Interested in teaching a workshop with HerStry? Propose a new course here.
All events take place in the central time zone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” Jonathem Lethem argues for the eager plundering of earlier art to make new art. The idea is that all writing is recycled, the key is to channel age-old ideas and write pieces that are distinctly our own. Each week we will read and discuss two published stories by authors like Nabokov, Justin Torres, Mary Gaitskill and more, to look deeply at the ways the author constructed their own unique narrative.
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.
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.
From conception to submission. Let’s get this summer started.
Writing a short story doesn’t happen in one session. It takes multiple drafts to get it exactly right, to match the outside story with the inside story. In this seven week session we will work on a single short story from conception to submission ready. The seven week session will include generative brainstorming sessions, short story craft analysis, multiple workshop sessions, and detailed line by line feedback and edits. Plus, we’ll talk about submission venues, cover letters, and when to know if your story is ‘finished.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
including alternative forms, slanted metaphors, and utilizing different points of view. These strategies are geared toward staying vulnerable and authentic to your experience, but also creating distance when needed.
In this one-day, 90 minute workshop with writer Brittany Ackerman (The Brittanys Vintage), writers will tap into their own well of experiences in order to mine inspiration for their creative work. Whether writers are working toward a novel, a second draft, or are embarking on a journey to find passion in storytelling, this generative class will be a supportive and encouraging space to hold close the truths that occur in our own lives and how we might translate those experiences into art. In Fiction, we are able to pinpoint real life drama and excavate ideas for story in order to create pieces that feel true to existence, stories that we embrace and share in an attempt to connect with each other.
The Enneagram is a system of personality typing that describes patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. The Enneagram describes nine personality types and maps each of these types on a nine-pointed diagram which helps to illustrate how the types relate to one another.
A hint, you don’t need to have lived a dramatic or wild life to have something to write about. A good personal essay is all about telling a good story, no matter what the subject matter.
