Writing Workshops: Hi, Adam. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Adam Popescu: I write about the way the world is changing, often using the impact of the modern world on the natural world. That can have wide range, and that’s why I find it so interesting, the connections in our world that may seem tenuous but are really quite strong. If I write about a rare species a world away, or a company or cultural figure, I try and connect it to a wide audience. That way, these aren’t niche topics, they’re relatable, and relatability is what good narrative is all about.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Adam Popescu: I hate the word passion when it comes to writing. It’s really not about passion. It’s about patience, it’s about perseverance. Alliterations aside, it’s true. Talent isn’t as important as working hard, that’s just a fact. You don’t need to have talent to write. Of course, it helps, and that’s why writing and teaching writing is such a black box, but while style and form and perspective can take years to build and develop, the work ethic is something anyone at any stage can pick up. And that’s what I try to focus on in these courses: forget talent. That we can’t control. Sometimes those with talent think they don’t have to work as hard and that’s a disservice to them, the work itself, and the talent. But what we all can control is effort and time and if you put those in, the work will be better no matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished --- or how well you can write. That’s something key I try to focus on. So is reading. If you don’t like reading, why would you want to be a writer?

“I hate the word passion when it comes to writing. It’s about patience, it’s about perseverance, it’s about pain.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Adam Popescu: I hope you walk away with the feeling that if you really want this life, if you’re really open to the time it takes to build and develop--and if you’re real with yourself--then there are skills you can build. Reading helps, it really does. And I don’t mean summaries.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Adam Popescu: I’m going to pick up the book that I’m reading by an author from Chile named Roberto Bolaño who maybe rings a bell, maybe not. This isn’t premeditated, just typing out the page I dogeared to give a sense of his style (translated from Spanish and god it’s long and I have no clue what he’s even talking about but wow is it packed with ideas and images and tone, so I’m willing to be sort of bewitched by it). The book is called Nazi Literature in the Americas and it’s a literary experiment sort of apropos because each chapter is about a fake person and their fake book which is what this sentence describes.

Adam Popescu: Anyway, it’s long, I warn again, but think of the energy it took, and the balls, to write something like this. Ok, here goes: “One of Quantrill’s Raiders crossing the state of Kansas as the head of five hundred cavalrymen; flags inscribed with a sort of primitive, premonitory swastika; rebels who never surrender; a plan to reach Great Bear Lake via Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories; a Confederate philosopher whose fanciful dream was to establish an Ideal Republic in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle; an expedition unraveling along the way, beset by human and natural obstacles; two exhausted horsemen finally reaching Great Bear Lake, dismounting. Such, in summary, is the plot of JMS Hill’s first novel, published in 1924 in the Fantastic Stories series.”

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Adam Popescu: My workshops are very interactive and it’s for that very reason. I can see it in peoples’ faces and in their voices when we talk about craft and structure and the ins and outs of narrative. That way it’s not just a one-way street. Knowing the rules is how you break them and that’s the level you want to get to.

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.

Adam Popescu: I don’t have a trick. But I will say if you’re using AI you’re not sounding like you. You’re sounding like other people and the goal should be to develop your own voice.

“If you’re using AI you’re not sounding like you. You’re sounding like other people, and the goal should be to develop your own voice.”

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Adam Popescu: Right now I’m having an affair with El Boom, but not so much Gabo: I love Mario Vargas Llosa and am trying with Carlos Fuentes and recently discovered Eduardo Halfon (he is not part of El Boom and writes from Guatemala but pick up The Tarantula and you’ll see what I’m talking about). And Bolaño, as I mentioned, from the 80s and 90s, is also someone I’ve recently discovered. What I do is I read a writer then read their peers and then go deep in their list. I always love Conrad and Tolstoy and can go on and on, which is what makes reading so special. It’s a time machine, it’s a portal, it’s a window into a mind.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Adam Popescu: That you can teach writing.

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Adam Popescu: You can’t teach writing. No one can. But you can teach how to read and think and that’s how you learn to write.

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Adam Popescu: My father. My favorite writer of all time: Petru Popescu.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Adam Popescu: Honest.

Enroll in The Art of Pitching and bring the pitch you have been afraid to show an editor.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature.

There’s a fantasy version of writing a memoir that goes something like this: you work on your memoir whenever inspiration strikes—and aren’t you lucky because inspiration reliably strikes whenever you have free time.

Unfortunately, the reality of that game plan isn’t quite so ideal: years go by, and you don’t even have a good draft to show for it. Maybe you get excited from time to time, write a few thousand words, then life gets busy and six months go by in a flash before you open the document again. Oops.

Courtney Kocak knows exactly how that story goes because her debut memoir took 15 years from the beginning of the dream to the published book.

​It wasn’t until she took a year-long incubator that she could finally wrap her head around how to start AND how to finish. She needed that mentorship and community with deadlines, feedback, and a sustained container with enough time and effort to finally figure out what her book was trying to say.

That book, Girl Gone Wild, was published by Trio House Press in April. Not only that, but she’s halfway through book #2, which was inspired by some of the content cut from her debut.

Incubators have been such an essential part of Courtney’s own author journey that she’s leading a year-long Memoir in Essays Incubator starting September 8th.

Every other Tuesday for twelve months, a small cohort of 6–12 writers will meet to do the work that’s hard to do the first time alone: generating pages, figuring out what belongs (and what doesn’t), identifying the thematic and narrative spines, slowly turning a collection of essays into a manuscript, and polishing it until it shines.

The goal is ambitious yet totally doable: 52,000+ well-revised words over the course of the year.

This isn’t just a race to produce a messy first draft. Over 26 sessions, you’ll study craft, learn about publishing, figure out how to talk about your book, and gain all the skills you need to find a good home for it.

You’ll also meet with Courtney one-on-one four times throughout the year for individualized guidance on your project.

You don’t need to show up to the first class with a rough draft or even half a manuscript. Some writers will come with a handful of published essays. Others will just have an idea that won’t leave them alone. Anywhere on the spectrum is fine as long as you’re ready to take the work seriously.

By next September, you could still be saying, “I really want to write a memoir someday.” Or you could have a draft you’re proud of and a plan to get it published.

Applications are open, and admissions are rolling. Apply now​to ensure you have a spot in Courtney’s upcoming cohort.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Julia:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Julia. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Julia Cooke: I’m Julia Cooke, the author of three nonfiction books and a huge variety of shorter writing from reporting to essays to criticism. I’ve written a group biography, Starry and Restless, a book of narrative history, Come Fly the World, and a book of reporting on youth culture in Havana, Cuba, and I’m thrilled and a little scared for my next book, a hybrid memoir.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Julia Cooke: You’ll write best when you’re excited, and learning to locate that excitement and lean toward that place is the best time investment you can make in any writing project. One writing instructor told me to “follow the heat” — as if you can hold your hand above a manuscript and sense where, within the text, the fire lies — and that’s helped me so much over the three, soon to be four books I’ve now written.

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Julia Cooke: They’ll understand research differently — how to use it to amplify scenes that don’t appear to be research-based, how to organize it, how to turn toward it when stuck in writing, and when to turn away from it to get back to the page. They’ll also learn to write a banging book proposal. I absolutely love book proposals.

“One writing instructor told me to ‘follow the heat’ — as if you can hold your hand above a manuscript and sense where, within the text, the fire lies.”

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Julia Cooke: “How they all wished they could go.” It’s the last line of Deb Olin Unferth’s gorgeous EARTH 7, which I loved, start to finish.

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Julia Cooke: In a research class I once taught, a student who had thought that her memoir was primarily about her was told by another student — a young woman who’d dealt with a similar family dynamic — that the book was actually about her mother’s upbringing. The writer was shocked and silent for a few beats. Then she looked up and around at all of the other students’ faces with this huge grin. The realization had opened up this enormous space for her to write into, and she was excited.

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, but a small, specific technique.

Julia Cooke: When I feel blocked, I like to look at an image associated with the book I’m working on and describe it. It nearly always gives me a few sentences I want to keep.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Julia Cooke: Rebecca West’s THE FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS. It is so atmospheric and her characters are just so real; I love that there’s no plot at all, yet I can’t stop reading whenever I get into it.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Julia Cooke: “Show, don’t tell.” Yes, there is some truth to it, but there is a time for each mode! What people are usually saying is that showing a scene is more effective and atmospheric than telling what happened in that scene, and yet to veer totally away from telling just doesn’t work to build a book.

“Learning when and how to ignore workshop critique is a huge part of being in a workshop.”

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Julia Cooke: Learning when and how to ignore workshop critique is a huge part of being in a workshop.

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Julia Cooke: Anne Sexton. I did a big project on her in high school, and I just love her words.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Julia Cooke: Totally candid with a sometimes messianic zeal for sharing what actually works as far as actually writing a book.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Julia Cooke: I wrote big chunks of a 400 page book in 100-word increments.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

There is a peculiar prejudice in short fiction circles against three-act structure. It belongs, the thinking goes, to screenplays and feature films. The short story, by contrast, is for character studies, mood pieces, lyric experiments. For many writers, that is where the conversation about structure ends. Andreas Trolf would like to complicate that assumption.

In Using and Abusing the Three-Act Structure in Short Fiction, an 8-week online workshop beginning September 16, 2026, the Emmy-nominated TV writer (Nickelodeon’s Sanjay and Craig, Adult Swim’s Tigtone) and fiction author whose work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency turns the structural vocabulary of screenwriting on its head and applies it to the literary short story.

Students read screenplays alongside contemporary fiction by George Saunders, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Ann Beattie, then submit their own stories for full-class workshop and revision.

By the end, you will have a working three-act vocabulary you can use or refuse, a story workshopped and revised under that structural lens, and a clearer sense of how readers actually process the information you give them.

At WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Trolf brings the rare combination of professional dramatic craft and literary sensibility to a workshop where the goal is not to follow rules but to know exactly when, and why, you are choosing to break them.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Andreas:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Andreas. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Andreas Trolf: My name is Andreas. I’m a television and fiction writer. I like bluegrass guitar, old British motorcycles, noodle dishes, cats, skateboarding, and riding my bicycle. Sometimes I think I might be enthusiastic about too many things. Before I was a writer, I worked as a fine art archivist and painted houses.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Andreas Trolf: I honestly wish that I’d learned more about three-act structure early in my writing life. This is something that’s taught early on in screenwriting classes but doesn’t seem to get mentioned much, particularly in classes about the short story. The caveat here— and essentially the caveat of this entire class—is that this kind of structure isn’t strictly speaking “necessary” in short fiction. A short story can be a character study, a mood piece, a scene, whatever—it’s generally much harder to pin down than a novel. But understanding structure, and knowing when to use it, is something I find crucial to understanding your own work and to understanding a reader’s expectations. Three-act structure exists because it is a remarkably effective way for us to process information, and to ignore it is something I believe short story writers do at their own peril.

“Three-act structure exists because it is a remarkably effective way for us to process information, and to ignore it is something I believe short story writers do at their own peril.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Andreas Trolf: I hope students will walk away from this class with a stronger understanding of, and empathy for, their readers—how readers take in and process information, how a writer works with a reader’s expectations. A specific shift in writing that might come along with this is being more fully aware of what is at stake in the story, both for readers and characters.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Andreas Trolf: The opening sentence of Halle Butler’s hilarious Banal Nightmare:

Margaret Anne “Moddie” Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Andreas Trolf: As an undergrad, I was in a workshop led by a very talented author and empathetic teacher, who stressed to us both brevity and pacing, which I believe are two things that absolutely overlap with any discussion of structure. He used a visual metaphor for cutting scenes to the bone, which was that if a scene consists of a boulder rolling down a hill, rather than beginning the scene by describing the vast geological processes that brought the boulder to rest on the hill, it’s almost always better to begin the scene the very moment when, after millions of years, a small bird lands on the boulder and tips it, finally, over the edge and sets it into motion. A scene’s potential energy being converted to kinetic.

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.

Andreas Trolf: This may be very idiosyncratic, but I absolutely love it when a writer who uses otherwise perfect grammar messes with sentence structure or even just puts a single word where it doesn’t belong—something that would attract an editor’s red pen but which is done 100% intentionally. Sentence-level prose, like structure, is a place where knowing when to subvert the rules can have a tremendous effect.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Andreas Trolf: Most recently that book has been Open Throat by Henry Hoke. It’s a beautiful and lyrical story about a mountain lion living in LA’s Griffith Park. It thoroughly upended any understanding I had of what a novel is, or should be. Calling it a novel seems both insane and absolutely perfect.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Andreas Trolf: Anyone who claims that there are inviolable rules to writing is someone I would urge people to ignore. Contrary to anything I’ve written here (or will tell you in class), the only *inviolable* rule I know of is that if you can get away with it, go for it.

“It’s almost always better to begin the scene the very moment when, after millions of years, a small bird lands on the boulder and tips it, finally, over the edge and sets it into motion. A scene’s potential energy being converted to kinetic.”

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Andreas Trolf: This feels like a continuation of the previous question, so I’m going to answer it like that. Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but no one really knows what they’re doing. Even the acknowledged “masters” have heated disagreements about what makes for “good” writing. An air quotes bad story has often been saved by pure style, and air quotes great stories can just as often feel clinical and unalive.

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Andreas Trolf: Maybe this means that I should be teaching a class on sentence-level prose instead, but I think there’s nothing quite like a perfect sentence to make a reader sit up and take notice. Not necessarily something baroque, not flashy, just perfect. Which is, of course, wildly subjective. This, coupled with a sense of playfulness—the idea that both the reader and the writer are taking some measure of joy from this whole endeavor—is certainly what did it for me. I’m pretty sure it was John Barth or Italo Calvino who first produced this effect.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Andreas Trolf: I don’t think that workshop feedback should be about judgment so much as it should be a conversation. The most important thing to me is never to step on anyone’s enthusiasm for their ideas. To that end, I prefer to ask questions about the work rather than make statements about it.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Andreas Trolf: I have been attempting to sing “Modern Major General” from The Pirates of Penzance in its entirety from memory for probably 12 years now and I have yet to succeed.

Trolf’s workshop is not built on judgment. It is built on the kind of structural conversation that helps you understand your own choices, deepen them, and revise with intention. Whether you want to master three-act structure to use it, or to deliberately ignore it, you will leave this class with the vocabulary to do either with full awareness of what you are choosing. Workshop seats are limited to ten writers. Class begins September 16, 2026, and meets weekly via Zoom on Wednesdays from 6:00 to 8:00 PM ET.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Going Back to the Well: Keeping Noir Alive in the 21st Century

By Tom Andes

James Ellroy is one of the reasons I write fiction.

When I read White Jazz in college, it excited me in a way none of the more so-called serious literary fiction I was reading in my other classes did. The language was direct, immediate, almost like a police blotter. The stakes were as high as they could be: corruption at the top of the Los Angeles Police Department. And the characters were amazing. In the first three chapters, Ellroy’s protagonist, Dave Klein, takes a bribe to throw a federal witness out a window, and you learn the guy is in love with his sister.

Reading about bad people doing bad things, then seeking redemption because they want out of a broken, corrupt system — that remains central to what I loved about Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, the four novels he published between 1987 and 1992: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz.

So much of making art is about influence, about what we do with the things we consume and how we remake them. Just as Ellroy updated noir for the 1990s, the genre in general has survived because people keep going back to the well. That’s the premise of Writing the New Noir, the eight-week workshop I’m teaching this August, and it’s worth explaining what I mean by it.

In the 1960s, the married Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö co-authored ten Martin Beck novels. Using the form of the police procedural, they traced Beck’s disillusionment with police work while autopsying bourgeois Swedish society from a socialist perspective. They helped birth Scandinavian noir. Similarly, in the 1970s, Jean-Patrick Manchette used Dashiell Hammett’s novels as a template for his situationist noirs, a post-1968 intervention in bourgeois French society that helped repopularize the genre there.

More recently, on this side of the Atlantic, Sara Paretsky updated the PI novel with her female series character, V.I. Warshawski. Since then, writers like Vicki Hendricks, Laura Lippman, and Megan Abbott have brought the genre into the 21st century by shifting the focus away from men and toward the relationships between women. Likewise, Walter Mosley and Attica Locke have written great genre novels that center Black characters and land as powerful political interventions.

Noir has always existed in a strange space both within and outside the mainstream of American writing. It combines elements of both so-called high and low art. From Drive to cyberpunk, from Michael Mann’s Heat to most of Scorsese’s output, from Godard to Kurosawa, its style and aesthetic remain a distinctive influence in movies as well as literature. In writing, while it’s hard to say who influenced whom, the clipped style of Hammett and Spillane has left a mark on American literature as surely as Hemingway’s famed terse style. Faulkner, likewise, was influenced by gothic literature, which in its doomed romanticism is another precursor to noir. We can see noir’s influence in contemporary literary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, whose Eileen recalls Patricia Highsmith.

Of course, the genre also carries a lot of baggage, having been dominated by white male writers whose work often leans on misogynistic and racist tropes. The criticism is valid: sometimes noir glorifies a particular kind of experience, or a particular brutality, in the name of realism.

I’m leery of using the word woke, given how thoroughly it’s been co-opted as a political epithet. So I want to be clear that when I say Jordan Harper’s A Violent Masterpiece reads like a woke update of James Ellroy, I mean it in the best possible way. Harper grafts his own preoccupations onto Ellroy’s three-protagonist structure, telling the story of livestreaming crime-scene journalist Jake Deal, high-end concierge Kara Delgado, and lawyer Doug Gibson, all of whom work as fixers and gofers for Hollywood’s elite. At the center of the book is a character almost certainly inspired by Jeffrey Epstein. He’s busted. And because he’s in a position to bring other powerful people down with him, the machine turns against him.

Like Ellroy’s great L.A. novels, Harper’s great L.A. novel deals with complicity, its characters finding redemption by standing up to a system they once helped support and were, to various extents, part of. But where Ellroy’s heroes are dirty cops, Harper’s are low-level fixers — procurers who know they’re part of something awful and are just trying to get by. The tenor of their complicity is different, and because his characters stand outside the law, the book examines power in a very different way: ruthless, exacting.

Noir is nothing if not a tradition, and it’s one of the most influential and enduring literary traditions in American — and for that matter, world — literature. Yet for all its pretense to gritty realism, the traditional detective story was not realism, as Raymond Chandler observed in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” Chandler was making the case that hardboiled writers such as Hammett introduced a dose of psychological realism into their stories, making them not so much clever puzzles as examinations of particular kinds of psychology and power. He wanted to take the detective story out of the parlor, and that is still what so much writing in the nebulously defined noir genre aims to do.

That still describes what I love about this genre. Is it mere entertainment? Well, as Chandler says, any reading we do involves an element of escapism. Yet in its preoccupation with power, corruption, and the material conditions that create crime, the best noir offers a level of sociopolitical examination few other genres do.

That’s probably why so many great small magazines dedicated to reinventing the genre — to using it to think about America from the bottom up — have sprung into being over the last decade. Two of my favorites are Rock and a Hard Place and Dark Yonder. And if you comb the pages of any recent volume of The Best American Mystery and Suspense, you’ll find people doing exciting work that keeps the genre fresh and alive. A few off the top of my head: C.W. Blackwell, S.A. Cosby, Meagan Lucas, Rob D. Smith. But there are so many more.

That, to me, is what it means to engage with a tradition. A lot of the great innovators in noir, as in any genre, have innovated out of a desire to course-correct, and out of love for the literature that made them the writers they are. Whether we’re writing noir, traditional mysteries, or something adjacent that borrows the style and the aesthetic, we get to go to what James Sallis described as the great buffet table that is literature and choose what works for us.

Tom Andes is the author of the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books, 2025). His stories have appeared in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He lives in Albuquerque, where he works as a musician and freelance editor.

Sophia Hembeck is a bilingual writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh and has published three books of lyrical essays. In Unhinged in Your Notes App: An Introduction to the Fragmented Essay, her six-week online workshop at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, she teaches writers to trust the spaces between fragments instead of rushing to fill them.

Across six Saturday sessions on Google Meet, you will learn to arrange fragments through juxtaposition, white space, repetition, and sequencing so that disconnected pieces begin to speak to one another. You will build a daily practice of noticing that turns ordinary moments into raw material. And you will leave with one or two complete fragmented essays, plus written feedback from Hembeck on your final submission.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Sophia:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Sophia. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Sophia Hembeck: I’m a bilingual writer and artist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Seven years ago I decided to move to Edinburgh from Berlin on a whim and like so many decisions that are utterly bizarre to others: it was the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Sophia Hembeck: That it’s more important to have something to say than how you say it. Particularly when it comes to essay writing, where the whole point is to lay open your mind. I guess a part of this class is about trusting that we all have something inside of us that wants to connect with the outside world, with the reader.

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Sophia Hembeck: A story in its most basic form is the continuous answer to the question: and then?

And then, and then, and then. The fragmented essay on the other hand seems to say: and now this! And now that! And now what?

Its form is all about trying to make connections, trying to make sense in collaboration with the reader. Of course, it’s not just chaos. Life is. Writing isn’t. Yet, we need the reader to fill in the gaps for us, which really is about trust. The neurotic writer will try to control everything, over-explain, over-communicate. So my goal is that through this class students begin to trust themselves more, trust that if they leave gaps in their essays, in their thoughts, if they let something be a fragment, let something be a bit of a puzzle, that it will attract readers who find joy in figuring things out. And if you think about it: most people do.

“A story in its most basic form is the continuous answer to the question: and then? ... The fragmented essay on the other hand seems to say: and now this! And now that! And now what?”

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Sophia Hembeck: “To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.” From Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream. It’s just exactly where I am right now.

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Sophia Hembeck: A few weeks ago, I was invited to a podcast, and I found myself saying something like: “The most important thing when you’re writing is to be vulnerable, to know yourself, and to open up and share those things you believe to be true. Everything else is secondary. A text without any meaning, any risk of showing yourself is just decorative.” I still wonder if I actually mean that. Perhaps it is a little bit more complex. Perhaps what I meant to say was, that is where we start: a place of exploration and curiosity. Especially at the beginning of a career, and that is where one most likely will join a writing workshop or enroll in a creative writing MFA. First you need to have time to build confidence, to build a routine, because there’s no point in pruning when you can’t actually distinguish between what’s a seedling and what’s a weed. They’ll look the same.

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, but a small, specific technique.

Sophia Hembeck: Forcing myself to think of ten different ways to begin an essay. It’s really allowing you to be less attached to a certain perspective or entry point and often creates great sentences that can be sprinkled in later on as well.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Sophia Hembeck: Liars by Sarah Manguso. The number of sentences I underlined and photos of pages that I sent to my friends, basically saying: see? see!? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a writer dissect a toxic heterosexual marriage better.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Sophia Hembeck: “To write every day and keep a word count.” I have ruined my natural flow state over fixating on numbers for years. It is something I am still recovering from. It’s kind of like what dieting does to your relationship with food.

“I have ruined my natural flow state over fixating on numbers for years. It is something I am still recovering from. It’s kind of like what dieting does to your relationship with food.”

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Sophia Hembeck: It’s really up to you how much you get out of it.

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Sophia Hembeck: I couldn’t actually tell you who my first literary crush was, but I always had this sense that I am less alone when I’m reading. That, for instance, when I read the diaries of Samuel Beckett at University and his obsession with death, his fears, and all that: I felt so grateful. That he wrote it down. That he made me feel like I’m not the only one with these thoughts. It’s always been the reason why I became a writer in the first place.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Sophia Hembeck: It will definitely feel a little bit like therapy. Breakthroughs and all.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Sophia Hembeck: That I don’t use my beautiful antique bureau desk but always have to write in my bed. It’s giving upright croissant and one day my back will have its revenge but not yet!

There is something fitting about a teacher of the fragmented essay who writes from bed instead of her antique desk: the good material rarely arrives where we expect it. If you are ready to slow down, pay closer attention, and discover the essays hiding inside your own everyday moments, consider this your invitation. Over six weeks you will write real fragments, arrange them into finished pieces, and get Hembeck’s eyes on your work. Bring your curiosity and your notes app. The rest you will build together.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Brittany Ackerman has published an essay collection, The Perpetual Motion Machine, a debut novel, The Brittanys, and has a third book, The Style of Your Life, on the way. Even so, she will tell you that every blank page still stares back with the same quiet questions: Can you really do this? Does it even matter? For Ackerman, that uncertainty is a companion to write beside. It is also the beating heart of how she teaches.

In Main Character Energy: Claiming Our Own Narrative Authority, a four-week nonfiction intensive at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Ackerman invites writers of memoir, personal essay, and hybrid forms to stop performing on the page and start paying attention. Borrowing a line from Mary Oliver, she treats attention as the beginning of devotion, the engine that turns lived experience into story.

Across four weeks on Zoom, you will learn to locate the emotional center of a personal narrative rather than simply recounting what happened, to shape meaning through specificity and pattern, and to trust your own obsessions as the clues that point toward the story you most need to write. You will leave with four new generative pieces and a firmer claim on your voice.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Brittany:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Brittany. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Brittany Ackerman: Hello! I’m Brittany. I write books, essays, and the occasional newsletter when I’m trying to make sense of the world. I’m originally from Riverdale, New York, but I’ve lived all over-- New York, Florida, Indiana, Tennessee, and now California. I’m endlessly interested in memory, family, girlhood, identity, and the strange stories we tell ourselves to get through difficult moments. I’ve published an essay collection and a novel, with another novel on the way, and I love helping other writers find the emotional center of their own work through workshops and craft chats. Outside of writing, you’ll usually find me reading, doing yoga, chasing after my daughter, or thinking about my next latte long before I’ve actually made it.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Brittany Ackerman: I wish someone had told me earlier that great writing isn’t about sounding smart or following the right rules, but that it’s about paying attention. That simple, yet profound line from Mary Oliver: “Attention is the beginning of devotion” rings true! The strongest stories come from noticing what’s emotionally charged, the oddly specific, our deepest (and sometimes darkest!) obsessions, and trusting that those details matter. This class is built around that idea. Rather than sticking to formulas, we’ll practice noticing and following our own instincts so that we can write with more confidence, curiosity, and a stronger sense of our own voice.

“The strongest stories come from noticing what’s emotionally charged, the oddly specific, our deepest (and sometimes darkest!) obsessions, and trusting that those details matter.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Brittany Ackerman: Students will leave knowing how to identify the emotional center of a personal story and build a piece around it, rather than simply recounting what happened. They’ll learn how to transform lived experience into compelling narrative by paying closer attention to specificity, pattern, and meaning—understanding that the power of a memoir or essay comes not from the event itself, but from the writer’s unique way of seeing it.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Brittany Ackerman: “All the stories go with you, Franny thought, closing her eyes. All the things I didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for. All the ways to get to Torrance.” From Commonwealth by Ann Patchett.

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Brittany Ackerman: Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...your obsessions are your best clues to what matters on the page. The details you keep returning to—the fragmented memory, the sacred object, the question you can’t stop asking—are usually pointing you toward the story you actually need to write.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Brittany Ackerman: Warm, curious, and encouraging—but I’ll always push you to dig a little deeper!

“Learning to write alongside that uncertainty and not waiting for confidence to arrive is one of the most valuable lessons my writing life has taught me.”

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Brittany Ackerman: People are often surprised to learn that I still feel intimidated every time I start a new project, or that I, too, get lost or caught up in my own self-doubt. I’ve published books, but every blank page still stares back at me and questions: Can you really do this? Does it even matter? What’s the point? Learning to write alongside that uncertainty and not waiting for confidence to arrive is one of the most valuable lessons my writing life has taught me.

If the blank page still intimidates a writer with three books to her name, then the goal was never to outrun the doubt. It was to keep writing beside it. That is the quiet promise of Main Character Energy: four weeks to sharpen your attention, claim your narrative authority, and build new work from the obsessions only you can chase. Bring the fragmented memory, the sacred object, the question you cannot stop asking. Your seat, and your story, are waiting.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

In the Armenian household where Aida Zilelian grew up, family dysfunction was something you did not name out loud. Years later, after publishing a novel about that kind of family, she found other writers coming to her with the same quiet question: how do you write about the people who raised you without betraying them? Her answer reframes the whole problem. Instead of writing around reality, she says, write what you actually mean to write.

That conviction is the beating heart of The Family Fight: Turning Conflict Into Story, a one-day Zoom seminar Zilelian is teaching on Saturday, August 8, 2026 through WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature. Zilelian is the author of the novels The Legacy of Lost Things, winner of the Tololyan Prize, and All the Ways We Lied, and she has told stories everywhere from PBS’s Stories from the Stage to the TEDx stage.

In two focused hours, you will learn to wield dialogue as the primary engine of a scene, using it to carry not just conflict but plot and the hidden layers of character. You will generate three to five story concepts drawn from the family relationships you know best, and you will practice skipping exposition to drop readers straight into the charged moment. Bring the fight. Leave with the pages.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Aida:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Aida. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Aida Zilelian: I’m a writer and storyteller as well as an educator in NYC classrooms. I recently gave my first TEDx Talk about my experiences teaching storytelling. I’m excited about completing two new collections of work - my short story collection ‘Where There Can Be No Breath At All’ and my first full-length poetry collection ‘Beautiful Monster (and other lost orphans)’.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Aida Zilelian: My response is not going be based on craft here, but content. After my novel was released, writers reached out to me about how they could navigate around writing about their family without crossing boundaries. Many of them were interested in writing fiction and borrowing from their real lives.

Coming from an immigrant Armenian household, where talking about family dysfunction was taboo, I wish someone had told me to write about it as much as I had to. To write what I mean to write instead of writing around reality.

“To write what I mean to write instead of writing around reality.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Aida Zilelian: I’d love my students to understand the value of writing what you want to write and using dialogue to communicate not just conflict, but plot and hidden layers of elements such as characterization and character dynamics.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Aida Zilelian: ‘You are loved,’ someone said. Take that and eat it. - from “Sinners Welcome“ by Mary Karr

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.

Aida Zilelian: Moments of pause. Where are moments in a story where the pacing needs pause? Pause for tension, for the reader to consider the moment, to create an element of surprise.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Aida Zilelian: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

When I was writing my last novel All the Ways We Lied there were moments where I grew bored of my writing on a sentence level. The Goldfinch was on my desk the entire time I wrote. I would turn to it to remind myself what beautiful, fresh language looked liked. Though my book was not written in the first person, the narrator in The Goldfinch writes confessionally and candidly in a way that helped me navigate my characters and their internal and external dialogue.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Aida Zilelian: What I have heard time again that creates pressure for most writers is, ‘Write every day’. Instead, I plan ahead. I look at the week ahead and ask myself the most realistic times I can write. And sometimes if nothing comes, I use that time to revise work, read literary journals who have an open call, submit my writing. If I’m not actually writing, I’m committing that time to anything related to writing.

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Aida Zilelian: Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but you don’t have to start at the beginning of your story. You can start at the part or moment you are most excited to write.

“You don’t have to start at the beginning of your story. You can start at the part or moment you are most excited to write.”

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Aida Zilelian: Sylvia Plath. Although I have been writing prose much longer than poetry, my first genre of writing was poems. When I realized I wanted to write poems in Plath’s style, I knew I was a writer. She is one of the only poets whose work I memorized and can still recite.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Aida Zilelian: Open and supportive with clear direction.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Aida Zilelian: My students would be surprised to learn that I play guitar and piano, and that I played solor shows in downtown NYC for nearly a decade. For the release of my novel All the Ways We Lied, I composed music on the piano and it is the mini soundtrack for my book.

There is something fitting about a novelist who scores her own books on the piano teaching a class about tension and release, because that is what a family story is: a piece of music built from silences and sudden crescendos. In one Saturday afternoon, Zilelian will help you find the charged moments in your own history and turn them into scenes that crackle with subtext. If the stories you have been circling are the ones about the people closest to you, this is your invitation to finally write them down.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Blackout poetry is often misunderstood as a casual exercise: a Sharpie, a borrowed page, an afternoon of crossing things out. The poet Alicia Cook has spent her career proving how far that assumption misses. Across her bestselling “mixtape” collections with Andrews McMeel Publishing, nearly half of the work is created through self-erasure of her own previously written poems, treating revision as a generative practice.

This summer, Cook is bringing that practice into a four-week online workshop, The Art of Erasure: Transforming Text Through Blackout Poetry, at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature.

Students will work hands-on with personal writing, published texts, and public language to generate a small portfolio of finished blackout poems, develop a repeatable erasure process they can return to long after the final Zoom session, and gain a working understanding of the form’s history and ethics.

Cook is candid about why blackout poetry feels so freeing for writers stuck waiting for perfect first drafts: it begins with revision rather than invention.

“You’re not staring at a blank page trying to invent perfection,” she says. “You’re entering into conversation with existing text.”

For anyone who has ever set a poem aside and never come back to it, this class offers a different invitation entirely.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Alicia:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Alicia. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Alicia Cook: Hi, I am Alicia Cook, a writer from New Jersey. I love poetry, but I also write essays professionally for labor unions and higher education. I have four full-length poetry collections out with Andrews McMeel Publishing. I advocate for families impacted by drug addiction and talk very openly about grief and mental health. I love iced coffee and sleeping.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Alicia Cook: One thing I wish someone had taught me earlier is that writing is never really “done.” At least for me, deadlines are what make me submit something and finally call it finished. Before I understood that, I spent a lot of time thinking good writers magically arrived at perfect drafts, instead of revising, reshaping, and re-seeing their work over and over again.

This class is built around that idea. Blackout poetry is such a powerful example because it begins with revision. You’re not staring at a blank page trying to invent perfection. You’re entering into conversation with existing text, cutting away, discovering patterns, and realizing that meaning can emerge through editing as much as through writing. It teaches students that writing is a process of experimentation, instinct, and transformation, not just first-draft inspiration.

Blackout poetry also helps take away the fear of “getting it right.” It invites play, surprise, and risk-taking while still sharpening core writing skills like word choice, rhythm, imagery, and voice. More than anything, it shows that sometimes the strongest writing comes not from adding more, but from learning what to leave behind.

“Sometimes the strongest writing comes not from adding more, but from learning what to leave behind.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Alicia Cook: Students will leave this class knowing how to find unexpected meaning and imagery by cutting away excess language. Blackout poetry teaches writers to trust revision as a creative tool, sharpen their attention to word choice and rhythm, and break through writer’s block by showing that writing can begin with discovery instead of a blank page.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Alicia Cook: Song lyrics are a huge part of my life. The song Dashboard by Noah Kahan recently grabbed me: “It ain’t our fault that you aren’t suddenly somebody else / ‘Cause you’ve worked on yourself”

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.

Alicia Cook: I’m always obsessed with repetition as a craft move, especially when a writer repeats a word or phrase but shifts its meaning through context. It’s such a small technique, but it can completely change the emotional weight and rhythm of a piece. I love pointing out moments where repetition doesn’t even feel repetitive, especially in poetry and blackout work, where every word carries extra weight.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Alicia Cook: The Lovely Bones.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Alicia Cook: “Write what you know” can become terrible advice when people interpret it too literally. It can make writers feel like they’re only allowed to stay inside the exact boundaries of their own lives. I often write from personal experience, but I also love creatively expanding my universe, exaggerating details, imagining alternate outcomes, and inventing things that never happened.

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Alicia Cook: ...the person teaching it is still a student of the craft too.

“Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but the person teaching it is still a student of the craft too.”

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Alicia Cook: Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Alicia Cook: We are going to have fun, trust our instincts, and maybe unlock a new hobby.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Alicia Cook: I collect Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland books. I have over 60.

In four weeks with Alicia, you’ll learn to cut away the excess, surface what was already there, and trust that meaning can arrive through subtraction. Whether you come to the page as a curious beginner or a poet ready to push your formal toolkit further, this is a class that promises real new work and a creative practice you can keep using long after the final session ends.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

On a snowy day in Amherst, around one of those long seminar tables, Kritika Pandey heard the question that would reorganize her sense of what fiction is for. What if the dead mother in her story were still alive? Or what if the narrator simply was her mother? The moment was, in her own words, genuinely horrifying. It was also the beginning of a conviction she now teaches: write from the mind of someone you are too afraid to humanize, and give even your inner villain a credible, intelligent voice.

That instinct sits at the center of The Alien in Me: Writing Beyond Identity, a four-week online fiction intensive Pandey is leading this July through WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature. In an age when machines can assemble plausible sentences on command, she asks a sharper question: what can a story do that a pattern cannot? Over four Sundays on Zoom, you will learn to handle the passage of time inside a scene, to build escalation and causality without leaning on tidy logic, and to write dialogue that reveals character, delivers information, and moves the plot all at once. You will also practice shifting points of view until your fiction can go where consciousness breaks loose from mere biography. The global winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Pandey makes the slipperiest questions of craft feel not only answerable but thrilling to chase.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Kritika:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Kritika. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Kritika Pandey: I am a person who’s always trying to slip out of personhood, as it were, because I find it exciting in ways that regular, stable, coherent selfhood is not. This is of course an impossible undertaking. But the Sisyphean struggle of never quite managing it makes it worth wanting. I guess this is also why I write. I write because I can never quite say what I want to. And that in-between place of not knowing is the place of freedom.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Kritika Pandey: All language is only ever artificial. It’s a shared system of patterns and predictions we use for surviving our minds, while surrounded by others, without ever reaching the whole truth. What sets us apart from talking machines, therefore, is that human language is messy, inefficient, embodied, and almost always excessive. The job of fiction is to take this excess and turn it into an experience as recognisable as it is strange. So my responsibility as a writer and a teacher of writing is to approach this contradictory relationship with language not as a problem to solve, but as the very reason to tell stories.

“The job of fiction is to take this excess and turn it into an experience as recognisable as it is strange.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Kritika Pandey: They’ll know how to write from where consciousness breaks out of mere biography.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Kritika Pandey: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.” - the opening sentence of Burnt Sugar, by Avni Doshi.

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Kritika Pandey: It was a snowy day in Amherst. We were sitting around one of those long seminar tables, workshopping a story of mine where the protagonist was angry, but the anger didn’t quite know where to go. And in this story, like many others before, the mother was dead. “But what if her mother were still alive, though?” one person said. “Or what if she IS her mother, maybe?” said another. This was a genuinely horrifying moment, as you can tell. But it was also when I first felt the most important instinct that drives my writing today. Write from the mind of someone you’re too afraid to humanize. Give your inner villain a credible and intelligent voice. It is the most sincere act of imagination, and the writer’s first responsibility.

“Write from the mind of someone you’re too afraid to humanize. Give your inner villain a credible and intelligent voice.”

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.

Kritika Pandey: Fragments. The awkward second thought that follows a seemingly complete sentence, only to tell on it, and sometimes even become the real one.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Kritika Pandey: The Dao De Jing. Because if you can muster the courage to take seriously the things the book tells you, even half the time, you stop mistaking domination for power. And in writing, what you force is always less interesting than what you stop interrupting.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Kritika Pandey: “Find your voice” — because it makes voice sound like a lost object that must be retrieved before you can start writing, when really, voice is what happens in the act of writing.

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Kritika Pandey: Writing does not always satisfy you, and that might be part of why you keep writing.

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Kritika Pandey: The jilted and vengeful Miss Havisham!

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Kritika Pandey: Encouraging, but serious about the work.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Kritika Pandey: I hate words, the way Sally hated Harry when she knew it was love!

Pandey does not promise that writing will satisfy you. She suggests instead that the lack of satisfaction is part of why you keep going, and that the most interesting work tends to happen in whatever you stop interrupting. If you have ever wanted to write fiction that resists easy interpretation, that reaches past identity markers toward the stranger truths underneath, consider this your invitation. Bring a finished story, a handful of fragments, or a single restless idea. Over four Sundays this July, you will leave with one fully considered story and a sharper way of seeing every story you write next.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

It’s high spring, almost summer, and the world is in its greening. Gardens are blooming and, everywhere, the plants sing to us.

It’s no secret that I write with plants. Read any of my work – my novel, Leafskin, or my poetry chapbook, The Cemetery Cure – and you’ll find the green leafing into it. I seek inspiration in the flowering of the world around me. I’m perpetually curious about the ways of plants, these sun-transforming creatures who root and reach.

Gardens, these human-cultivated, flora-filled places, fascinate. A garden is where humans and plants meet. In the best of gardens, I see a kind of mutuality. Respect and care crossing species. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about reciprocal relationships between humans and plants in The Serviceberry, describing the way that plants create food as an act of love. Sophie Strand writes about the way nature “courts” us if we take notice: “The world is a love story that wants desperately to include us again.” It is not only that we love nature. Nature, perhaps, loves us back.

And nature is everywhere. We can find gardens in any place we choose to look. In our backyards. In our windowsills of potted plants. In our parks and public gardens. Even in roadside meridians. Here in Portland, we have a famous tiny garden, Mill Ends Park, that holds the record for being the smallest park in the world. We also have the vast Leach Botanical Garden, where I recently spent a rainy day wandering and listening to the sounds of raindrop meeting leaf.

Next month, I’ll be teaching Writing with Plants, Animals, and Ecosystems online. In this course, we’ll write with plants, in and out of the garden. We’ll look at poems from Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, a classic garden collection, and a perpetual favorite of mine. In this book, Glück brings the voices of the garden into her poetry. Flowers speak to us in our own human language. In his essay “In the Key of Green,” John C. Ryan writes of the voices Glück evokes in The Wild Iris, calling them “ecological”:

“a nexus of things, feelings, and memories, voice is ecological; it is neither a property of the flower, nor of the poet-supplicant, nor the garden itself, but of their interdependencies and points of contact.”

Glück’s flowers are not speaking in personifications, but, rather, in interconnections. This is what I love most about this book: it is a record of the human and the nonhuman reaching toward each other.

It is not easy, as a human writer, to bring plants into our work without overly imposing our humanness on them. When we try to process observations with our human brains and render them in our human languages, we inevitably person them. The trick, I’ve found, is to both accept this and work against it, to try to write from within the tension of writing what we cannot truly comprehend. The result can feel like an uncanny combination of specific concrete detail and a kind of mystical unknowing. The title poem of Glück’s collection describes the iris awakening after winter, bringing our knowledge of this plant–that it overwinters in a bulb, deep in the soil and emerges in the spring–into an imaginative realm rendered through human emotion and experience. The poem describes the “voice” of the emerging iris, the plant’s feeling of being able to “speak” again, in human terms, directly addressing the human reader:

“You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:”

In this stanza, the plant reaches toward us, trying to render experience in our language and realms of understanding. Then the poem turns. The flower blossoms, but is no longer telling us of human speech. Instead, we have water, a plant element, but not just water, seawater. The iris reaches outward, into the ecosystem, to find the image to hold the experience of blossoming.

“from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.”

This last stanza moves us outward from the human into the more-than-human, giving us a clear resolution to the process of the iris’s emergence in an uncanny image where petals become saltwater and shadow.

I love the way this final image feels. It’s strangeness, it’s beauty, and the way it finds a language, not of words, but of water, reaching for something that exists both outside of the human and plant lexicon (a fountain) and, elementally, inside human and plant bodies (water).

This poem works with the iris, from a place of deep knowledge and observation. It inhabits a space of connection between the writer and the plant. Though we, as humans, can never truly render the experience of another species, we can write from the space of reaching toward it. And in that reaching, in that desire for connection, wonder is born.

An Exercise for Plant Writing

For this exercise, you don’t need to have your own garden. You can do this in a park or public garden, in your weed-overtaken backyard, or even at the bus stop with a dandelion coming up through the sidewalk. This also works in your apartment with a potted plant. If no actual plant is possible, you can even do this with images or scents that evoke the plant for you.

• Choose a plant to work with. This may be a plant you know or plant you have just encountered. Choose the plant who draws you, who you feel most curious about or connected with in the moment.

• If you are able, it can be helpful to sit with this plant while you do this exercise. You can also imagine this plant in your mind. Use your senses to observe. What does the plant look like? What does it feel like, smell like? Does it have flowers? Leaves? What colors?

• At this point, you may find yourself inspired to write. Go with it. Sometimes we find a connection with a plant and need to follow the path of intuition rather than logic. At any point in this process, if inspiration comes, if the plant is speaking to you, just go write. You can always come back to the process later to expand or deepen your work.

• Consider this plant, their shapes, their growth, their colors, their scent. What do you know about them? This may be from firsthand experience interacting with them, from stories, memories, science, or folklore you associate with them, or from what you imagine or intuit about them. Make notes about what you know or imagine.

• Research. Learn something new about this plant. I like to search for the plant online and look them up in some of my plant books. When I research, I approach from both scientific and folkloric angles. I want to know how the plant works and also what stories people have gathered around the plant over time.

• Let this plant guide your work in some way. You might try writing a poem to or about the plant. You might mimic the plant’s growth with the shape of your work. You might write a story about a human character experiencing something akin to something the plant experiences. You might rewrite a folktale that features this plant. Or you may simply see where the words take you while you are thinking of this plant.

• Once you have written something, if you are working with a specific plant you know and are able to be physically near, you might try reading it aloud to them.

If you’d like to read more about writing with plants, I’ve detailed my own process of “Writing with Daffodils” on my Substack, Writing Toward Nature.

Miranda Schmidt’s whole practice rests on a simple, radical idea: that wonder is born in the reaching, in the desire to connect with a life we can never fully know. If that idea pulls at you, you can carry it well past a single exercise. In Writing with Plants, Animals, and Ecosystems, Schmidt’s six-week generative workshop beginning July 6, 2026, you’ll write six new pieces alongside gardens, pets, animals, trees, and ecosystems, in the company of writers from every genre and level. Find a plant, follow it onto the page, and see where the reaching takes you.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Cara Benson does not kill her darlings. When a sentence she loves stops earning its keep, she tucks it into a separate document she calls “cuttings” and lets it nap, ready to be woken when the right piece comes along. It is a telling habit for a writer about to teach a seminar on cutting, because Benson’s real subject is not deletion for its own sake. It is momentum: the craft of putting words on the page that make a reader hungry for the next ones.

That instinct shapes Leave Out the Part that Readers Tend to Skip, a one-day online seminar built around Elmore Leonard’s most famous rule for writing. At WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Benson guides writers of every level and genre through published examples of forward propulsion, then turns them loose on their own pages. You will leave with three concrete things: a sharper eye for the passages readers tend to skim, revision strategies for cutting that dead weight without losing your voice, and at least one new section of writing generated live during the session.

Benson is the author of the memoir An Armsfull of Birds, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and a winner of the bpNichol Award. Here is what she had to say about overexplaining, fly fishing, and the worst writing advice that sounds smart.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Cara:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Cara. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Cara Benson: Hello writers! I’m Cara. I have a literary memoir newly out that I’ve been told is also a page turner. I got my MFA in poetry from Goddard College and have been writing, teaching writing, and working one-on-one with writers for decades. I love it—my writer’s life. I read, write, talk about both with other writers, and go hiking like my life depends on it (because it does).

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Cara Benson: Not to be redundant with the class title, but that Elmore Leonard advice is such a keeper. It is so liberating to realize that I can just cut the dead weight in my text! I have found that this leaves room for more lively writing to materialize. I can now typically feel when I’m overexplaining something to a reader and gently encourage myself to quit it.

I have spent a lot of time and energy justifying why a particular paragraph or passage should stay in a piece and being afraid of the gaping holes that removing it will leave behind. I still do it – get defensive with myself or with editors about cutting material – but I am much quicker to let it go now. I think practice and experience really do help in this regard.

“It is so liberating to realize that I can just cut the dead weight in my text! I have found that this leaves room for more lively writing to materialize.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Cara Benson: Students will come away from this class with a strengthened sense of what weighs material down and how to get things moving again.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Cara Benson: “Having turned a somersault round a twig and hung on to it upside down with one foot, swinging the other in the air, also vigorously pulled off leaves and chucked them down, he finally hammered the bark with a loud tattoo then flew off, never again taking the slightest interest in the fledglings or the nesting-hole.” Len Howard, Birds As Individuals (pg 16)

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Cara Benson: A story of mine was being workshopped at a prestigious writing institute, so of course I was nervous. There were twelve of us in the room, and I was supposed to remain silent while they discussed my work, with the exception of reading a snippet of the story aloud to kick off the conversation.

I read my portion and sat back in my chair, waiting to be told to get a day job. The room went silent, as it can, and then one woman read a short sentence from my story out loud: “No robe.” I’d written it to describe how a judge had shown up unexpectedly to a personal matter for one of the characters who’d appeared in his courtroom. She was blown away. “You can just do that? Say it so simply?” I’ll never forget her reaction, and this was decades ago! Clearly, that was a revelation for her. And it’s something I still remind myself of when I’m about to get bogged down. “No robe,” I’ll say to myself.

I never did anything with that story – it needed work – but it proved useful for at least two writers.

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.

Cara Benson: I’m always obsessed with the rhythm of sentences, the way our words can move across the page like a fly fishing line released from the rod then drawn back, only to be cast out across the water again. Or – plunk. Drop it like an anchor.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Cara Benson: The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender. Everyone should read this book. I think the title says it all, but writers especially will benefit from understanding how big tech is trying to make it seem that AI taking over our lives and vocations is inevitable, when that is not the case.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Cara Benson: “Kill your darlings.” Which actually seems like I would love that, having written about cutting material as a liberatory practice. But my darlings? I don’t kill them. I tuck them carefully into another document I call “cuttings” and leave them there for a nap. I may need to wake them up later, whether for the piece I took them from or for something else down the road.

(Full disclosure: I was just interviewed for a site called Dead Darlings. And I even used that phrase on some of the material that I cut from my memoir! Writing is also about becoming comfortable with contradictions, is it not?)

“But my darlings? I don’t kill them. I tuck them carefully into another document I call “cuttings” and leave them there for a nap.”

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Cara Benson: I don’t know that other writing classes don’t say this, but it can seem unpopular to say that there are zero guarantees of being satisfied with a writing life. Writing itself is a lot of work. It can be lonely and bring little reward. You can struggle to pay the bills from the money you might bring in from the actual writing. That said, there’s nothing else I’d rather do with my life than be a writer.

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Cara Benson: I was a guarded, crusty teenager when I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. It wrecked me. A few years later when I moved to New York City to go to film school, I went on a huge Hemingway tear. I finished A Farewell to Arms in my tiny bathroom because that was the brightest light in the apartment and my eyes were failing from the strain of reading for hours straight, literally not able to put the book down. I know he’s become problematic for a variety of good reasons. But having a partner who also died by suicide, I want to give Hem some grace. And the man sure could write.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Cara Benson: I’m a big fan of using the Robert Lowell line “Yet why not say what happened?” to encourage writers to let go of feeling like they need to be writerly, to be someone other than who they are.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Cara Benson: I have no clue what would surprise them! We’re all so unique.

That last line is the whole philosophy in miniature. Benson’s approach comes down to trust: trust that your reader is smart, that your darlings can wait in their nap drawer, and that the strongest writing happens when you stop performing and simply say what happened. If you want to learn how to spot the parts readers skip and replace them with momentum, this is your seminar. Spend one evening with Cara Benson this July and walk away with sharper instincts, practical revision tools, and new pages of your own. Your reader is waiting. Do not make them skim.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

One of the things I love about short stories is the way they can make a single episode, an incident from a person’s life signify, filling it with meaning. This is not to say, of course, that short stories are incidental. In the best stories, the stakes are high, and there’s nothing incidental about them.

In the barest outlines of its plot, Gina Berriault’s “Bastille Day” seems incidental. A woman turning forty goes out by herself to celebrate at a dive bar in a gentrifying neighborhood in San Francisco. Teresa used to go to this same bar when she was younger and involved with radical political causes, and she finds herself looking around for faces she might recognize from that old crowd. Instead, while there, she befriends an older, “fairy tale woman,” promising to walk her home, so the older woman’s husband doesn’t think she’s been out with another man.

Finally, Teresa does run into someone she knew from her political days. Once upon a time, she might have been attracted to Mayer, who was a ship’s steward who delivered the union newspaper to Teresa’s organization. When the bar closes, he leaves with her. Together, they walk the fairy tale woman home. Having realized she’s missed her bus, Teresa goes to Mayer’s place, where she lies down—fully clothed—on his bed. At the end of the story, she is lying “as close to the wall as she can,” listening to his breathing as he falls asleep in his chair.

Even this brief synopsis ought to leave us with one glaring question, namely, why is this woman going out alone on her fortieth birthday? Why is she not celebrating with her husband, with their friends? As the story reveals in her interaction with Mayer, Teresa is acting out of a deep longing. She often does this, going out by herself, searching for something or someone. Unhappy with her husband, an academic who keeps changing fields, who she might be supporting, she is lonely, regretting her life choices, wondering at their old friends who have become “prosperous,” and disappointed with both her own life and the fact she and the people she was close to didn’t have the political impact they wished to have.

This, I think, is closer to the real plot of the story. As much as the synopsis above reveals, it doesn’t get to the question of motive. And plot is all about causation, about why we do things. For instance, does Teresa miss her bus home intentionally, or is it a lapse that reflects her ambivalence about her marriage, about her husband and their life together? The latter, I suspect—an ambivalence reflected in what she tells Mayer in the bar when he asks about Ralph, who he also once knew:

“I’m out on the town,’ Teresa told him. “I told Ralph I wasn’t coming home till late. No, I didn’t tell him. I’ll tell him when I get back.”

Then, once they have walked the older woman home, Teresa confesses that she has missed her bus:

They walked back the way they had come, unspeaking, Teresa stumbling only once, so far. She had no direction now. “I can’t make it home,” she said. “Over the bridge to Berkeley and another bus stop in the heart of darkness. Nothing’s running this time of night. Or far between. I think I’m scared.”

These are not—to my ears—the words of a woman who has planned anything, but rather of someone who finds herself in a predicament because she is acting out of desires that she hasn’t articulated to herself.

This idea of plot is not unrelated, I don’t think, to the idea of a container. The story takes place over the course of a single night. With great empathy but also without pity, Berriault shows us Teresa taking stock of her life. The choice Berriault makes in the first sentence of the story sets the parameters of the rest of the action, acting as a seed for what follows: “Just after one o’clock Teresa came to the San Gotardo, the last bar on her round of bars on the night of her fortieth birthday, July 14, 1970.”

That narrative specificity is wonderful. And we see it in the rest of the story as Berriault describes the bar and the neighborhood it’s in:

Only a few of the old bars were left in this Italian neighborhood that was taken over now by the manic facades of nightclubs where nude girls danced, and whenever she came in here now she wondered if anyone present had been among the customers years ago and grown unrecognizable. On the high ceiling the paint was the same antique ivory, and behind the bar the lineup of Fun Land prizes seemed the same. The Kewpie doll, the blue plush dog, the plaster Popeye. The flowerpot, wrapped in foil, held wax flowers in an era of plastic ones, and the two little girls in the photo garlanded with a paper lei were women now.

We learn early on that Teresa has been coming to this bar—presumably in North Beach, though it strikes me that the story might just as easily be set in the present day in the Tenderloin—for twenty years. It’s worth lingering over those evocative phrases, both the specific details, and also the idea that the old faces might have “grown unrecognizable,” a poignant thought on one’s fortieth birthday. But as loaded with details like this as the story is, and with a bar full of broken-down specimens gracing its first few pages—a woman ranting about William Randolph Hearst, two people who get in a barfight—Berriault controls our attention, keeping our eyes focused on what’s important: there are only three named characters in the story, Teresa, Mayer, and Teresa’s husband Ralph.

I hate using the word perfect to describe stories. As a writer, I find the idea of perfection reductive and limiting, if not to say paralyzing. And I don’t believe in it. There’s no such thing as a story that doesn’t have holes in it, little threads one might pull to tease the whole thing apart. And the holes, the absences, the unanswered questions, they’re so often what makes short fiction compelling. But I think we can learn so much from this story, and from thinking in an advanced short story workshop about these fundamental questions, the issues of plot, of a container, and what they can teach us about narrative and the questions our stories are asking.

If reading a story this closely is the kind of work that excites you, this is the work we do together in my Advanced Short Fiction Workshop. We meet Mondays from 8 to 10 PM Eastern beginning June 22, 2026, run for eight weeks over Zoom, and keep the room small, capped at eight writers, so every manuscript gets sustained attention. You will get feedback on two of your own stories and leave with a sharper sense of why your stories stop where they stop. I would love to read your work and to think alongside you about the questions your fiction is asking.

About the Instructor

Tom Andes wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books, 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, among many others. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a musician and freelance editor. Southern Crescent Recording Co. re-released his acclaimed EPs on vinyl under the title The Ones That Brought You Home in 2025. You can learn more about Tom in our Meet the Teaching Artist series, and find more of our fiction offerings on the Fiction Classes page.

About WritingWorkshops.com

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Episode 383 of This Podcast Will Change Your Life went live this week. Ben Tanzer, the host, has been recording these conversations since 2011, and he has a way of drawing stories out of his guests that don’t appear anywhere else. This time the guest is Blake Kimzey, founder and executive director of WritingWorkshops.com. The conversation runs the full arc: from a cubicle in Dallas to a basement classroom in a Methodist church, from a Failure Resume to a global writing community of more than thirty thousand students.

The full episode is worth your time. What follows is a short orientation to what you’ll hear, with context drawn from a decade of interviews Blake has given about why WritingWorkshops.com exists and how it grew.

Why this conversation, and why now?

Tanzer’s questions tend to look small on paper and open wide once you start answering. He asks about the work, the doubt, the people who taught his guest how to keep going. Blake has given interviews for nearly a decade now. There was Lynne Golodner on the Make Meaning podcast, John Milas at SmokeLong Quarterly, a profile in Poets & Writers Magazine, write-ups in the Lakewood/East Dallas Advocate and Voyage Dallas. He has told versions of the WritingWorkshops origin story in print and in conversation.

This one is different because Tanzer is. From the outside, the school looks inevitable. The conversation Tanzer pulls out of Blake is a reminder that it was never inevitable and that the most important parts of how it was built are the ones a casual observer would never see.

What does it look like when a writing school starts in a church basement?

The first four classes of what was then called Writing Workshops Dallas met in the basement of a Methodist church in 2017. Blake was working long weeks and overtime at an engineering firm. He had been teaching as an adjunct at UT-Dallas in the evenings, and a student had asked if he could audit one of Blake’s classes. The administration said no. That refusal became the founding moment. Blake decided to build a writing school that would say yes.

The first classroom was a church basement turned co-working space. He handled the registrations, answered the student emails, and, in the Texas summers, turned on the oscillating fans before students arrived so the classroom would be cool enough to meet in. He still calls himself the janitor of WritingWorkshops.com. He says it with affection. People who have built something they love tend to remember the unglamorous tasks fondly, because the unglamorous tasks are how the thing got built in the first place.

The seed for the school had been planted two years earlier. Blake heard a podcast in 2015 in which a guest said you have to love where you live, and if something is missing where you live, you have to build it yourself. He chewed on that advice for two years before opening the door for that first class of students.

Hope and courage: the two books that became a mission

In the conversation with Tanzer, Blake recounts telling his father he wanted to be a writer. The response was unexpected. His father gave him two books. One was called The Writer’s Book of Hope. The other was called The Writer’s Book of Courage. Those twin ideas, hope and courage, became the guiding lights of WritingWorkshops.com. The school exists to give writers the confidence to put their authentic selves onto the page. Not the version that wins. Not the version that pleases. The real one.

It is a generous frame for a writing school, and not a sentimental one. Anyone who has tried to put their authentic self on the page knows how much courage that takes. Sustaining a writing life across years asks an equal amount of hope. The phrase you hear from Blake again and again, in the Tanzer episode and in nearly every interview he has given since 2017, is some version of this: writers don’t need motivation; they need community. Community is what turns isolated hope into actual momentum.

“We started WritingWorkshops.com to give writers the confidence to put their authentic selves onto the page, and to give them a community of writers around the table who take their work as seriously as their own.”

Blake Kimzey, Founder & Executive Director, WritingWorkshops.com

What’s a “Failure Resume,” and why does Blake talk about his?

Blake keeps a Failure Resume.

The phrase has been around in entrepreneurship circles for years. Blake uses it the way it was meant to be used, as a counterweight to the survivorship bias that warps how writers see other writers’ careers. He has two unpublished novels sitting in a drawer. The list of rejections he has collected from journals, agents, residencies, and fellowships is long enough to fill a notebook. Stories he wrote years ago found homes at Tin House and McSweeney’s and were adapted for broadcast on NPR; others he believed in went nowhere, despite years of revision.

The episode dwells on this honestly. Most of what writers see online is the highlight reel: book deals, blurbs, cover reveals, awards. What writers rarely see is the part Blake describes openly in the Tanzer interview. The work that didn’t land. The years it took to learn to simply keep moving forward. The way teaching helped him understand his own writing life better than another year of trying to publish in private would have.

He calls this failing publicly. The phrase sounds rough, but the practice is gentle. If a writer at the start of their career can see that the founder of the school they are looking into has two novels in a drawer and shows up for class anyway, they may be more willing to draft the messy first chapter that becomes their own first book. Part of what the Tanzer episode does is make the unseen part of the writing life visible.

From four classes to a global community of writers

What started in a church basement now runs 30 to 40 classes a month and reaches writers on 6 continents. WritingWorkshops.com is the official education partner of Electric Literature. The destination retreat program has expanded to Paris, Dublin, Iceland, Tuscany, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Portland, and Mackinac Island. There is now an alternative to the traditional MFA, called IndieMFA, designed for writers who want the deep mentorship of an MFA without the cost or the two-year campus relocation. More than thirty thousand writers have studied with us.

The faculty list reads like a wish list. There are National Book Award finalists and Pulitzer nominees, New York Times bestsellers, and writers with credits at The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Paris Review, and McSweeney’s. Among them are Ramona Ausubel, Marie-Helene Bertino, Brandon Hobson, Mira Ptacin, Morgan Talty, Isaac Fitzgerald, Chloé Cooper Jones, Stewart O’Nan, Karen E. Bender, Chloe Caldwell, Halimah Marcus, Mary South, Ethan Joella, Diana Spechler, Elissa Bassist, Thao Thai, Kelly Luce, Omer Friedlander, and dozens more.

The alumni outcomes are more telling. Alumni have signed with literary agents, published debut novels and story collections, been selected for the TODAY show book club with Jenna Bush Hager, won the Halifax Prize from American Short Fiction and the Mary McCarthy Prize from Sarabande Books, and earned admission to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Michener Center, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia. The Tanzer episode gets at why this list exists, and what the school has been doing to make outcomes like these more accessible to writers who would once have been priced or geographically locked out of them.

Why this episode is worth your full attention

If you are a writer at the start of something, this conversation will sound like a description of your own life. Writers in the middle of something that isn’t working will hear how someone they respect made peace with a Failure Resume of his own. Anyone weighing whether a writing community could move their work forward in ways solitude has not will recognize, in this episode, one of the most honest arguments for it we know how to make.

Ben Tanzer is also returning to WritingWorkshops.com on September 29th, 2026, to teach his seminar Introducing the Power of Hope to Your Writing Process. The seminar is the practical companion to the podcast conversation. Tanzer brings nearly three decades of experience helping writers, authors, and creative professionals get unstuck and back to the page, and the class teaches the three pillars of hope (goal setting, pathways, and willpower) as a working method. You can browse Ben’s full slate of classes at WritingWorkshops.com on his instructor page.

Blake Kimzey is the Founder and Executive Director of WritingWorkshops.com. His collection Families Among Us (Black Lawrence Press) received advance praise from Roxane Gay, Ramona Ausubel, and Matt Bell. His work has been adapted for NPR and published in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Longform, VICE, and over 70 other literary journals. Blake is a graduate of the MFA program at UC Irvine and received an Emerging Writer Grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.

He co-wrote a dramatic WWII film about Polish underground hero Jan Karski, set for production in 2027, and a film adaptation of his short story “A Family Among Us” is currently in development. Blake moderated the August 2025 Big Conversation for The Writer’s Chronicle on emerging alternatives to traditional creative writing education. He has been awarded fellowships from The Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center and has taught at SMU, UT-Dallas, and UC Irvine.

About WritingWorkshops.com

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Courtney Kocak will tell you that beginning a memoir and finishing one are two entirely different skills. Beginning means generating raw material and quieting your inner critic. Finishing means shaping that material into something cohesive, resonant, and worth rereading. She learned the difference the hard way while writing her debut memoir-in-essays, Girl Gone Wild, and now she wants to spare other writers the years she spent waiting for permission to start.

That conviction is the engine behind the 12 Months to a Full Memoir in Essays Incubator, an MFA-level program offered through WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature. Across 26 Zoom sessions and four one-on-one meetings with Courtney, you will generate more than 52,000 words, revise individual essays until they can stand on their own, and learn how a gathering of essays accumulates into a book that understands itself.

A writer, podcaster, and comedian who came to writing at 27 after a first life as an actress, Courtney teaches the way she works: she breaks overwhelming creative problems into clear, actionable steps. Expect to move past perfectionism and writer’s block, to build a working table of contents and a revision roadmap, and to find the kind of accountability that actually carries a manuscript across the finish line. As she puts it, writing is solitary, but finishing a book is more collaborative than most people realize.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Courtney:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Courtney. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Courtney Kocak: I’m terrible at small talk, but I’m great at having super deep conversations with strangers, which makes me a terrific podcaster. I’m endlessly curious about people—why they do what they do, what they’re ashamed of, what they long for, what they care about most. I’m also a dog mom of two pit mixes—I love rescue dogs so much. And I’m addicted to long walks. Walking is a huge part of my creative process. That’s how I get the juices flowing between writing sprints.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Courtney Kocak: I knew that I wanted to write a memoir someday, but someday kept getting delayed further and further into the future because I had no idea how to get started. I think a lot of aspiring memoirists get stuck waiting for some magical knowledge they don’t have yet—assuming published authors just sit down and know the secrets of how to painlessly produce a book. But for me, the biggest breakthrough was realizing that writing a memoir is actually a zig-zagging process of accumulation, experimentation, and revision. It’s hard, but entirely possible. Working on my debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, taught me a ton of lessons—not just about writing and publishing, but about dedication, structure, tension, revision, emotional honesty, and what it takes to finish a big creative project. This class exists because I want to demystify that process for other writers. I want students to understand that you do not need to have everything figured out before you start. You just need tools, structure, accountability, feedback, and enough support to keep going when the going gets hard.

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Courtney Kocak: I want students to walk away understanding how to start AND how to finish their memoir manuscript. Those are two completely different skills. Beginning is about generating new material and ignoring your inner critic; finishing is about learning how to elevate and shape that material into something cohesive, dynamic, and emotionally resonant.

We’ll work on moving past writer’s block and perfectionism in service of writing new pages. We’ll also spend a lot of time focused on scene craft, reflection, embodiment, structure, and themes. Revision is where a draft transforms from a series of events into something worth reading and remembering. My goal is for students to leave with a much stronger ability to fully express an experience on the page.

“Revision is where a draft transforms from a series of events into something worth reading and remembering.”

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Courtney Kocak: David Grann opens The Wager with: “The only impartial witness was the sun.” So good!

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Courtney Kocak: A few weeks ago, I taught a memoir class over Zoom where I guided students through a series of writing prompts designed specifically to pull out sensory details and embodiment in their scenes. Instead of just saying “add more detail,” I broke the process down step-by-step: What did the room smell like? What was happening in the body? How was the dialogue physically delivered? What tiny gestures carried emotional meaning?

We did several writing sprints, and afterward students shared what they’d written. Where they landed was honestly kind of astonishing. Suddenly the scenes felt cinematic and textured. Several students were beaming after they read their work aloud because they could feel the shift themselves. That’s one of my favorite things about teaching—watching the real-time elevation of someone’s artistic skills is so thrilling and rewarding.

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, just a small, specific technique.

Courtney Kocak: I’m fully obsessed with embodiment right now. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned during the final revisions of Girl Gone Wild. The earlier drafts were focused on excavating the story itself: drawing out the plot and themes, figuring out the emotional arc, and understanding what the book was really about. But the later drafts became much more about how experience was physically expressed.

How was a line of dialogue actually delivered? What was happening in the narrator’s body? Once I started thinking this way, it completely transformed my writing. Embodiment adds an entirely new layer of meaning and emotional depth because readers don’t just understand the scene intellectually—they feel it. Now I spend a lot of time helping students learn how to access that same level of specificity and dimensionality in their own work.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Courtney Kocak: The last book that I gave multiple people as gifts was The Wager by David Grann. It’s so propulsive, immersive, and incredibly well-researched, but what really stuck with me is how distinct the authorial voice is. You can feel the intelligence and obsession behind every page. It’s one of those books that reminds you nonfiction can be incredibly rigorous while still feeling cinematic and compulsively readable.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Courtney Kocak: “Show, don’t tell” can absolutely be useful advice, but I think it can be taken too rigidly. Sometimes you just need to tell the reader what’s happening. There’s no prize for making your work unnecessarily oblique or burying what you’re trying to say in subtext. Good writing is about clarity and balance. Scene and summary serve different purposes, and learning when to use each is part of becoming a stronger writer.

“There’s no prize for making your work unnecessarily oblique or burying what you’re trying to say in subtext.”

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Courtney Kocak: Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but writing a book takes a village. Mine was the only name on the cover of Girl Gone Wild, but the book wouldn’t exist without the teachers, classmates, workshop peers, editors, and friends who pushed the work further through feedback and encouragement. Writing is solitary, but finishing a book is more collaborative than most people realize.

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Courtney Kocak: Cheryl Strayed was and still is my literary crush. I love her plainspoken prose. She’s so wise. Reading Tiny Beautiful Things and Wild were life-changing for me. Those books made me want to become a memoirist.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Courtney Kocak: I boil overwhelming creative problems down into clear, actionable steps so my students can create their best art.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Courtney Kocak: I’m a pretty open book, so I’m not sure there’s much that would surprise them, but I like to tell my students that I actually started out as an actress. I didn’t pivot to writing until I was 27, which I now think was a gift. Coming to writing later in life meant I had more experiences to draw from, more emotional maturity, and more perspective and wisdom. A lot of my students worry they’re starting too late, but lived experience is one of the greatest assets a memoirist can have.

Courtney’s own path is the best argument for her class: she did not start writing until 27, and she counts that late arrival as an advantage rather than a handicap. If you have been telling yourself you are too late, or too unsure of the process, or simply waiting to feel ready, this is the year to begin. Over twelve months, inside a small cohort and alongside a teacher who has finished the very book you are trying to write, you can turn a folder of loose essays into a manuscript that knows exactly what it wants to be.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Michael Costaris knows exactly when he stops reading your story. As Fiction Editor at The Adroit Journal, he has spent years sifting through thousands of submissions, and he’ll tell you plainly: most writers lose him before the end of the first paragraph. Not because the writing is bad, necessarily, but because the opening hasn’t earned his attention.

That bluntness is what makes his upcoming Premise to Publish: Fiction Writing Seminar so valuable. This three-hour online seminar moves through three concentrated segments: how to distinguish a viable short story premise from a novel-length idea; the craft moves that get a story past the slush pile (precision in description, disciplined pacing, openings that hook); and the business of literary publishing, from identifying strategically valuable magazines to writing a cover letter that doesn’t sabotage you.

Costaris, whose fiction has appeared in The Baffler, Maudlin House, X-R-A-Y, and Toronto Journal, is also a regular contributor to Becky Tuch’s LitMag News and a certified teacher with fifteen years of classroom experience. He reads as an editor and writes as someone whose first publication was rejected 78 times before it found a home. Students will leave with a workshopped opening line, a logline-based story outline borrowed from screenwriting, a cover letter template, and a personalized list of magazines suited to their work. With readings from Joshua Ferris and Emma Cline on the syllabus, this seminar is built for beginning and intermediate fiction writers ready to stop guessing and start submitting with a plan.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Michael:

Meet the Teaching Artist: Michael Costaris

Writing Workshops: Hi, Michael. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Michael Costaris: My name is Michael Costaris. I’m currently working as Fiction Editor at the Adroit Journal. I’m a father of two young children and, mostly during naps, write fiction and my novel-in-progress. I began writing prose in a bizarre situation when a literary agent read a screenplay of mine and asked if I’d turn it into a novel. It never sold (and was awful), but I fell in love with the form.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Michael Costaris: Something I wish I had understood earlier in my writing life is that there is no single achievement that will make one feel like a success.

I have friends at every stage of the writing journey and each of us is in the same boat. Those without agents dream of landing one. Those with agents dream of selling their book. Those who’ve sold a book want a bestseller and so on. Writing can, if you let it, lead to endless disappointment, because this is a pursuit where every success is preceded by hundreds of rejections. My first publication, in The Baffler, was rejected 78 times, some from journals I’d never even heard of but sent to anyway. It is why, as a writer, it is so important to be honest about what you want and why you want it. If your goal is simply to get published, that’s very achievable. There are thousands of journals out there, and many who will take a chance on new, sometimes even raw work. If your goal is to be published in The New Yorker, that’s less achievable, but not impossible.

This class will address both aspects of the writing world. The first half will tackle the craft, exploring the countless mistakes writers make that weaken stories and lead to rejection. The second half will look at the business side. In these three hours we will look to sharpen your skills and, more importantly, define your goals and develop a strategy that will help you place your work in the journals that will make you happy.

“There comes a point in every submission cycle when, bleary-eyed after hundreds, often thousands, of stories, I abandon any sane order and begin flipping through the slush pile. Here I am reading the cover letter, title and the opening paragraph. My goal is simple. I want to be pulled in.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Michael Costaris: Working as an editor helped me learn the importance of first impressions in writing. Specifically, the important combination of a cover letter and opening line.

There comes a point in every submission cycle when, bleary-eyed after hundreds, often thousands, of stories, I abandon any sane order and begin flipping through the slush pile. Here I am reading the cover letter, title, and the opening paragraph. My goal is simple. I want to be pulled in. When that happens, I’m ecstatic, because that is all I (and, I suspect, most editors) want: to feel a genuine desire to read the work we’re obligated to read.

When a piece grabs me, I read from a position of gratitude. I assume it’s a strong story and wait to be disproven. Contrarily, when I lose interest from a dull opening or bizarre cover letter, the story is immediately evaluated and working its way out of a hole.

In the craft portion of the class, we will focus extensively on what makes a good opening at the prose level, specifically how mystery can be used to hook a reader. On the business side, we will examine the cover letter, a necessary aspect of submitting and one many writers get wrong. Students will leave with a workshopped opening line and a template for the ideal cover letter.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Michael Costaris: “We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever” — Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop—one you were teaching or one you took as a student—where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Michael Costaris: In a previous workshop I ran we performed an exercise (which will be repeated in this class) where each student presented a logline for a story in progress.

A logline is a screenwriting term where a script is pitched in its simplest form, often a single sentence. The goal of the exercise is to dilute a story to its essence, to highlight its theme/purpose. In this exercise the loglines were then compared to the opening sentence of their story and many students were shocked to see how their openings had nothing to do with their loglines. A student writing a story about career dissatisfaction opened their story with a half-page description about an ex-boyfriend. Short fiction, as an art form, is about doing the absolute maximum with the bare minimum. This makes it essential that every element of a story — the character, voice, POV, word choice, tone, and mood— runs tightly along a thematic spine. This loglining exercise highlighted to many students how much waste was in their story, how they diverted away from their intention and lost their meaning.

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept—a small, specific technique.

Michael Costaris: This is something I borrow from screenwriting, the concept of the opening image, a single shot that contains the entirety of the story within it. Think Parasite‘s opening shot of the family, submerged in a basement apartment, showing their physical place in the world. I’ve been trying to imbue my opening lines with a similar kind of weight — writing something which immediately grounds the work’s theme, or character, or setting in a single sentence.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Michael Costaris: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. This is a collection of stories where each subsequent entry became my new, all time favourite. The fact that Ahegao, which builds to a nearly ten-page description of the main character’s pornographic fantasy, appeared in The Paris Review is proof that no story is too strange, no subject matter too taboo to succeed at the highest of levels.

“Don’t sacrifice your vision, but make deliberate craft choices. Writing to maximize reader engagement. Write to be read.”

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Michael Costaris: Many established writers, in interviews and even craft courses offer a notion that writers should follow instinct and ignore the reader in service of vision. Write what your heart tells you to write, and the readership will follow. I hate that advice. It could be true for the small tier of writers with guaranteed readership, people placing work through agents, relationships, or name recognition, but when you rely on the slush pile you need to earn attention. Many editors make their decisions within the first paragraph. Some even on the first line. Don’t sacrifice your vision, but make deliberate craft choices. Write to maximize reader engagement. Write to be read.

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Michael Costaris: …it isn’t difficult to get your work published. There is a vast network of journals that have high acceptance rates. There are dozens of tools that help you find these journals and many of these have a strong dedicated readership and even come out in print. The writing world has never been more accessible than it is right now.

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Michael Costaris: Kazuo Ishiguro. I was a teenager and snatched Never Let Me Go off my parent’s bookshelf and never looked back. I love that he writes a version of the same novel each time without it ever becoming stale.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe—in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Michael Costaris: Everyone is different — it’s my job to adapt.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Michael Costaris: I’m a licensed teacher with a specialty in Math and Science. I took my first English course in my third year of University and have never taken an MFA.

Join Michael in Premise to Publish

A math and science teacher who never took an MFA, now editing one of the country’s most respected literary journals? That unusual path is exactly what makes Costaris’s teaching so practical. He learned the craft not through institutional channels but through the slush pile: reading thousands of stories, accumulating 78 rejections, and paying close attention to what separates a story that gets read from one that doesn’t. This seminar distills fifteen years of teaching and editorial insight into a single intensive session. If you’re ready to move from premise to publication, this is where you start.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

The first sentence of A Harvest of Hearts, the cozy fantasy debut by Andrea Eames, runs like this: “They said that magic, real magic, not the shite that the hedge-witches peddled with all their little bags of powders and herbs, could only be performed in exchange for a human heart.”

It is the line literary agent Sam Farkas calls haunting, the one she returns to as a small master class in tone. Notice what it does. It places us inside a familiar fairytale ecosystem, complete with witches, magic, and payment in flesh, and then cracks the spell with a single profane word. That collision of the timeless and the irreverent is, in a way, the entire promise of a great retelling.

It is also why Sam is the right person to teach Retellings: Fairytales & Myths in Fiction at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature.

As global rights director and literary agent at Jill Grinberg Literary Management, Sam helps books find homes around the world, which means she has a finely tuned ear for what feels fresh on the page and what reads as derivative.

Her workshop offers writers something most retelling classes do not: the agent’s eye. Students will leave with concrete tools for generating and pressure-testing ideas, a working method for finding the layered “deeper about” of any story they choose to reimagine, and a clearer sense of what makes a retelling marketable to editors and readers alike.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Sam:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Sam. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Sam Farkas: Hi! I’m Sam, a literary agent and global rights director (which means I help books find homes around the world). I live in New York City with my husband and two cats, Bask and Paprika.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Sam Farkas: I wish someone had taught me idea generation. There’s this myth with any kind of art that inspiration just strikes, an idea more or less fully formed, but that hasn’t been my experience. Sometimes you have to actively work toward coming up with good ideas (which also means learning to recognize bad ones. It’s okay, we all have bad ideas!). My goal with this class is to give writers tools for honing their ideas and discovering new ones.

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Sam Farkas: They will know how to workshop and refine their idea into one that feels fresh and, importantly, marketable.

“Good stories are layered. They are about something, but they are also about something else (often multiple things!).”

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Sam Farkas: I’m continuously haunted by the first sentence of my client Andrea Eames’s novel A Harvest of Hearts: “They said that magic, real magic, not the shite that the hedge-witches peddled with all their little bags of powders and herbs, could only be performed in exchange for a human heart.” I love how it immediately establishes the tone of the book, and how it blends a classic fairytale feeling with “shite.”

Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?

Sam Farkas: I had a writing teacher in college who used to ask in regards to our writing, “What’s the About? And more importantly, what’s the Deeper About?” For some reason, talking about theme that way caused a lightbulb moment for all of us in that class: good stories are layered. They are about something, but they are also about something else (often multiple things!)

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.

Sam Farkas: Enter late, exit early. It’s basic advice, not at all groundbreaking, but I find myself talking about this a lot when it comes to scene structure and pacing. We don’t want to take too long to get to the meat of a scene, and we don’t want it to overstay its welcome.

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Sam Farkas: My current obsession is Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s funny, smart, well-written, with amazing character development and worldbuilding, and there’s a good reason it’s speaking to all types of readers.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Sam Farkas: “Start in the middle of the action.” Gosh, I hate this advice. It leads to a lot of very confusing, rushed openings, when really we need an on-ramp. Action doesn’t matter if we don’t understand the purpose behind it, and if we aren’t yet emotionally invested in the characters.

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Sam Farkas: One of the best things you can do for your writing is to read widely, i.e. outside your genre. A lot of classes have a narrow focus, but there’s so much to be gained from reading books you wouldn’t normally pick up.

Romance offers a masterclass in creating tension even though the reader knows how the book will end; fantasy teaches worldbuilding; horror, atmosphere; literary fiction, voice and stylistic prose; thrillers, pacing. It’s great to do a deep dive into a genre, of course, but there’s also a true benefit to reading and studying books outside of it.

“Romance offers a masterclass in creating tension even though the reader knows how the book will end; fantasy teaches worldbuilding; horror, atmosphere; literary fiction, voice and stylistic prose; thrillers, pacing.”

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Sam Farkas: Not sure if you mean “book boyfriend-style crush” or “crush on a writer’s skill/style.”

The former, Rhys from Gail Carson Levine’s The Two Princesses of Bamarre. I was probably twelve years old and I wanted to marry this sorcerer.

If we’re talking authors and their body of work, probably Ernest Hemingway. In high school, I was truly obsessed. I love how he can say so much with such spare prose.

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Sam Farkas: I am going to ask so many questions — I want my students to not only think deeply about what they’re writing, but why they are writing it.

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Sam Farkas: I really love video games (although perhaps less surprising now since I’m shouting about my love for Dungeon Crawler Carl). I could talk for hours about Fire Emblem.

Find the Deeper About of Your Retelling

From dungeon crawls to fairytales, Sam moves through stories the way her clients’ best characters do: with curiosity, craft, and an instinct for what is marketable. She brings that same energy to the workshop. Whether you are nursing a half-formed idea or wrestling with a draft that has not yet earned its retelling, Sam will help you find the deeper about, sharpen your prose, and shape something an agent (or a roomful of readers) would want to follow into the woods. Bring an idea, or come to find one. You will leave with a story that has its own pulse.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Emma Kress collects sentences. Not just any sentences, but what she calls Gateway Characterization Sentences: single lines where a writer manages to deliver an entire human being in a handful of words. Her latest acquisition, lifted from Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, describes a woman who puts the narrator in mind of an elegant alligator. That sustained, magpie-eyed attention to small craft moves is the same energy Emma brings to her own books and her teaching, and it’s the engine inside both of her summer 2026 Zoom workshops at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature.

Emma is the author of the young-adult sports and action thriller Dangerous Play (Macmillan), about a team of field hockey players who become vigilantes. She earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and was one of four finalists for New York State Teacher of the Year.

This summer she’s teaching two one-day workshops back to back: How to Juggle the Big Cast on Sunday, July 12, where she shares the eleven strategies she developed managing the twenty-four-character ensemble of Dangerous Play, and How to Write Action and Sports Scenes That Keep Readers on the Edge on Sunday, August 9, where she shows fiction writers how to build a believable fight, a State Championship, or a getaway, even if you’ve never thrown a punch or laced up a skate. Both classes are anchored in the practice she calls her common denominator: side writing.

Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Emma:

Writing Workshops: Hi, Emma. Please introduce yourself to our audience.

Emma Kress: I’m an author and a teacher, not always in that order. Things I’m good at: parallel parking, packing, talking in the accents of places I’ve lived, and listening. Things I’m bad at: make up, sleeping, cooking two things at once, and balance—both literally and figuratively. I wanted to write a book since I was 10. It took me until I was 46 to finally hold my book in my hands. I spent decades wanting to write but not actually writing, because I was too scared. Now, I can’t imagine my life without it.

Writing Workshops: What’s the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?

Emma Kress: Since I spent so long avoiding the writing chair, once I finally sat in it, I thought I’d be “wasting time” if I did character or scene sketches. If I wasn’t spending my time writing the actual manuscript, then what was the point? Side writing was one of the greatest gifts a mentor ever gave me and I’ve relied on it ever since. It’s also the common denominator in every workshop I teach.

“Side writing was one of the greatest gifts a mentor ever gave me and I’ve relied on it ever since. It’s also the common denominator in every workshop I teach.”

Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn’t have before, what is it?

Emma Kress: Side writing! Side writing is when the writer writes off to the side of their manuscript. (I prefer using an unlined notebook or large chart paper so that I can fully embrace the mess.) This writing is never meant to be in the actual manuscript, but instead, to inform, deepen, and direct it. In this course, we will do several side writing activities, and you’ll walk away not only with those products, but also with a skill that will serve every writing project you tackle.

Writing Workshops: What’s the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.

Emma Kress: “She was a small, tough, wiry woman who put me in mind of an elegant alligator.” -The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

Writing Workshops: What’s a craft move you’re slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, but a small, specific technique.

Emma Kress: I collect what I call “Gateway Characterization Sentences.” These are single sentences (or very short) moments where you get a real sense of a full character even in just a few lines. The sentence I gave you above was my latest entry. But I have more!

“Lincoln sounded high-strung and full of anticipation, as if he only ever expected good news after the beep.” Five Tuesdays, by Lily King

“Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin.” Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

“If Jimmy-George from high school knew how to look at a person, Duke knew how to make a person look at him.” Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett

“You just wondered if I was the kind of woman who attracts criminals the way other women attract alcoholics or sadists.” Heartburn, by Nora Ephron

“Everything Sophie said, as a rule, was about three degrees too vivacious.” Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler

Aren’t you glad you asked? Don’t you want to start a collection now, too?

Writing Workshops: What’s a book you press into people’s hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?

Emma Kress: But, but you’ve told me nothing about the person who will read it! How will I choose? A teen who wants to escape into a fully-realized world that isn’t ours? Holly Black’s White Cat. A middle-aged woman who feels her life slipping by? Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow. A middle-aged woman who needs to laugh along with her tears? Alison Espach’s The Wedding People. Someone (of any age) who wants to laugh, savor the power of stories, and grasp the evils of censorship? Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. As a book-lover, I love nothing more than matching a friend with a just-right book. A good matchmaker has to take into account not just the book, but the hands receiving it.

Writing Workshops: What’s the worst writing advice that sounds smart?

Emma Kress: Write what you know. It’s well-meaning but flawed advice that new writers can take too literally. Perhaps they don’t have the money/time/ability to do all that’s required of them to “know” everything that needs to happen in the sort of book they want to write. Laura Hillenbrand suffers from a debilitating case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and she barely left her house when she wrote her critically acclaimed books filled with vibrant action scenes and far-off places.

You’re a writer. That means you love to learn. You love to read. And, your imagination is your superpower. What you don’t know today, does not define what you know tomorrow. Jump in.

Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: “Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but...”

Emma Kress: You can’t do everything at once and you definitely can’t aim for perfection with all the things in the same stroke. That’s the magic of revision. You get to be perfectionistic about just one thing with every pass.

“You can’t do everything at once and you definitely can’t aim for perfection with all the things in the same stroke. That’s the magic of revision. You get to be perfectionistic about just one thing with every pass.”

Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?

Emma Kress: Grover in There’s a Monster at the End of This Book

Writing Workshops: What’s your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?

Emma Kress: Cheerleader and Challenger

Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?

Emma Kress: You’ll never catch me at karaoke, but I’ll lip sync all day long.

From Field Hockey Vigilantes to State Championship Stakes

Cheerleader and Challenger is exactly the right framing for a teacher whose debut novel features a team of girls who refuse to be told their sport, their bodies, or their stories are anyone else’s territory. The action and sports scenes in Dangerous Play are the work of a writer who knows that physical struggle on the page demands the same care as any other kind: clear motivation, real stakes, language that moves at the speed of the body. If you’ve ever wanted to write a fight, a championship game, a chase, a high-speed escape, or any scene where the body has to carry the meaning, this August class is built for that exact problem.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

Adapting Source Material for Film and TV: A Working Writer’s Decision Guide

Most adaptation guides on the open web read like checklists. Secure the rights. Read screenwriting books. Outline your three acts. Pitch. The work of adapting source material for film and TV happens long before any of that, in the diagnostic decisions a writer makes before they ever open a beat sheet.

Working television writers develop a sixth sense for these decisions because they have to. A pile of source material lands on the desk, and the first job is to figure it out. Will the engine hold? Is this a feature or a series? Where is the heart? What is my take? What can I cut without breaking it? Who is going to buy it?

What’s below is that sequence, in the order working writers run it. Each section names a question, gives you the working logic, and shows it at work in a contemporary adaptation that solved the decision well. Six questions in, you’ll have a framework for evaluating any piece of source material before you commit a single page.

Should This Story Be Adapted at All?

The first question never feels like a question because most writers come to adaptation already in love with the source material. They’ve finished a novel they couldn’t put down, or rediscovered a public-domain title, or bought the rights to a memoir they think will move people. Love is the reason they’re at the desk. Adaptability is the first question every writer adapting source material for film and TV has to answer, and love often makes it harder.

Adaptability has nothing to do with prose quality, sentence-level beauty, or whether the source material moves you. Plenty of beautifully written novels make terrible films. Adaptability is about whether the underlying story engine, the thing that drives the source forward, can survive the transposition to a visual medium where the audience watches characters do things to and for each other.

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels have an engine designed for the screen. The drive comes from scene-level conflict: a 20th-century woman caught between two timelines, two husbands, and a regular crank of capture-and-escape stakes. The Starz adaptation didn’t have to invent action. It had to organize it. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch runs on the opposite engine. Theo Decker’s drift through guilt and grief is a consciousness, not a sequence of events. The 2019 film tried to externalize that consciousness and ended up with a literal, plot-shaped object that lost the very thing the novel was about.

When a working writer assesses source material, the question is where the story lives. In voice, sentence rhythm, and interior weather? Or in scene, action, relationship, and visible decision? The answer doesn’t kill any project, but it tells you what the adaptation is going to cost. If the story lives in interiority, you’re going to invent a visual analogue for that interior, and that invention is the work.

Is This a Feature, a Limited Series, or an Ongoing Show?

Once you’ve established the source can be adapted, the next question is what shape the adaptation wants. Most failed adaptations fail because they’ve been forced into the wrong container. A novel that should have been a limited series gets compressed into a 110-minute feature. A short story that should have been a feature gets stretched into eight episodes of a streaming show.

Format is a structural decision, dictated by the scope and shape of the source. Studios and producers will weigh in on commercial viability, but the writer’s job is to recognize the natural shape of the material first.

Bounded narratives with a fixed cast and a contained crisis tend to want limited series. Big Little Lies is the textbook case: Liane Moriarty’s novel has a finite mystery, a finite ensemble, and a finite arc, and HBO’s adaptation kept it that way for one season because that was what the book was. (The second season, which the novel never anticipated, struggled because the format had been expanded past where the source could go.)

Expandable worlds with regimes, institutions, or systems that can be examined from multiple angles want ongoing shows. The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu was always going to outrun Margaret Atwood’s novel because Gilead is an entire society and a novel can only show you so much of it. The adaptation found new angles by following different characters, regions, and resistance lines that the original book gestured toward but didn’t enter.

Single emotional arcs, condensed in time, want features. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2021) adapted Elena Ferrante’s novella as a feature because that’s what the source’s psychology supports: a woman alone on a beach, her present unraveling under the weight of her past, with one short stretch of narrative time. A series would have diluted the pressure.

Get the format right and the rest of the work has structural integrity to climb. Get it wrong and every later decision compounds the original mistake.

Where Is the Heart of Your Adaptation?

The third decision is where the writing begins: identifying the heart of your adaptation. The heart is the portable narrative core, the part of the source that has to survive the move regardless of what you cut. Find it and you have a compass for every cut, every consolidation, every invention. Miss it and you’ll write something that’s faithful to the plot of the original and unfaithful to the thing that made it matter.

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (2002) is the most radical example because Kaufman violated nearly every plot point in Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief and somehow produced an adaptation that’s more faithful to the book than a literal version could have been. The heart of The Orchid Thief lives in Susan Orlean’s longing for an obsession of her own, set against an orchid heist that gives her something to chase. Kaufman recognized the longing as the engine and built the film’s structure around it, mirroring it with a screenwriter’s longing for an obsession of his own. The two book-ends rhymed.

Eric Roth’s adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon worked the same diagnostic muscle. Grann’s book is a journalistic procedural anchored in Tom White’s FBI investigation. Roth and Scorsese moved the heart of the film to Ernest Burkhart and his marriage to Mollie Kyle, because the moral weight of the story sat there, in a love that participated in genocide. The book’s investigative frame became a coda. The heart became the engine.

The exercise Dan teaches in his weekend intensive is simple and ruthless: write a single paragraph stating what the source material is at heart, before you open a beat sheet. Not the plot summary. Not the elevator pitch. The thing under those things. Until you can write that paragraph, you’re guessing at structure.

What’s Your “Take” on This Material?

A take is the working writer’s vocabulary for the interpretive lens you bring to source material that nobody else would. It’s the single most asked-about and least discussed asset in the development process, because it’s also the hardest to define. Producers want to know your take in the first ten minutes of a meeting. They will pass on a writer who knows the source backward and forward but has no take of their own.

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019) is a master class in the move. Louisa May Alcott’s novel has been adapted for the screen many times, and the standard version walks chronologically from Jo’s girlhood toward her marriage and the death of Beth. Gerwig’s take cracked the timeline. She started with adult Jo selling her stories to Mr. Dashwood and used that frame to interrogate every choice the younger Jo had made about love, money, and authorship. The novel’s themes had always been there. Gerwig’s take pulled them up to the surface and gave them a structural home.

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021) did something similar to Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel. Savage wrote a Western told largely from Phil Burbank’s masculine, brutalizing perspective. Campion’s take re-centered the watching: how Rose sees, how Peter sees, how the camera sees the men who think nobody sees them. Same source. Different weight on the prism. A Western became a study of who is looking at whom, and how that looking shifts power.

A take is what you bring that the source can’t bring on its own. It’s the reason a producer hires you and not the next writer. Until you have one, you’re an editor of the source material. Once you have one, you’re an author of the adaptation.

How Do You Break the Story for the Screen?

By this point, you’ve established that the source is adaptable, identified its proper format, located its heart, and developed your take. Only now does the practical work of breaking the story begin. Beats. Scenes. Acts. The structural skeleton of what the script is going to be.

Breaking the story means dismantling the source down to its narrative units, then reassembling those units in the order and shape your chosen format demands. A novel that runs 400 pages might break down to eighty story beats; a feature script can hold maybe fifty. So twenty or thirty of those beats have to be combined, demoted, dropped, or absorbed into a different scene’s subtext. A limited series can hold more, but the breaking has to account for episodic shape and ending each hour on a question that pulls a viewer to the next.

“When I teach writing action lines, I tell people to jot them down as if they’re explaining what’s happening to their best friend who’s in a hurry. We’re trying to tap into this totally freed up, urgent, almost audacious way of showing up on the page.”

– Dan Robert

The hardest mechanical question in adaptation is interiority. Novels can sit inside a character’s consciousness for pages at a time. Films and television, with rare exceptions, cannot. Voice-over works in Goodfellas because the voice itself is dramatic. Voice-over fails in most adaptations because writers reach for it as a shortcut to render thought. The actual move is to find a visual analogue. Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers (2023) adapted Taichi Yamada’s novel about a man visiting his dead parents by simply letting the dead parents appear in the present, on screen, in the kitchen. The book’s metaphysical haunting became the film’s literal premise. The interiority got a body.

Inventions are part of this work and shouldn’t be apologized for. Cutting a beloved subplot is part of this work and shouldn’t be apologized for either. The discipline you’re developing is the discipline of choosing in service of your take, with your take as the unifying logic for every cut and every addition.

How Do You Sell an Adaptation?

The last decision is the one most craft posts skip: how the adaptation gets out of your hands and into the marketplace. Adapting source material for film and TV is a working profession before it’s an art, and the assets you build to sell are part of the craft, not adjacent to it.

The practical kit, in 2026, looks like this. You’ll need a written take, usually one to two pages, that names the source, your interpretive frame, the format you’re proposing, and the tonal references. You’ll need an opening sequence or pilot pages, ten to fifteen pages strong enough to communicate voice. If it’s a series, you’ll need a series document outlining the season-one arc and the show’s renewable engine. If it’s a feature, you’ll need a longer treatment or a complete script. Producers in adaptation meetings look at all of these at once, not because they’re checking boxes but because each document tells them something different about whether you can deliver the show or film you’re pitching.

The marketplace in 2026 is contracting and selective. Streamers are buying fewer titles. Studios are looking harder for IP that comes pre-packaged with a strong take and a writer who can articulate it in a single meeting. Authors increasingly arrive with their own adaptation already in development, partly because they realized waiting for someone else to option their work was a slow road, and partly because producers have started preferring authors who do the upfront thinking.

The package serves both kinds of writer: authors with their own manuscripts, and screenwriters mining public-domain or optioned material. It’s what lets the work survive a meeting after you leave the room. A great take in a writer’s head is a thought experiment. A great take in a buyer’s hand is a project.

The Six Decisions, Run Together

Should this be adapted? What format does it want? Where is the heart? What’s my take? How do I break the story? How do I sell it? Working writers run that sequence on instinct now, but instinct came from doing it deliberately, with a real piece of source material, with feedback from someone who has done it before in the rooms where the work gets made. That’s the function the workshop serves. That’s also why working writers keep teaching: the framework is portable, but the muscle has to be built.

The May 16-17 weekend intensive with Dan Robert is two three-hour Zoom sessions on Saturday and Sunday, sized for writers who already have a piece of source material in mind and want to apply this exact decision sequence to it under a working TV writer’s guidance. Whether the source is your own novel, a public-domain title, a historical figure, or something stranger, the diagnostic moves are the same, and the room makes the work better.

For writers who want sustained one-on-one development on an adaptation project, Dan also offers a multi-week 1-on-1 mentorship structured around finishing or fixing original or adapted film and TV projects. Browse our full slate of upcoming screenwriting and TV classes to see what else is on the calendar.

About WritingWorkshops.com

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, New York Times bestsellers, and Emmy-winning television writers, with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.

“Wild Geese” was not supposed to be “Wild Geese.” Mary Oliver wrote the poem that has, in Lauren Davis’s words, “literally saved lives” while explaining something mechanical about poetry to a student. The lesson Davis carries forward into her Writing Mary Oliver 8-Week Online Poetry Class is this: sometimes the best way to write a poem is to forget you are trying to write one at all. “I think there’s wisdom in going at the page sideways,” she explains.

Over eight weeks at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Davis invites poets into what she calls an “alchemic learning process”: concentrated immersion in a single author. Students will read Oliver’s poetry alongside her two craft books, generate twenty-one new poems through guided prompts, and receive close instructor feedback on six pieces. Beyond the page, Davis hopes the class will reset the rhythm of attention itself. Her aim, in her own words: to help students “slow down, so that something at the corner of their vision that has been asking for attention can finally be seen.”

Whether you are coming to Oliver for the first time or returning to “the soft animal of your body” for the hundredth, Davis offers something rare in a literary culture obsessed with output: a workshop that treats reverence as a craft.

Here is our interview with Lauren:

Writing Workshops: What part of your own creative journey compelled you to build an entire eight-week course around Mary Oliver’s poetic legacy, and what do you personally hope to discover by revisiting her work with your students?

Laruen Davis: One of the most instructive things I’ve found for myself, as a writer, is to spend concentrated time with one author. I read about their life, and I also read everything they’ve written that I can get my hands on. There’s a sort of alchemic learning process that occurs when I concentrate in this way. I am hoping to create a similar approach for my students. And who better to get to know than Mary Oliver?

WW: Mary Oliver is often praised for her reverential attention to the natural world. Can you share a moment from your own life where nature profoundly impacted your writing—and how that experience might shape how you guide students through Oliver’s poems?

LD: I grew up in the southeast of the United States. Flat land. Lots of pine tree forests. Gorgeous, unique landscapes, but there is little in the southeast that is especially large. The first time I drove out to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State and saw the trees that grow along the highway—these mammoth, ancient creatures—I felt not only awe but honestly a bit of fear. I was humbled by them. That feeling of awe was something I wanted to bring into my writing, but it took a few false starts. I did not give up, though. And I think that’s something we can learn from Oliver’s work. She repeatedly strived for a felt sense, and she would come at it from multiple angles in multiple books. I think students can learn from her how to return again and again to what is asking in them to be written.

WW: Oliver’s work explores the limits of language and the human capacity for wonder. How do you plan to encourage your students to push the boundaries of their own language, especially as they generate 21 new poems over the course of eight weeks?

LD: Oliver leaned towards structure, form, and discipline. I see the wisdom in it, and I see how it worked for her. And while some students may not be able to reproduce her discipline in their daily lives long-term, I encourage them to explore it in our time together. I also encourage a different practice each week meant to help them connect or reconnect with their outer and inner word.

WW: In your own poetry collections and chapbooks, you often delve into themes of spirituality, belonging, and transformation. In what ways does Mary Oliver’s sense of awe and interconnectedness echo (or contrast) your personal poetic vision, and how do you bridge that gap as an instructor?

LD: Oliver’s emotional range is much larger than mine. I think it’s hard to write a poem about hope or wonderment and not have the poem veer into cliché or even take on a patronizing tone. But that simply means those poems need to be attempted, again and again, until we get it right. Oliver made a lot of things look easy. She just did. It’s honestly a little maddening. Thankfully, in addition to her poetry books, she left us two craft books, which we read parts of together in the workshop.

WW: What’s one piece of Mary Oliver’s writing advice or one habit from her creative life that you believe could revolutionize a student’s poetry practice, even if it seems deceptively simple at first glance?

LD: I share the story of how “Wild Geese” came to be, a poem that has literally saved lives. The poem came when she was explaining something mechanical about poetry to a student. I think there’s wisdom in going at the page sideways. Approaching the page the same way day after day may bring results, but if we want to go deeper, it’s often fruitful to forget we are trying to say anything and instead play with form, line, and prompts. Or if we are more inclined towards form, taking a looser approach while still letting go of the need to control what we are trying to say.

WW: After the eight weeks end and the newly crafted poems have been workshopped, how do you envision your students carrying Mary Oliver’s influence forward in their lives—both on the page and beyond it?

LD: My hope is that this workshop helps students slow down. Slow down in their writing, and slow down in their daily lives, so that something at the corner of their vision that has been asking for attention can finally be seen. I think Oliver’s poetry is capable of inspiring a different pace to life.

Lauren Davis, author of the short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), the poetry collection Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize short-listed When I Drowned (Kelsay Books), and the chapbooks Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press), The Missing Ones (Winter Texts), and Sivvy (Whittle Micro-Press). She holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a former Editor in Residence at The Puritan’s Town Crier, and she is the winner of the Landing Zone Magazine’s Flash Fiction Contest. Her stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and reviews have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Spillway, Poet Lore, Ibbetson Street, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.