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• Christina Clancy - Radical Revision

  • When
    April 25, 2024
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  Sometimes writers tell stories in the same way, in the same style, and with the same voice. Often, we’re so comfortable with our storytelling voice that we can lose sight of what our story is really about. How can we break loose and revise in order to get at something new and important, or discover new ways of telling? This intensive workshop will provide you with exercises intended to move you out of your comfort zone, shake your story loose, and help you rethink how you can tell it.

  Christina Clancy is the author of Shoulder Season and The Second Home (St. Martin's Press). Her work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and in various literary journals. She has a PhD in creative writing from UW-Milwaukee and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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• Mary Anne Mohanraj - The Writer’s Life: Structures that Support Your Writing and Publication

  • When
    May 02, 2024
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  The key to publication is often simple persistence, but the hectic pace of modern life often makes it challenging to write and submit on a regular basis. In this workshop, we'll discuss some of the barriers authors face and look at structures that can be put in place to better support a writing practice that will helps you not just survive, but thrive and publish. 

  Mary Anne Mohanraj is author of A Feast of Serendib, Bodies in Motion, The Stars Change, and thirteen other titles, including her forthcoming cancer memoir, Tornado. Other recent publications include stories for George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series, Perennial: A Garden Romance (Tincture), stories at Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, and an essay in Roxane Gay’s Unruly Bodies. Mohanraj founded Hugo-nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning speculative literature magazine Strange Horizons, and serves as Executive Director of both DesiLit  and the Speculative Literature Foundation. She is Clinical Associate Professor of fiction and literature at the University of Illinois Chicago. Visit her at maryannemohanraj.com 

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• Charles Baxter: Dramatic Interventions: The Request Moment

  • When
    May 09, 2024
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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  Some years ago Charles wrote an essay about "the request moment" as a catalyst for stories. In that essay he argued that stories often begin when one character asks another to perform a particular action as a proof (of friendship, love, or personal identity) and to do it within a limited amount of time (i.e., please do it soon). In this talk, Charles would like to reconsider the request moment by paying particular attention to the ways that request moments can edge toward psychological violence and emotional blackmail. He also is interested in the characterizations of the person who asks (or demands), and, given those ingredients, what sorts of stories may result. In all cases, the request moment tends to increase the dramatic tension of the story by putting demands on the protagonist.

  Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Story Anthology. His craft books, The Art of Subtext, Burning Down the House, and Wonderlands, have provided insight and inspiration to writers everywhere. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Baxter lives in Minneapolis.

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• Michael Zapata - Choosing Your Realities: Narrative Distance and POV

  • When
    May 16, 2024
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  When we write fiction, we create realities. As such, the realities we experience on the page often have a great deal to do with point of view and its vast possibilities. How does a narrative mind work? In any given sentence, where is the language coming from? What IS omniscience, anyway? In this workshop, Michael Zapata (author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau and founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine) will guide writers through inquiries into narrative distance and POV, and discuss craft techniques and artful strategies found in cinematography, stream of consciousness, omniscience, and multiplicity, among others, to create works of fiction that both create and bend reality. The workshop will also include a writing exercise and a Q&A. 

  Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, winner of the 2020 Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, finalist for the 2020 Heartland Booksellers Award in Fiction, and a Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, and BookPage, among others.  He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the MFA faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing drop-out students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

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• Dr. Alexis Pride - Writing the “Unlikeable” Character in Fiction

  • When
    May 23, 2024
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  Creating an unlikeable character is often a necessary “evil” in fiction writing. After all, bad behavior by some can serve as the needed foil to the likeable characters in your story. But how do we avoid crafting the one-dimensional villain (assuming this isn’t your objective)? And what are the keys to writing an unlikeable protagonist—in realistic fiction—that won’t turn off readers? These points and others will be examined with the use of literary examples and exploring writing process techniques that help to avoid the pitfalls of the cliché.

  Dr. Alexis Pride is the Interim Director of Graduate Programs at Columbia College Chicago and a professor of creative writing in the English and Creative Writing department. Pride also works as a contracted writer for Level 4 Press, Inc., where she co-authors novels that are optimized for film/television adaptation. Among her works are All I Want for Christmas (published in August 2022, Level 4 Press), which hit #1 for new releases on Amazon during its first week, and Satchel Paige, a forthcoming novel. Her other publications include Where the River Ends (Tanksley-Simpson Publishing), and short stories in TriQuarterly, F Magazine, and elsewhere. Pride also served as the Fiction Editor for the inaugural issue of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose, the multi-genre literary magazine published by Columbia College Chicago.

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• Abby Geni - Writing the Short Story Collection

  • When
    May 30, 2024
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  What makes a strong, cohesive short story collection? Many writers feel confident in their individual stories but question how to bring them together into something greater. How do you find a central theme to build the collection around? Which should come first: the finished stories or the idea that unites them? How can you be sure that your stories are interacting with one another in compelling and resonant ways? Are your stories too different from one another—or not different enough? Award-winning author Abby Geni will share her insights about the daunting task of creating a collection that is more than the sum of its parts. We will discuss the process of writing stories that balance and complement one another. We will talk about how to order your stories, how to make sure they build on one another, how to determine which are the strongest and weakest, how to revise each piece with the larger whole in mind, and how to know when your collection is complete.

  ORDER THE BOOK!   Abby's new release, The Body Farm: Stories launches May 7. Order your copy from The Book Stall and pick it up at the workshop to have it inscribed by the author.

  Abby Geni is the author of The Wildlands, The Lightkeepers, The Last Animal, and a forthcoming short story collection, The Body Farm. Her books have been translated into seven languages and have won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Chicago Review of Books Awards, among other honors. Her short stories have won first place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and the Chautauqua Contest and have been published or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Missouri Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, and New Stories from the Midwest. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and frequently serves as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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