Off Campus Writers' Workshop

Editor Panel - Which literary magazines and journals are looking for your work?

When
February 09, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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Finding the right home for your work requires understanding the literary landscape—how little magazines work, how to find them, how to interpret submissions guidelines, what to look for when deciding to enter contests, how and when to pitch your work, and more. A talented panel of editors will share their insights and advice to writers of all genres seeking publication in a journal. You’ll learn concrete tips for approaching the submissions process; you’ll also get a behind-the-scenes look at a variety of different magazines/journals and learn about what you can expect once your work is accepted. There will be plenty of time for Q&A.

Joshua Bohnsack is the managing editor of TriQuarterly, faculty advisor for Oyez Review, and publisher of Long Day Press, a short-form publishing house. He is the author of the novella, Two Hands (Fruit Bat Press) and his work has been published in The Rumpus, AGNI, Salt Hill, and more. He grew up on a farm and moved to Chicago.

Su Cho is the author of the poetry collection The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin, 2022) which was a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in places like The Best American Poetry 2021, Best New Poets 2021, and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. Her editorial work includes serving as Guest Editor for Poetry magazine and serving as editor-in-chief of Cream City Review and Indiana Review. She is an assistant professor of English teaching creative writing and poetry. You can learn more at www.suchowrites.com.

Hattie Fletcher has been the managing editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine since 2005 and the editor of True Story since 2016. Essays she has edited have been reprinted in The Best American Essays, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing and have been awarded the Pushcart Prize. She was a coordinating editor for the Best Creative Nonfiction series, published by W.W. Norton, and is co-editor, with Lee Gutkind, of True Stories, Well Told . . . from the first 20 years of Creative Nonfiction magazine (In Fact Books, 2014).

Aram Mrjoian is an editor-at-large at the Chicago Review of Books, an associate fiction editor at Guernica, and a 2022 Creative Armenia - AGBU Fellow. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, Catapult, Electric Literature, West Branch, Longreads, and many other publications. Find his work at arammrjoian.com

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Karen Bender - How to Open a Story? Exploring Strategies

When
February 16, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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In this generative talk, we'll study openings to stories by several authors. We’ll work to identify different types of openings in an effort to understand how writers create urgency that carries the reader through a narrative. We’ll practice these different types of openings in class, so that you leave the course with a few different ways to begin your story, novel, or essay. This session’s strategies will be helpful to writers of all forms. Come ready to read some great openings and create your own.

Karen E. Bender is the author of two collections: Refund, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Story Prize, and longlisted for the Story prize, and The New Order, which was longlisted for the Story prize. Her novels are Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Yale Review, TheHarvard Review, Guernica, and others, and her stories have won three Pushcart prizes. She has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and has taught for MFA programs including the University of Iowa, SUNY Stony Brook, Hollins University, Warren Wilson College. She is Core Faculty at Alma College's MFA program in Creative Writing. Visit her at www.karenebender.com.

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Micah Fields - Writing vs. Typing: A craft talk on composition and artful prose

When
February 23, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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In this talk, we will discuss the challenge of mastering tone, rhythm, and style in our writing by looking closely at the art of composing powerful sentences and scenes in fiction and nonfiction. We'll explore samples from masters of the form, learn some new strategies, and discuss the challenge of word choice and sentence variation as they apply to our own work. Writers will leave the session with a bank of examples from writers in all genres, plus a few of their own short exercises to use as stand-alone pieces or seeds for a larger project.

Micah Fields has published essays and photography for the Oxford American, Gulf Coast, The Baffler, Columbia Journalism Review, Sonora Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, War, Literature & the Arts, and elsewhere. He holds a BA from the University of Montana and an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. He received the Oxford American’s 2018-19 Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and the AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction. He served as a Marine Corps infantry rifleman from 2007 to 2011 and is a combat veteran of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He now lives in Helena, Montana, where he writes, teaches, and works as a fishing guide on the Missouri River. We Hold Our Breath, his book about Houston and its story of development and storms, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.

Micah will accept manuscripts for critique. Please see the manuscript drop down on our website at ocww.info for details.

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Patricia Ann McNair - Alternate Endings: An exercise in discovery and letting go

When
March 02, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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As writers, it is essential that we trust and explore the many possibilities of our imaginings. This workshop will push us past what we think we know about the narratives we are making and help us to expand the parameters of our stories. With particular attention to endings (of characters, situations, and stories), we will study published models and write our way down alternate roads. During the workshop, it can be helpful to have access to one’s own work-in-progress, but we will try new writing as well.

Patricia Ann McNair’s short story collection, Responsible Adults, was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Awards. The Temple of Air (stories) received Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year and other honors. Her collection of essays, And These Are the Good Times, was a Montaigne Medal Finalist for Most Thought-Provoking Book of the Year. McNair’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Barrelhouse, American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Hypertext Review, LitHub, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and other publications. She was named to Chicago’s NewCity Lit 50 list, and A Writer to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Literary Complex. McNair is associate professor emerita in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award, and was nominated for the U.S. Carnegie Professor of the Year. She directs the Interlochen College of Creative Arts Writers Retreat and the Shake Rag Alley Mining for Story Writing Retreat. McNair lives in Tucson with her husband, visual artist Philip Hartigan.

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Brian Turner - Doorways into Surprise and Delight

When
March 09, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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In this generative workshop, we’ll focus on the twin engines that move a poem—the sentence and the line. In revision, we’ll consider how we might step back from our own intentions so that we might learn more from the poem itself—and in this way discover ‘doorways’ that open new passageways into the poem. This workshop will cover a lot of ground (pacing, erasure, silence, visual poetry, and more) while remaining focused on the possibilities available to us within the sentence and the poetic line. Brian will share handouts detailing these concepts and featuring poems from contemporaries like Diane Seuss, Ocean Vuong, Ilya Kaminsky, Tim Seibles, and more—as well as global voices that (he hopes) might become some of your new favorite poets.

Brian Turner is the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, and two collections of poetry, Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. Three new collections of poetry will be published by Alice James Books in 2023. He’s the editor of The Kiss and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. He’s published work in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, and other fine journals. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando, Florida.

Brian will be accepting poems up to 3 pages for our OCWW Poetry Contest. Please see the manuscript drop down on our OCWW website at ocww.info for details.

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Sandra Scofield - Aboutness

When
March 16, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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You can write a narrative all the way to the end and still not be able to say what it is about. Uh oh. Learn to capture the essence of a story in a few sentences. That analysis becomes your North Star for your character and plot development. It is your way into drafting or revising a story, and it is your way of convincing someone they really should read it. This session is for writers of fiction, especially novels and memoirs.

Learn to:

Articulate the subject and idea of your story

Make an umbrella statement about the action and its impact

Describe the vision and the world of the story

Say how your protagonist's actions prove your concept of the story.

Recommended reading: The Last Draft: A Novelist's Guide to Revision

Sandra Scofield is the author of seven novels, including a National Book Award finalist, Beyond Deserving (1991); a memoir, Occasions of Sin; a book of essays about family, Mysteries of Love and Grief; and a book of short stories, Swim: Stories of the Sixties. She is on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University, and has been on the faculty of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival for 26 years. She also is an ardent painter.

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Joan Silber - Generosity in Fiction

When
March 23, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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How can work be generous to its characters but not stupidly innocent, not ignorant of human nature? We’ll look at examples by Anton Chekhov, David Malouf, Colm Toibin, Edward P. Jones, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Joan Silber is the author of nine books of fiction. Her most recent is Secrets of Happiness, listed as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review and one of the most anticipated books of the year by Buzzfeed, The Millions, and LitHub.

Her novel, Improvement, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her book Fools was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Size of the World was a finalist for the LA Times Fiction Prize; and Ideas of Heaven was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She lives in New York, taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College, and frequently teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.

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Michael Zapata - Last Evenings on Earth: Writing Speculative Fiction

When
March 30, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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When we write fiction, we create parallel worlds. As such, possibility is not only a question of genre or believability on the page, but also one of language: What if?

In speculative genres, the relationship between the past and the future, the real and the unreal is often blurred beyond recognition. In this workshop, Michael Zapata (The Lost Book of Adana Moreau) will guide writers through these relationships and discuss craft techniques and artful strategies to create speculative and otherworldly works of fiction. 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 core 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 dropout students. He currently lives in Chicago with his family.

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John McCarthy - Imagining and Intuitive Perception

When
April 13, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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How do we use language that calls for our and others’ full attention? How do we create, order, and craft words in a way that goes beyond the user-friendly, transactional ways we skim text to gather information or entertain ourselves? In this generative session, we'll explore metaphor-making and other strategies for making our writing sing. The exercises provided in this session will push you toward what Gregory Orr calls your poetic "thresholds—those places where disorder and order meet." We will make our writing more urgent and persuasive. We will write in a way that ensures our readers feel what we felt when we were called to write those words in the first place.

John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize. His new manuscript, This Brutal Vanishing, was recently a finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from The University of Wisconsin Press and the Lexi Rudnitsky's Editor's Prize from Persea Books. Additionally, John is a former recipient of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2015, Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, and TriQuarterly. John received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He lives in Evanston where he serves as a Managing Editor of RHINO.

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Kathleen Rooney - Send in the Clowns: Using Humor to Deepen Emotional Impact

When
April 20, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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Robert Frost famously said “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” The corollary, then, must also hold true: “No laughs in the writer, no laughs in the reader." Structurally, a happy surprise can be as impressive as a sad one, and in this session, writers will learn how to use humor and comic timing to make their poetry more emotionally complex, considering how the addition of comedy—even to poems that are ultimately serious--can yield a more pleasing experience for both author and audience.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her most recent books include the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin, 2020). Her poetry collection Where Are the Snows won the 2021 X.J. Kennedy Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in fall of 2022. Her novel From Dust to Stardust, based on the life and work of silent movie star Colleen Moore, will be published by Lake Union in the fall of 2023. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches English and Creative Writing at DePaul University.

Kathleen will judge the OCWW Humor Contest. Please visit Manuscripts on our website for details.

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Rachel Swearingen - Cultivating Mystery and Delight in Fiction

When
April 27, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader, or so the adage goes. Easier said than done. The process of drafting is filled with uncertainty that can cause us to reach for easy solutions that later ring false.

In this course we will explore what it means to give our work our courageous attention, and how to open our creations to more risk and delight. By turning toward the mysteries inherent in our early ideas and drafts, we can strike our best material sooner, and write our most original, authentic stories.

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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Marcy Posner and Joanna McKenzie - Publishing Today: What’s working in today’s ever-changing publishing market

When
May 04, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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Marcy Posner of Folio Literary Management and Joanna MacKenzie from Nelson Literary Agency will take you through the projects that are getting editors’ and readers’ attention and discuss why certain genres are working particularly well in today’s demanding and dynamic publishing landscape. They will break down the hooks and ideas that have garnered attention and offer advice on how to take your projects to the next level.

Joanna MacKenzie joined Nelson Literary Agency in 2017 and is building a list of adult titles in the areas of mystery, thriller, and commercial women’s fiction as well as select projects for kids in the areas of young adult and chapter books. She loves creepy islands, mysteries set in close-knit communities (if those communities happen to be in the Midwest, all the better), and fierce female heroines. Joanna is looking for smart and timely women’s fiction where the personal intersects with the world at large, think Emily Giffin’s All We Ever Wanted or Camille Perri’s The Assistants; stories about the immigrant experience like Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake; and narratives dealing with the relationships that make us who we are for all ages like I’ll Give You The Sun by Andy Nelson.

Joanna McKenzie will accept one-page query letters for critique. Please visit Manuscripts on our website at ocww.info for details.

Marcy Posner has spent a lifetime in books. After a brief stint as a librarian and fifteen years in publishing, Marcy made the transition to agenting and spent twelve years at the William Morris Agency as an agent and as Vice President and Director of Foreign Rights; five years as president of her own agency; five years at Sterling Lord Literistic as an agent and Director of Foreign Rights. Marcy is currently very happy at Folio. Her editorial skill and a deep knowledge of the publishing industry set her apart from many of her colleagues. When she works with her authors, she focuses editorially on how to make their books as strong as possible. Her extensive experience and connections are invaluable. Marcy knows the editors and publishing houses that are looking for a certain subject, or a different voice, or a particular kind of author. Her clients include Newbery Honor winner and New York Times bestseller Jacqueline Kelly, New York Times bestseller Sheri Reynolds, literary writer Christine Sneed, along with debut authors Lexie Elliott and Christi Clancy.

She is seeking women’s fiction, thrillers, historical fiction, history, psychology, narrative non-fiction, YA and middle grade, fiction and non-fiction. She is not interested in genre fiction for any age especially sci-fi and fantasy.

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Joseph Scapellato - Narrative Density

When
May 11, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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In this class, we’ll explore “narrative density”—the interconnectedness, layered-ness, and weight of a work of fiction. We’ll walk through a sequence of specific, practical exercises in which we look to use the everyday complexity of ordinary life to enrich our fiction—we’ll consider the beautiful messiness of what our characters are “in the middle of” (in a big-picture sense and in a small-picture sense), “linger” on fertile elements of a draft, and bring lively narrative through-lines to the surface.

The goal will be for you to walk out of this class with a new tool for composition and revision, fresh ideas that you can immediately use, and revised/brand-new passages.

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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Jennifer Solheim - Let’s Make Trouble: Characters, Conscience

When
May 18, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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Character and action might be the drivers of compelling fiction, but in drafting and revision, how do we decide what kind of development makes sense? How do fear and desire shape the logic—and illogic—of our characters’ choices? And how can we avoid the pitfalls of event that lacks character agency, which can show the hand of the author in the work? This is a generative class that includes examples from Julia Otsuka, Brandon Taylor, and Lydia Davis. Participants will come away from this class with a character profile that includes motivations and a bank of images, obsessions, and actions, as well as tools and understanding for how to move from character to plot and action to emotion in fiction.

Jennifer Solheim's stories and essays have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Pinch, and Poets & Writers. As a writer and literary scholar, she has taught at University of Michigan, Université de Paris VII, and University of Illinois—Chicago, in addition to creative writing workshops at the Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference and StoryStudio Chicago. A Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review, she serves as the Associate Director of the BookEnds novel revision fellowship at Stony Brook University.

Jennifer will accept manuscripts for critique. Please visit Manuscripts at ocww.info for more details.

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Abby Geni - The Science of Story

When
May 25, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

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In this class, we will take a unique approach to the study of fiction, exploring stories through the lens of science. We will draw from biology, physics, psychology, sociology, and more, using each discipline as a window into a deeper understanding of craft. What can a study of people’s living spaces reveal about how to create a strong setting and vivid characters? What can an examination of physics teach us about the propulsive force of tension on the page? Students do not need to have a background in science to take this class; we’ll be using these studies and concepts as a jumping-off point to think differently and, perhaps, more deeply about our own writing. Science has a great deal to teach us about how to create stronger, clearer, more immersive stories.

Abby Geni is the author of The Wildlands, The Lightkeepers, and The Last Animal. 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 latest novel, The Wildlands, was named one of the best books of 2018 by Kirkus and Buzzfeed and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Geni is a faculty member at StoryStudio Chicago and recently served as Visiting Associate Professor of Fiction at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Visit her website to learn more.

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Kelly McMasters - The Landscape of the Personal

When
June 01, 2023
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
REMOTE

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Memoir is a strange animal, living somewhere between fiction and autobiography. Life doesn’t unfold in neat little plot packages, and a novelist’s toolbox is required to bring our stories to life. Through short readings, generative exercises, and observation, we'll work together to stretch toward the universal by illuminating the particular.

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the forthcoming The Leaving Season: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 2023) and co-editor of the forthcoming Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film “The Atomic States of America,” a 2012 Sundance selection. The anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington PostMagazine, The Paris Review Daily, Literary Hub, The American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Tin House, and more. Her writing has been supported by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Katharine Bakeless Nason scholarship to the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference. She is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY.

Kelly will accept the first 10 manuscripts for critique. Visit Manuscripts on our website for details.

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