Upcoming Events.
HerStry offers a variety of events for writers of all genres and abilities.
Interested in teaching a workshop with HerStry? Propose a new course here.
All events take place in the central time zone.
Short Story Summer
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.
Babes Book Club with Chelsea Bieker (Babes Only)
Babes Book Club with Chelsea Bieker
Chelsea Bieker will join us via Zoom to discuss her book Madwoman. Grab the book here and bring your questions for this informal chat!
Submission Season: Finish & Submit with Confidence
You’ve written the piece—now what?
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.
Hold Back to Hook: Writing Tension
Writing Tension
This six-week course examines tension as a narrative force. We’ll consider how writers can counter the impulse to resolve too quickly, to justify wrongful acts or to redeem a character’s behavior. By looking at ways to sustain tension without escalation into spectacle, we’ll experiment with evoking it in the ordinary and the unspoken.
Ask an Agent with Tia Ikemoto (Babes Only)
Ask an Agent with Tia Ikemoto
Tia Ikemoto, literary agent at CAA, will join us via Zoom for an informal chat about what it’s like to work with an agent, how to find one, the publishing process, etc.
Let's Get It On...the Page
Writing the sex scene.
Writing a sex scene can be delirious fun, a harrowing challenge, a literary milestone—possibly the most important part of building your short story or book. In our six weeks together, 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 big emotions on the page … and when to pull back and let the reader’s imagination go to work.
Mastering the Short Story Cycle
Stories that connect.
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.
Your One Wild and Precious Life: Nature Writing and the Modern Adventurer
Nature Writing and the Modern Adventurer
In this generative writing workshop, ecologist and poet Anne Marie Wells will introduce participants to some of today's eco-poets and essayists and guide participants through a series of writing prompts that will use the outdoors and personal experience as inspiration for creative expression. No writing experience is necessary to participate.
Micro Memoirs
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.
Radical Nature Writing
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.
Crafting Your Story's Atmosphere
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.
Your Story Matters
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.
Making a Lot with a Little: Flash Fiction
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.
Revision Made Easy: A Three-Step Process to Up-level Your Writing
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.
Writing the Lyric Essay: A Form for the Age of Uncertainty
For the Age Of Uncertainty
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.
Craft Chat with Anna North (Babes Only)
Craft Chat with Anna North
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.
Substance Over Substack: Building an Email Newsletter That Serves You and Readers
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.
Submission Season: Finish & Submit with Confidence
You’ve written the piece—now what?
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.
Build a Morning Writing Practice (for Life)
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.
Writing Sex
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.
Craft Chat with Anna Bliss (Babes Only)
Craft Chat with Anna Bliss
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.
Ask an Agent with Annie Hwang (Babes Only)
Got Agent Questions? We’ve Got an Agent Who Just Might Have the Answers
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.
Healing a Heart: Writing as an Act of Self-Care
Open Your Heart
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.
Writing as Resistance: Using Art to Create a Better World
How can art serve as resistance to tyranny?
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.
Digging Deeper: Putting the Personal in the Personal Essay
Let’s Go Deeper
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.
Craft Chat with Julie Buntin (Babes Only Event)
Craft Chat with Julie Buntin
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.
Memoirs in Fragments
Memoirs in Fragments
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 and the Art of Truth-Telling
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.
Small Press Publishing with a Debut
Looking for a publisher to call home for your manuscript? So many roads are overwhelming. I can help narrow the view along the journey.
Cultivating Your Creativity Anytime, Anywhere (Even When You Don’t Feel Like It!)
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.
Short Story Summer
LET’S 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.
Submit It! A Guide to (Cataloguing) Literary Submissions
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.
Shivering and Lonely: Rescuing Your Abandoned Drafts
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: Writing Lively Scenes in Your Fiction and Nonfiction Writing
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.
Babes Who Write Open Mic
Our Fall open mic is here!
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!
Create a Book Marketing Plan: How to Authentically Promote Your Book and Engage Your Community
Make a Plan!
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.
Write Your Way Forward
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.
Creativity Oasis: An Evening of Generative Writing (Babes only)
Let the ideas flow.
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.