Off Campus Writers' Workshop

Peter Orner - Creating Living, Breathing Characters

When
October 10, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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Blood in Their Veins: On Creating Living, Breathing Characters

UPDATED DESCRIPTION!

The most difficult challenge of fiction writing is how to make our characters live on the flat page. We're not filmmakers or photographers, we can't rely on images. All we've got are the sentences. Through examples (James Joyce, Jean Rhys, John Edgar Wideman, Annie Ernaux, Edna O'Brien, Juan Rulfo, and others) and close examination, we'll discuss in depth characters who, by some sort of craft combined with alchemy, seem as though they are living and breathing. We'll also work through writing exercises designed to isolate certain aspects of character creation. Like I say, this is, for me, the holy grail of fiction, and though we won't come up with definitive answers since there are, probably, as many ways to create a character as there are characters themselves. But we will, I hope, come away with some inspiration (and focus) to take back to our lonely desks or kitchen tables or wherever we try to do the work..

Chicago-born Peter Orner is the author of most recently Still No Word From You: Notes in the Margin, a finalist for the Pen/ Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the art of the essay, as well as two novels: The Second Coming Of Mavala Shikongo and Love And Shame And Love, and three story collections, Esther Stories, Last Car Over The Sagamore Bridge and Maggie Brown & Others. Peter’s memoir/ essay collection, Am I Alone Here?: Notes On Reading To Live And Living To Read was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A new novel, The Gossip Columnist's Daughter, will be published by Little, Brown in 2025. Peter's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and received four Pushcart Prizes. Peter has been awarded the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a Fulbright to Namibia. Currently, Peter is chair of the English and Creative Writing Department at Dartmouth College. He lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.

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Rebecca Makkai - Why Are You Making This So Damn Hard? On Complexity and Simplicity

When
October 17, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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How do you know if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew? How do you know if you haven’t bitten off enough? Is it a bad idea for your novel to include 15 points of view, a reverse chronology, talking ghosts, AND a 50-page history of Siberia? Or is confining yourself to one simple plot and one simple timeline somehow unambitious or limiting? We’ll talk about choosing your elements and complications, finding room for simplicity, recognizing when addition becomes procrastination, and remembering that you can always change your mind.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of this year's New York Times bestselling I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU as well as four other works of fiction. Her last novel, THE GREAT BELIEVERS, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca teaches graduate fiction writing at Middlebury College, Northwestern University, and UNR Tahoe, and serves as Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

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Mary Ruth Clarke - Drama: A Collaborative Artform

When
October 24, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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In all its iterations — plays, screenplays, comedy, tragedy, whatever the heck The Bear is — drama is created with the intention of collaboration. Yes, the playwright or screenwriter is the original creator of the story, but they are creating what is essentially a blueprint for other artists to bring their skill set to spring this story alive on the stage or screen.

The writer benefits just from hearing the dialog come to life — does it sound natural, is it too repetitive, are the jokes landing, do the words flow trippingly on the tongue? But the added benefit is getting invaluable feedback from the actors and listeners — fellow writers in a supportive writer’s group, an audience gathered for a staged reading.

Participants are invited to submit a 3-5 page scene to the instructor, who will select several submissions to be read by professional actors at the workshop. Comedy, tragedy, and everything in between is acceptable. This workshop will benefit writers in any genre. Attendees will learn and discuss the benefits of the collaborative process of hearing your work read aloud and how to manage feedback.

Submission criteria: Plays, Screenplays, Teleplays. 2-3 characters would be wonderful (but no worries if there are more). Maximum 5 pages. If this is part of a larger work, participants should also send brief bullet points that will get us up to speed on what we need to know. Please see the manuscript/contest page on our website for more information: https://ocww.info/page-18211

Formatting Criteria:

Click here for formatting criteria for the Dramatists Guild.

Click here for formatting guidelines for screenplays or teleplays

Mary Ruth Clarke is a screenwriter and playwright, best known for Meet the Parents film franchise, starring Robert De Niro. She is on the faculty of the Second City Film School and heads up the screenwriting/television program at Chicago Dramatists and Story Studio. She is a screenplay consultant for clients in LA and Chicago.

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Christina Clancy - Mistakes

When
October 31, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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Kurt Vonnegut once said that "strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God." As we navigate our writing projects, it's normal to hit potholes and find ourselves facing detours and misdirections that can lead us into frustrating creative cul-de-sacs. We tend to think of these changes in directions as mistakes, but what if, instead, we see them as dancing lessons? In this session, we'll discuss some of the ways our writing can go wrong between inspiration and completion, develop strategies for knowing when to change course, and recognize the kinds of mistakes you want to avoid. We'll also look at the mistakes characters make and how they inform who they are and the struggles they face and (sometimes) overcome.

Christina Clancy is the author of The Second Home, Shoulder Season, and The Snowbirds (out Feb. 4, 2025). Her stories and essays have appeared in The Sun Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Lit Hub, The Minnesota Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. She has a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She lives in Madison.

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Diana Goetsch - Working Against Your Drift

When
November 07, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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Let’s say you’re looking forward to a visit from your dear old Aunt Ida, but when she comes you’re disappointed by how tiresome and dull she is. Actually you’re disappointed in yourself: Aunt Ida has always been dull—what did you expect? Likewise, as writers, if we expect to succeed by coming down the page the same way every time, no matter the subject, falling back on habitual patterns, we’re inviting Aunt Ida (bless her heart) for another visit. Even worse, we’re becoming her.

As a teacher, I introduce writers to a multiplicity of practices for making discoveries on the page. But if I could only teach one, it would be “working against your drift.” Working against your drift is a dynamic practice that trains you to never be complacent, never settle for even a smart idea or clever move, never “get high off your own supply.” When we work against our drift we adjust ourselves into greater precision and possibility, inviting the world’s subtlety and surprise onto the page.

This session is perfect for all genres, and will include models, discussion, Q&A, and exercises.

Diana Goetsch is a poet and essayist, author of eight poetry collections, much freelance journalism, and the acclaimed memoir This Body I Wore. Reviewers have called her writing “enthralling,” “exquisite,” “hilarious,” “harrowing,” and “achingly beautiful.” Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Diana is a renowned teacher of writing, who has been on faculty at various colleges and conferences, and is sought after as a mentor. Her online course Actually Writing was attended by poets and writers from five continents and is now available on Vimeo.

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Catherine Barnett - Syntax and Improvisation

When
November 14, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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In this fast-paced hands-on craft talk, we'll read and write together as we demystify the often under-recognized pleasures of syntax: the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences. Please bring pen and paper!

Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, just published by Graywolf Press, and Human Hours (Believer Book Award, NYT "Best Poetry of 2018" selection). A Guggenheim fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU's MFA Program and works as an independent editor.

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Michael Zapata - Make a Mess

When
November 21, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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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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Rachel Swearingen - Managing Groups of Characters in a Single Scene or Story

When
December 05, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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Parties, meetings, funerals, and weddings. Well populated scenes are some of the most rewarding, and notoriously difficult, to write. Not only can social gatherings allow us to depict wider cultures and histories without resorting to pages of passive summary, they can also energize plots and add intrigue. But how many characters are too many, and how does one introduce groups of disparate characters without overwhelming or confusing the reader?

In this workshop, we will examine a few rich examples from literature and discuss ways to handle the potential chaos. If there is time, we will apply these strategies to the opening of a scene of our own.

Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize, and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review “New and Noteworthy Selection.”

Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing has won the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, the Guild Literary Complex named her one of 30 Writers to Watch. She lives in Chicago and teaches in Cornell College’s low-residency MFA program.

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Steve Almond - All the Secrets of Plot

When
December 12, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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It took Steve Almond 30 years, and five failed efforts, to write his first published novel, All the Secrets of the World, which is now in development for TV by 20th Century Fox. In this lecture, Steve will use his experience writing the book to cover all the major plot issues that arise when we’re working on a novel (or memoir). Including: How to create rising action, how to manage chronology, how to craft riveting scenes, how to make plausibility work for you,

Steve Almond is the author of a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His new novel, All the Secrets of the World, has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox. He’s the recipient of an NEA grant for 2022 and teaches at Harvard and Wesleyan. His stories and essays have been published in venues ranging from the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Mysteries to the New York Times Magazine. He lives outside Boston with his wife, his three children, and his anxiety.

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Seema Reza - The Ritual of Discovery in Non-Fiction

When
December 19, 2024
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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A generative workshop for emerging and established CNF and poetry writers looking for strategies to access new perspectives and truths in their writing. Finding 'what you don’t know you know.' Using poetry, hybrid forms, and drilling into detail, we’ll find new angles on old stories. Writers can come prepared with a topic they’d like to get fresh perspective on or with nothing but an open mind. You’ll leave with some tools you can use again and again.

Seema Reza is a writer and performer and the author of two books: When the World Breaks Open and A Constellation of Half-Lives.
Her writing has been widely anthologized and has appeared in the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The LA Review, and LitHub among others.

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Nadine Kenney Johnstone - Nonlinear: A Straightforward Approach to Complex Structures

When
January 09, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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Our brains don't recall stories in a linear fashion. Why should our prose? In this generative workshop, we'll study models from beloved writers like Abigail Thomas and Maggie Smith, who've used nonlinear structures in their books. You'll learn what makes readers engaged rather than confused and how to navigate nonlinear timelines in order to produce compelling narratives.

Nadine Kenney Johnstone is a holistic writing coach who helps women develop and publish their stories. She has helped the writers in her community develop and publish countless books and hundreds of essays in places like The New York Times, Vogue, The Sun, The Boston Globe, Longreads, and more. Her infertility memoir, Of This Much I'm Sure, was named book of the year by the Chicago Writer's Association. Her latest book, Come Home to Your Heart, is an essay collection and guided journal that helps readers tap into their inner wisdom and fall back in love with themselves. Her articles and interviews have appeared in Cosmo, Authority, Good Grit, OnSite Journal, MindBodyGreen, HERE, Urban Wellness, Natural Awakenings, Chicago Magazine, and more. Nadine is the podcast host of Heart of the Story, where she shares stories from the heart as well as interviews with today’s top women writers. Pulling from her vast experience as a writing, meditation, and yoga nidra instructor, Nadine leads women’s workshops and retreats online and around the U.S.

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Joseph Scapellato - Language Workout

When
January 16, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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Have your sentences been feeling a little flimsy? Have your paragraphs been lagging and slogging, slogging and lagging? If so, you might be due for a language workout. This class will take you through a rigorous but playful back-to-the-basics study of language use in prose through discussion, examples of published prose, and a set of interactive exercises. The end goal is practicality—for you to leave the session with ideas, approaches, or passages that you can immediately apply to your current projects.

Joseph Scapellato is the author of the novel, The Made-Up Man, and the story collection, Big Lonesome. He was born in the western suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. His fiction and nonfiction appear in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, North American Review, Kenyon Review Online, No Tokens, and other places. Joseph teaches in the creative writing program at Bucknell University and lives in Lewisburg, PA, with his wife, daughter, and dog.

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Jeannie Vanasco - Finding Form(s)

When
January 23, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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In this generative session we'll experiment with some of the many forms your memoir may include: letters, notes, fragments, transcripts, and all of the above. We’ll follow prompts inspired by the nonfiction of Christina Sharpe, Jazmina Barrera, Kiese Laymon, E. J. Koh, Eleni Sikelianos, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, among others. This session prioritizes memoir, but the prompts can apply to any genre.

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Her third book, A Silent Treatment, is forthcoming from Tin House. She lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.

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Michelle Hoover - Saving the Saggy Middle

When
January 30, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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It’s not just about stomach crunches any more. Problems with the middle of your novel or memoir often have to do with problems in the early pages of your book: starting in the wrong place, lack of character development and specificity, stakes, motivation, fear of conflict, not thinking enough about cause and effect, and avoiding necessary scenes. We’ll talk about Philip Gerard’s idea of a story’s “signature,” George Saunders on escalation, the all-important “crucible,” the false victory or defeat, and what a midpoint really needs. At the end of the class, you’ll have more ideas for how to make your middle work and the tools you need to help you avoid that saggy middle in the future.

Michelle Hoover has taught writing for more than 25 years and currently leads the GrubStreet Novel Incubator program, which she co-founded in 2011. Her students have signed 50+ book contracts. She is a 2014 NEA Fellow and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, a fellow at MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee Writers Conferences, and a winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award. Her debut, The Quickening, was a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read," a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and one of Susan Straight's 1001 "Library of America" Novels featured in the L.A. Times. Her second novel, Bottomland, was the 2017 All Iowa Reads selection and a 2016 Mass Book "Must Read." She is the creator of The 7am Novelist, the popular podcast and webinar series for writers. She is a native of Iowa and lives in Cyprus and Boston.

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Sarah Stone - Reliable/Unreliable Narrators (and Characters)

When
February 06, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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The term “unreliable narrator” suggests that unreliability is a special category and that most narrators (and people) are clear-sighted, rational, and honest. Even a fairly casual consideration of an ordinary day, let alone a crisis, suggests otherwise; there’s substantial narrative interest in the everyday chaos of the “normal” human mind. This class will give us a chance to consider the craft strategies writers use to convey characters’ perceptions, misperceptions, rationalizations, and levels of awareness. How do we signal whether (and to what extent) the reader is to accept a narrator’s or character’s view of reality? How can we create narrative tension by depicting what one character sees that another doesn’t? How do we allow readers to understand what the characters haven’t yet discovered? We will read and write together, and our handout will include excerpts from Salman Rushdie and Grace Paley stories.

Sarah Stone is the author of Hungry Ghost Theater, a finalist for the 38th annual Northern California Book Awards, and The True Sources of the Nile, and co-author, with Ron Nyren, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. She has taught for UC Berkeley, the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and Stanford Continuing Studies and has written for Korean public television, reported on human rights in Burundi, and looked after orphan chimpanzees at the Jane Goodall Institute. Her work has appeared in Image, Ploughshares, The Millions, Scoundrel Time, The Believer, 100 Word Story, CRAFT, Alta Journal online for the California Book Club, and elsewhere. Her new novel, Marriage to the Sea, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2026.

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Adam Vines - Unorthodox Approaches to Ekphrasis

When
February 13, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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Art is everywhere: in the bark patterns of sycamore and poplar trees, in peeling hydrangea limbs, in striations of sandstone, but also in the deckled pages and worn spine of a book, in the rusty-hairball carpet stain, and the overlapping residue that has built up in the bathtub from different bars of soap. We will close-read images and write drafts inspired by subjects that do not fall within the confines of traditional genres of visual art, stretching the boundaries of influences and approaches commonly employed in ekphrasis. We can also look to images that are overtly commodified —for instance, billboards, signage, cover art on food boxes, candy wrappers; national or state symbols like an old driver’s license, a state seal, a state flag. We can look at stamps, patches, a cast with scribbles on it, street art, biker-gang leathers, tattoos, a body scar, a stain on a Celotex ceiling tile, a flaw in a pattern on a salad plate, a still shot from a movie, a graphic novel or comic pane. Using prompts and other influences we'll compose will allow you to write from a true state of the uncomfortable unknown, which is the best place to be when starting a poem draft.

Adam Vines is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of five collections—the latest, Lures (LSU Press, 2022), and his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Poetry, among others. He is the Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review , which received AWP’s 2020 Small Press Publisher Award.

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Dean Bakopoulos - Revising Your Scenes: Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

When
February 20, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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Often we think of revision as a major rewrite, a complete starting over, a burning down of the proverbial house. In this session, we will examine how much of our revision can be accomplished by slowing down, taking leaps, and lingering on the transformative moments in our fiction. (Bring a stalled story or novel along with you, a printout if possible, so you can see where you've gone astray.)

Dean Bakopoulos is an author from Detroit, Michigan. He is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. Dean’s third novel, Summerlong, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in June 2015. He is currently at work on a nonfiction book called Undoing, as well as a screenplay and a television pilot. Dean’s first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon was a New York Times Notable Book; his screenplay adaptation of the novel is being developed for the screen by James Franco’s Rabbit Bandini productions; His second novel, My American Unhappiness, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was named one of the year’s best novels by the Chicago Tribune. He received his BA from the University of Michigan and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to teaching fiction and creative nonfiction workshops at Grinnell, Dean has taught creative writing at UW-Madison, Iowa State University, University of Iowa, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. The winner of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Dean also reviews books for The New York Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Mary Kay Zuravleff - Building Literary Characters

When
February 27, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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In this hands-on workshop we'll learn techniques for creating vivid and complex characters. We will complete exercises to strengthen your characters' first impressions and practice revealing character through action. We'll also examine character traits that help generate plot and resonate throughout your story or book.

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, chosen for Oprah's Spring Reading List and inspired by the fact that in 1908, her American-born grandmother lost her American citizenship for marrying her Russian-born grandfather. Her novel Man Alive! was a Washington Post Notable Book. She has taught at Johns Hopkins, George Mason, and American University graduate programs; workshops such as Chautauqua, Key West, and Interlochen. She lives in Washington, DC.

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Sarah Stern - The Prose Poem: A Perfect Contradiction

When
March 06, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE - ZOOM ONLY

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Prose poems lack the usual features of a poem—line breaks and stanzas—but still read as poetry. Or do they? In this workshop, we will discuss how a prose poem manages to be a poem. We will read and discuss a variety of examples and look at the history of the form as well. You will have the opportunity to write your own prose poem and share it. Beginning, emerging and seasoned poets and prose writers are welcome to this interactive workshop.

Sarah Stern is the author of three poetry books—We Have Been Lucky in the Midst of Misfortune (Kelsay Books, Aldrich Press, 2018), But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2014), and Another Word For Love (Finishing Line Press, 2011). She is a five-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts BRIO Poetry Award, a recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations, and several Poets & Writers Readings & Workshops Grants. Stern is an educator at Poets House and on the faculty of the New York Writers Workshop. She has taught poetry workshops at Poets House, the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, the New York Public Library, CSAIR Adult Learning Institute, Hostos Community College, the Bronx Zoo, Edgar Allan Poe Visitor Center, and privately. Stern is the founder of SDGS Solutions, a communications and marketing consultancy. She has worked at universities, cultural centers, and think tanks. She graduated from Barnard College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

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Juan Martinez - Fast Talk: Four Easy Ways to Make Dialogue Pop

When
March 13, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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If you have sometimes struggled with writing dialogue, you're not alone. Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez both famously railed against it, and they found ways to avoid writing talk-heavy scenes. That's a perfectly legitimate work-around. However, in this talk we'll discuss four easy ways to make dialogue work — to move scenes forward and to reveal complicated character dynamics, all while keeping your reader interested in what happens next.

Juan Martinez is the author of the novel Extended Stay (2023) and the story collection Best Worst American (2017). He lives near Chicago and is an associate professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Huizache, Ecotone, The Sunday Morning Transport, NIGHTMARE, NPR's Selected Shorts, Mississippi Review and elsewhere.

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Audrey Niffenegger - Writing a Sequel

When
March 20, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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Readers clamor for a sequel after finishing a book they love. The opportunity is great, but so is the pressure. Audrey Niffeneger will share advice on honoring your original book and avoiding the pitfalls in order to keep the sequel fresh and alive.

Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist who lives in Chicago and London. Her novels The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry were international bestsellers. She has also published graphic novels, including The Night Bookmobile and Raven Girl. The Time Traveler’s Wife is being adapted into an HBO TV series, and Ms. Niffenegger is working on a sequel, The Other Husband. She recently founded a new literary and book arts center, Artists Book House, in Chicago.

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Lori Rader-Day - Popular Fiction: Character and Story

When
March 27, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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In popular fiction, character is just as important as in literary fiction—but one story may not be enough. In this session, we will discuss the unique demands of popular fiction and introduce the array of characters who populate stories that rely on discovery or suspense—some of them very shady, indeed. Who should lead the story? What do heroes and villains have in common? Who are the people required to build out your protagonist’s world and make readers believe— and worry?

Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, and others. Lori lives in Chicago, where she co-chairs the crime fiction readers’ event Midwest Mystery Conference and teaches creative writing at Northwestern University. Her next novel, Wreck Your Heart, featuring a wannabe country singer, will be released from Minotaur/SMPG in winter 2026. Visit her at www.LoriRaderDay.com.

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Taylor Byas - The Architecture of the Sestina

When
April 03, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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In this session, we'll talk about the challenges of the sestina form and how we might overcome them by thinking like architects/builders. When the sestina becomes a multi-roomed space, when we break the long and intimidating form into manageable parts, we enable ourselves to focus on each smaller part of the whole with a heightened attention to narrative, movement, and surprise. This is meant to be a generative workshop, in which students will leave the course with the beginnings of a sestina written.

Taylor Byas, Ph.D. (she/her) is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, a Poetry Acquisitions Editor for Variant Literature, an Editorial Board Member for Beloit Poetry Journal, and an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press. She is the author of two chapbooks, her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, from Soft Skull Press, which won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award and the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and Resting Bitch Face, forthcoming in Fall of 2025. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama from Texas Review Press, and of Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology on Black folklore from HarperCollins.

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Kathleen Rooney - Now I Know My ABCs: Using the Abecedarian Form to Transform a Project

When
April 10, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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From the moment we learn to read and write, we know that the alphabet is fundamental. Then these standard characters representing particular sounds in spoken language tend to disappear into the background as we go on to deal with bigger writerly concerns. But the alphabet is also fun and can be an illuminating and playful way to organize any literary project be it short or long. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how the abecedarian format can be applied across all genres to bring new ideas, themes, characters, and settings to light. By looking at—and experimenting with—the application of the alphabet in poems, memoirs, essays, and even fiction, we’ll discover how sometimes using a strict and familiar constraint can create freedom and take your work in a direction you wouldn't expect.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, and her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press. Her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, came out in September 2023, and her first children's book, Leaf Town Forever, co-written with her sister Beth Rooney, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.

Kathleen will judge a Three Paragraph Writing Contest. Please see the Manuscript and Contest Page on our website.

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Frances de Pontes Peebles - The Shape of a Story: What is Plot and How do We Write It?

When
April 17, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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In this lecture we will explore plot. Is it simply the unfolding of events? Is it driven by character or by the author? We will analyze different forms of plot, how plots vary among cultures, and how we can harness these variations and differences to create a plot that is organic to our own story.

Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of the award-winning novels The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe. She is a 2020 Creative Writing Fellow in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts. A native of Pernambuco, Brazil, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Missouri Review, Indiana Review, and Guernica. She teaches at StoryStudio and serves as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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Goldie Goldbloom - Going Deep: How to Achieve Interiority

When
April 24, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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The most beloved characters of our time all have one trait in common: they let the reader experience their interior worlds, with all of the darkness, the strangeness, the confusion and the shame. It's not that the writers linger in these places (it would be breathtakingly challenging to read too much of it!) but these moments allow us to identify with the character and to be drawn ever deeper into the work.

Many writers use special techniques to indicate that such moments are approaching. We will be examining a variety of these methods and testing out which are most effective. Stand aside, John Gardner. We all need more information than was provided in your essay on psychic distance!

Goldie Goldbloom is a writer, teacher and editor, author of four internationally award-winning books of fiction, most recently On Division (winner of the Prix des Libraires in France), and many articles, short stories and essays that have appeared around the world. For over fifteen years, she was on the faculty at Northwestern University and/ or the University of Chicago. She currently runs a developmental editing service for best-selling authors, celebrities and talented writers from all walks of life. She is the mother of eight children and an LGBTQ activist.

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Steve Trumpeter - The Best American Short Stories: Learning from the BASS Anthology Winners

When
May 01, 2025
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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Every year, the venerable Best American Short Stories series picks their top 20 pieces of short fiction that appeared in publications ranging from the smallest MFA-program lit mags to the white whale that is The New Yorker. In this session, writer Steve Trumpeter will discuss a few examples from recent editions and identify what makes those stories “the best” (for better or worse). In so doing, we’ll discover some strategies for making our own work unique and resonant and talk about what can help our stories stand out in the slush pile.

Steve Trumpeter is a writer, artist, and musician from Chicago. His recent fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Salamander, American Fiction, Chicago Quarterly Review and others. He was a finalist for the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award and took 2nd place in Zoetrope: All-Story’s 2019 fiction contest. He teaches creative writing classes at StoryStudio Chicago. Discover his stories, paintings, music, and more here.

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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 Maui 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 Maui 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.

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