and ideas that can benefit our writing practice and projects. In this interactive, generative session, you’ll learn the basics of the SoulCollage® method, then jump right in to create cards that we’ll engage with via imaginative writing prompts.

As the late Irish poet Eavan Boland used to advise her students, "The only way out is through." And yet, when we are bogged down in a work of several hundred pages, it can be difficult to see a way through to the end. In this 90 minute session, we will discuss several methods of puzzling our way to the end of our novels-in-progress.

Write an Ending that Sticks

How do you write an ending that sticks with your reader for days to come? One they will think about while brushing their teeth, doing the dishes, driving to work. Ending are—notoriously—one of the hardest parts of the essay and often they get neglected.

Flash fiction is hot right now and getting hotter!

What does it take to write a killer story that evokes an emotional response and draws readers into your world? In this workshop, Finnian Burnett will use generative exercises, story analysis, and guided questions to help each participant hone their flash fiction skills. We'll talk about subverting point of view, deep character dives, and revision techniques. Come prepared to write. Sharing your work is encouraged, but not required.