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• Heather Sellers - Micro Memoir: True Stories in Tight Packages

  • When
    May 08, 2025
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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  A micro memoir is a true story that fits in a small space (a page or two). They are delicious to read, but devilishly difficult to write. Every word matters, as in a poem, and your story-telling skills must be on point—there’s nowhere to hide. In this content-rich class, we’ll examine the special techniques required by this form. We’ll share publishing tips. And, I’ll offer an in-class exercise to jump-start your new micro practice.

  Heather Sellers is the author of a new textbook, How to Make Poems. Field Notes from the Flood Zone and The Present State of the Garden are her two most recent collections of poetry. Her textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing, is in its fourth edition, following two books on craft, Page After Page and Chapter After Chapter. Her collection of linked short stories is Georgia Under Water, and a memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, was featured in O, the Oprah Magazine and is an O  Book-of-the Month club pick and Editor’s Choice at the New York Times. Recent essays appear in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, The Sun, and O, the Oprah Magazine. Her essay “Haywire” was selected for the Best American Essays by Leslie Jamison, and “Pedal, Pedal, Pedal” won a Pushcart Prize. She regularly speaks to audiences about prosopagnosia (face blindness), most recently at NASA. Sellers directs the writing program at the University of South Florida.  

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• Megan Stielstra - Let People Carry It: Publishing as Practice

  • When
    May 15, 2025
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  “Once the work is done, it’s not yours anymore,” wrote Frank Chimero. “If the thing you make goes anywhere, it’s because other people carried it.” 

  The choice of if, when, and how to share our work with others is a deeply personal decision, both terrifying and exhilarating. How do you make that choice? And once it’s made, what do you… do?

  This session reframes publication as a vital and informative part of the writing practice, as opposed to rejection/acceptance roulette. How can our unique publication goals influence the rewriting process? How does the consideration of a wider audience take our work to the next level and when should we leave those (scary and often very loud) outside voices at the door? And how can we demystify the nuts-and-bolts of submitting—finding the right literary journals, writing a solid cover letter, connecting with editors—and get back to what we’re all here to do: carry each other’s stories.

  Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections: Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life. Her work appears in Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Tin House, and on National Public Radio. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is an editor-at-large at Northwestern University Press.

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• Abby Geni - Writing a Novel-in-Stories

  • When
    May 22, 2025
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  You may be writing a novel and / or writing short stories. A third option of story is gaining popularity: the Novel in Stories. 

  We will look at literary examples to explore ways to deepen the interconnectedness of your novel-in-stories by focusing on recurring characters, themes, and timelines.

  Abby Geni is the author of The Wildlands, The Lightkeepers, The Last Animal, and a 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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• Magazine and Journal Editor Panel: Christine Maul Rice, Kira Tucker, John McCarthy, Laura Joyce Hubbard

  • When
    May 29, 2025
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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  PANELISTS:
  Christine Maul Rice 

  

  Christine’s novel, Swarm Theory, was called "a gripping work of Midwest Gothic" by NPR and won numerous awards. Christine was included in New City's Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago's Guild Complex. Most recently, her short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in Allium, Make Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Millions, Roanoke Review, The Literary Review, among others. Christine is the founder and editor of Hypertext Magazine and is an Assistant Professor of English at Valparaiso University. Her novel, based on the Flint water crisis, will be published in 2026.

  Kira Tucker  is a poet and artist from Memphis. The 2024-2025 Artist in Residence in Creative Writing at Northwestern, Kira is an Associate Agent with the Shipman Agency and the current Assistant Managing Editor for TriQuarterly. Their poems appear in The Iowa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Jazz & Culture, and elsewhere. Kira is also at work on a hopeful debut collection—a poetic investigation spanning the mythos of the American Dream and the landscapes of our collective unconscious.

  John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize; and Ghost County (Midwestern Gothic Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Best New Poets, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Pleiades, and Quarterly West, among others. John is the Managing Editor of RHINO.

  Laura Joyce Hubbard's nonfiction and poetry appear in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere. Laura’s poetry manuscript was a recent semifinalist in Copper Nickel and Milkweed Edition’s Jake Adam York Prize. Writing awards include winner of The Iowa Review’s Veteran Writing Award, winner of the 2023 Porch Prize in Poetry, winner of the 2021 Nonfiction Contest at Southeast Review, and winner of the Individual Poem Prize (2021) and Essay Prize (2020) in the William Faulkner Pirate’s Alley Writing Competition. Her nonfiction was selected as a “Notable” in the Best American Essays 2022 and 2023 and won an AWP Intro Journal Award (2023). Laura’s work has been supported by the Ragdale Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the National Endowment for the Arts with a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is a veteran US Air Force pilot, a fiction editor for TriQuarterly, an MFA candidate at Northwestern University, and currently the inaugural Highland Park Poet Laureate.

  
  

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• Michael Zapata - Make a Mess

  • When
    June 05, 2025
  •  
    9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

  Register

  Rescheduled!

  In a society so fully bent toward production at all costs, we should remember, as art critic David Sylvester once said, “Artists must be allowed to get into a mess.” As we consider how we might listen, slow down, and make a mess in support of our own work, we’ll take our inspiration from writers like Jon Fosse and Gayle Jones, who write as if it were an act of listening, and the painter Mark Bradford who said, “I pillage my own work. I tear it down and build it up in traces.” Guided analytical and inquiry-based discussions and writing activities will encourage writers to build a sustainable writing practice that embraces both their own artistic impulses and the material worlds in which they live. 

  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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