calendar of events

Subscribe to our events RSS feed

Wednesday July 15 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM	Brown Bag Lunch Series Free! instructor: Chip Cheek Do you work downtown and want to fit some writing into your day? Or do you have a schedule that gives you free afternoons instead of evenings? Bring your lunch and come on over to Grub Street for a Brown Bag Writing Workshop – a series recently profiled in the Boston Globe. For 45 minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some cool writing exercises. Led by one of our award-winning instructors or ambassadors. Best of all, you’ll leave lunch with some new ideas to ponder for the rest of your day…and beyond. To reserve a spot, email sonya@grubstreet.org or call 617.695.0075.
Saturday July 18 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	The Rise of Flash Fiction: History and Practice Instructor: Tara L. Masih $95/$85 members Registration Deadline: July 14th Level: All Flash fiction is becoming a popular new genre, with both print and online publication markets growing steadily. Be one of the first students to learn about the history of the short short story through brief lectures and examples of historical magazines and books, which will provide literary context for understanding today’s contemporary markets and its successful writers. We’ll read and discuss stories by August Strindberg, Yasunari Kawabata, Robert Olen Butler, Stuart Dybek, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Sherrie Flick, answering the question, What makes this story classic flash? We’ll then experiment with a choice of several fun and highly effective flash exercises, and workshop the resulting stories. The goal is to let go of some of the constraints of writing longer prose, and to gain a better understanding of word choice, scene setting, pacing, self-editing, and the skill of opening and closing, which will help you in all genres. Leave with a revised flash near-to-ready for publication. Participants may also bring an unpublished flash story written outside of class: if time allows, we’ll provide constructive feedback on these as well.
Saturday July 18 / Sunday July 19 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	Revision Clinic Instructor: Cam Terwilliger and Celeste Ng $195/$170 members for 2 days, $100/$90 members for 1 day only Registration Deadline: July 14th Level (both sessions): All You have a story or stories (or novel) that’s not quite working, or that’s very good but not quite good enough, or that keeps getting narrowly rejected. Whatever the case, you’ve lost perspective on it, but you know it needs revision – macro, micro or both. This weekend, get macro revision tips from Cam Terwilliger on Sunday, then come back on Sunday for tips on line-editing and style from Celeste Ng. Or just pick one workshop or the other. Saturday (with Cam Terwilliger): Revision is a process that many writers find frustrating. Once you have a first or second draft of a story, what happens next? How do you follow through on the ideas your workshop suggested? How do you add depth to characters? How do you make the structure more direct? This workshop will teach a few basic concepts of revision that will help you address these issues, in addition to suggesting concrete techniques you can apply to stories at home. IMPORTANT: Students enrolling in this class will be required to bring a draft of a story in progress. Your story will serve as a frame of reference for the seminar's discussion and exercises. Sunday (with Celeste Ng): You've got the story down--now, it's time to fine-tune the language. Line editing your own work is one of your most difficult tasks, but it's also one of the most important: even a single word can create mood, reveal character, or signal a shift in understanding. In this one-day workshop, we'll step beyond proofreading to the nitty-gritty of language-level revision. Through published examples and exercises, we'll examine word choice, rhythm, and even paragraph breaks to make language work with your story. We'll also learn to identify--and correct--language "glitches" that wake the reader from your vivid and continuous dream. Towards the end of the workshop, you'll turn your newly critical eye on some of your own work, so please bring a copy of a story or essay you'd like to start polishing. Open to both fiction and nonfiction writers. Limited to 12 students.
Saturday July 18 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	6 Hours, 6 Essays Instructor: Grace Talusan $95/$85 members Registration Deadline: July 14th Level: All A radically condensed version of our popular “Six Weeks, Six Essays” course for those who want to generate ideas but don’t have the time for a full-length workshop. Here, you’ll spend one full day writing the beginnings to six different personal essays that you can develop later. We will cover the 6 different kinds of essays and topics usually covered in the six week version of this class and even share some of the work with others. Leave with a revision plan for finishing at least some of the essays and possible publication venues when the essay is finished.
Sunday July 19 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	Creative Brainstorming for Novels in Progress Instructor: Crystal King $95/$85 members Registration Deadline: July 14th Level: Intermediate/Advanced Do you have a shelved novel gathering dust? Are you stuck writing your current book? Do your characters sound flat or are your plotlines beginning to unravel? This workshop will help you learn how to use innovative and practical creativity exercises to expand and enhance your existing story ideas. Find out how Mindmapping can reveal new subplots, how the Why-Why diagram can reveal character motivations or how the Napolean technique can change your perspective on sticky situations. Join us for a full day of discovery exercises to help you and your characters solve all manner of problems and find new ways of moving your novel forward. This class is specifically geared for writers with novels in progress.
Tuesday July 21 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Funny is the New Deep Instructor: Steve Almond $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: July 16th Level: All Location: Arlington Center for the Arts *This class is SOLD OUT! Please email sonya@grubstreet.org to be put on a waiting list.* Contrary to popular belief, writing funny doesn't mean sacrificing depth. On the contrary, for most literary writers the comic impulse is inextricably linked to tragedy. In this informal class, we'll look at the work of Lorrie Moore, George Saunders, and others, in an effort to learn how you can be funny and break hearts while doing it.
Monday August 03 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Writing for Video Games Instructor: Chris Zirpoli $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: July 30th Level: All Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a writer for games? Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a game designer? In this workshop, we will pull aside the veil that seems to hover around the video game industry and discuss the day-to-day role of a wordsmith when it comes to this fully interactive medium. See how a game designer – who is part scriptwriter, part story-teller, part marketing guru and tech mogul – uses such vehicles as cinematics, in game cut-scenes, and missions to not only create a framework and backdrop for the mechanics that define the interactivity of the products, but uses them to create a deeper and lasting gameplay experience.
Monday August 03 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	The Art of Column Writing Instructor: Suzette Martinez Standring $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: July 30th Level: All With the explosion of blogs and websites, everyone is a columnist with a memory, opinion or skill to be shared. But creating compelling prose in 500 words or less is a special art. Vivid and insightful columns written in a unique voice catch an editor’s eye or a syndicate’s attention. The skills required to craft a taut and memorable column improve all types of writing. Learn the tips and techniques used by award-winning newspaper columnists to stand out and fuel a faithful readership. An expanded version of the “Hour of Power” seminar at the 2009 Muse and the Marketplace conference.
Monday August 03 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Using Time Wisely in Fiction and Narrative Non-Fiction Instructor: Celeste Ng $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: July 30th Level: All Time is often described as an arrow, but in writing, time is marvelously fluid. We can speed things up to cover hours or even years in a few sentences; we can slow things down to linger--or wallow--in the moment. Best of all, we can put present and past side-by-side to show how one influences or echoes the other. So how do we guide our characters through time while making sure our readers don't get lost? In this seminar, we'll study examples from published works to see how writers pull off tricks like flashbacks, flash-forwards, slow motion, and even warp speed. Then, through exercises, we'll look at when--and how--to manipulate time ourselves, braiding the presents and pasts of our characters to make their stories more meaningful. Useful for both fiction and nonfiction writers.
Tuesday August 04 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Freedom of Preach: Writing Cultural Criticism That Matters Instructor: Steve Almond $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: July 30th Level: All Location: Arlington Center for the Arts The best cultural criticism uses a particular artifact to cast light on the world around it. We'll look at the work of Anthony Lane, Adam Gopnik, and try to figure out what you should be writing about, and why it matters. Limited to 18 students.
Monday August 10 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Text and Subtext Instructor: Christina McCarroll $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: August 5th Level: Beginner Fiction exists on the level of the sensory or situational truth -- what the five senses tell us -- but also on a deeper emotional level. So how do we get from what's going on to what's really going on? How do we convey emotion and the all-important unsaid in our writing, rather than simply getting down the plot? We'll look at excerpts of published stories and see how writers transfer emotional meaning onto the page, endowing everything from teacups to car rides with mood and consequence. Through writing exercises, we'll examine how objects and images often tell us more than they logically "should," and we'll lasso this power for deeper insight into our characters and their worlds.
Monday August 10 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Traits, Quirks and Habits: Creating Characters from the Inside Out Instructor: Lynne Griffin $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: August 5th Level: Beginner/Intermediate Join Lynne Griffin, author of the novel Life Without Summer (St Martin’s, 2009) and the nonfiction title Negotiation Generation (Penguin, 2007), for a workshop on creating genuine characters readers can relate to. Lynne has over twenty years experience working as a family life educator with specific expertise in the impact of individual differences or temperament on human behavior. She’ll share her unique ideas for crafting characters from the inside out; ones who are more than the sum of their physical traits, showing you how to get to the heart of character motivation. Using psychological frameworks and personality research, she’ll show you how to answer questions like, “What would this character really do?” & “How would my character react to that situation or this person?” Through lecture, discussion and some writing exercises, you’ll learn new techniques for crafting three dimensional, compelling major as well as minor characters. An expanded version of Lynne’s sold-out seminar at the 2009 Muse and the Marketplace conference.
Monday August 10 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	The Skill of the Interview: Getting People to Talk Instructor: Elaine McArdle $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: August 5th Level: All The return of this sold-out seminar from 2008! In non-fiction writing, including memoir, the richest material often comes from the people who lived the event. But how do you get them to open up to you? Whether you're trying to get your mom to recall her childhood or to get a complete stranger to describe a crime they witnessed, the key is building a relationship of trust -- and honoring that. We'll learn practical tips for finding sources, getting them to agree to talk, establishing the rules of the interview (on the record? background only?), and helping them tell their stories in their own voices. We will also touch on how to place interviews and profiles in journals and magazines. A useful seminar for any writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry or screenwriting who needs to conduct this type of research.
Tuesday August 11 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM	Brown Bag Lunch Series Free! Do you work downtown and want to fit some writing into your day? Or do you have a schedule that gives you free afternoons instead of evenings? Bring your lunch and come on over to Grub Street for a Brown Bag Writing Workshop – a series recently profiled in the Boston Globe. For 45 minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some cool writing exercises. Led by one of our award-winning instructors or ambassadors. Best of all, you’ll leave lunch with some new ideas to ponder for the rest of your day…and beyond. To reserve a spot, email sonya@grubstreet.org or call 617.695.0075.
Saturday August 15 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	Publish that Chapbook! Instructor: Wendy Mnookin $95/$85 members Registration Deadline: August 11th Level: Intermediate/Advanced Do you have at least twenty poems ready to hit the press? Then why not put together a chapbook, enter a contest, and, of course, win! Chapbooks are shorter than regular manuscripts, generally 20 to 30 pages, so the arrangement of poems is especially important; publishers look for an engaging and coherent arc. Rather than offering feedback on individual poems, this day-long workshop will focus on the order of poems in a manuscript. Following prompts offered by the workshop leader, you will consider several possible arcs for your manuscript, write an author’s statement, get feedback from your peers, and take a look at the chapbook market. Bring three copies of 20 to 30 poems—and a few extra poems if you have them. You will leave with an artful arrangement of your manuscript and ideas for submission. Limited to 12 students.
Saturday August 15 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	Fiction Writers' Workout Instructor: Lisa Borders $95/$85 members Registration Deadline: August 11th Level: All Spend the day with one of Grub Street’s most popular instructors generating new scenes, characters and descriptions. What you write on this day can either be integrated into current stories and novels or serve as springboards for future narratives. Along the way, you’ll look briefly at some published texts and examine them as writers. By the end of the day, we’ll have made sure that you’ve produced pages of new material ready for revision or development when you get back to them on Monday morning.
Saturday August 15 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	Cortiscrawl: Writing with the Brain in Mind Instructor: Tim Horvath $95/$85 members Registration Deadline: August 11th Level: All Back (again!) by (more) popular demand! Findings from neuroscience regularly make the newspaper as research sheds more and more light on how the brain works. Writers such as Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen have made the human brain a focal point in their novels, and now Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist (2007) makes a case that great artists have long intuited what scientists could later only confirm through experiment. In this expanded weekend version of the popular seminar, we'll see how understanding a bit more about the brain can boost our own writing. We'll revisit staple topics like detail, description and character, learn how we can tap into the dreaming brain for inspiration, and even look at writer's block and hypergraphia (the compulsion to write) from this new vantage point.
Monday August 17 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	The Bestselling Author’s Guide to Ruthless Self-Promotion Instructor: Jenna Blum $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: August 12th Level: All So you have written a book: Felicitations on your tremendous accomplishment! Your book has been published: Congratulations on achieving a lifelong dream! But...now what? How do you make sure people read your book? To avoid your book falling in the forest (or into the remainder bins) without making a sound, you have to take publicity into your own hands. Perhaps your publisher's publicists are overwhelmed. Perhaps you don't think your book is getting the attention it deserves. Perhaps with the bad economy we are all going to have to shake our own tails a little more. Join Jenna Blum, initial reluctant convert to self-promotion and now obnoxious, ruthless marketing machine, as she shares her tips and strategies for self-promotion and details how her tail-shaking helped make her debut novel Those Who Save Us, a New York Times bestseller.
Monday August 17 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Ask the Agent Instructor: Joanne Wyckoff $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: August 12th Join literary agent Joanne Wyckoff for an insider's view into the life of a literary agency. You'll learn how to pitch agents and how not to pitch them, how agents make decisions, how the business works, what happens once you have an agent, how nonfiction projects get developed and more. Come with questions. Joanne will tell all.
Monday August 17 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Poem Revision Clinic Instructor: Scott Challener $45/$40 members Registration Deadline: August 12th Level: Intermediate/Advanced How do we know when a poem is finished? How do we know what should change and what should remain? In the first half of this seminar we'll take a hard look at some revisions of sonnets by Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Robert Frost to articulate a working definition of revision, to observe the choices involved in the making of great poems, and to begin developing a list of principles by which to revise our poems. In the seminar's second half we'll apply these principles to our work. Participants are expected to bring a poem that excites them as a work-in-progress, which they'll work on and have the opportunity to share at the seminar's end. Participants can also expect to leave the seminar with more contemporary examples of revision to examine on their own.
Wednesday September 02 8:00 PM - 10:00 PM	Summer Season Showcase FREE! Join Grub students from the Summer 2009 term, plus two of our award-winning instructors, as they read (for 5 minutes each) from recent work. You’ll hear great fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and maybe even a screenplay or video game script. Open only to students who’ve taken courses, seminars or weekend workshops this spring. Everyone gets free snacks and drinks. Sign-ups begin around 8pm. A great event for current Grubbies and those who want to check us out. Bring friends!
Saturday September 12 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	Developing Your Personal Brand: New Media Marketing For Writers Instructor: Crystal King $95/$85 members Registration Deadline: September 8th Level: All Novelists, poets, freelancers and writers around the world are benefiting from the possibilities of the Internet, building both their personal brand and at the same time driving visibility (and sales!) of their work. Writers face the same challenges as other entrepreneurs: competition; resource restrictions; the need to be first, the best or the most original to market; and, most importantly, the need to be innovative. Publishers are feeling the pinch which means that fewer and fewer writers will get “lucky” and score it big through traditional means. Instead, they need to engage in techniques that move them past hurdles and into the minds of their potential buyers. This class will explore both the basic tenets of what comprises a personal brand as well as to talk about the best ways to use new media tactics such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LibraryThing and much more.
Saturday September 12 / Sunday September 13 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	The Next J.K. Rowling: Unlocking the Power of Fairy Tale and Myth Instructors: Sophie Powell and KL Pereira $195/$170 members Registration Deadline: September 8th Level: All Readers can’t get enough of the fantastical. J.K. Rowling, and most recently Stephanie Meyer, have millions of devoted readers worldwide. So too does Philip Pullman, Margaret Atwood, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and hundreds of others who employ such worlds and characters. During this team-taught weekend, we will delve into the glittering Aladdin’s Cave of myths and fairytales and help you to find and develop your own fantastical kingdom. Revisiting a varied host of familiar tales from Little Red Riding Hood to The Odyssey, we will look at modern interpretations of these fairy tales and myths and see how you too can carve out your own magical world. There will be many inspiring creative exercises and prompts and plenty of time for you to start “opening the wardrobe door” and creating your own Narnia.
Saturday September 12 / Sunday September 13 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	Surviving the Slush Pile Instructor: James Scott $195/$170 members Registration Deadline: September 8th Level: All Publication in literary magazines is one of the best ways for emerging writers to achieve credibility, recognition, and a larger readership. Yet, the quantity and diversity of literary magazines can be daunting for submitters. Do you have stories that are polished and ready to be seen by a literary magazine editor, but are unsure of how to prepare a cover letter or pick the magazines best suited for your work? Or have you been submitting for a while, but worry you might be doing something wrong? In this weekend seminar, students will learn to navigate the literary magazine landscape. We will discuss how you can position your story for the best possible read and common mistakes made by submitters, study examples of “good” and “bad” cover letters, workshop first pages of student manuscripts, discussing what’s likely to engage a reader or dismay them from continuing with the story, and learn how to determine which magazines are appropriate for your work. In addition, students will draft their own cover letters and leave the class with a specific and personalized submission plan. We will also discuss the role of networking in the submission process and how to successfully pursue contacts made at conferences and other literary venues.
Sunday September 13 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	Writing From Real Life Instructor: Judah Leblang $95/$85 members Registration Deadline: September 8th Level: Beginner/Intermediate Writers are observers, continually examining our lives and the lives of others. For memoir writers, and for those who write in other genres, our life experiences become the raw material of our creative work. In this seminar, we will focus on the key challenges in our lives today, and other hurdles we’ve overcome – in other words, difficult circumstances that might become the rich “raw material” for new work. We will discuss strategies for developing this material in a way that avoids the sentimental and general, and look at a few short examples of how other writers (i.e. Didion, Ehrenreich, Sedaris) use essays as a way of making meaning of difficult circumstances. By the end of the day, you will have chosen a topic and be on your way to writing about it in a thoughtful and critical way. Limited to 12 students.
Monday September 14 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM	Writers on Writing Panel: How To Tell a True “Ethnic” Story FREE! (Donations Appreciated) Join author and HarperCollins editor Rakesh Satyal (Blue Boy), debut novelist Ru Freeman (A Disobedient Girl), and PEN/Winship Award-winning Rishi Reddi (Karma and Other Stories) for a honest, craft-based and provocative discussion about how to “use” our ethnicities and identities in our writing. Background: Writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, and Gish Jen have been wildly popular due to their brilliant abilities to document their cultural experiences while ensuring that there is a firm narrative thread through their work that transcends culture alone. How, as writers, do we infuse our stories with the authenticity of culture without overdoing the ethnic elements of our work? How do we bring to the fore our thoughts on our backgrounds and experiences – from race-related ones to sexuality-related ones and beyond – while keeping our stories true, assured, and thought-provoking? Then, on the flip side, what about ethnic stories rings true to editors who specialize in publishing them? This panel is an expanded version of the seminar offered by Rakesh Satyal at the 2009 “Muse and the Marketplace” conference, and may include brief readings by the authors. Author book-signings follow the panel. Refreshments will be served.
Tuesday September 15 12:30 PM - 1:15 PM	Brown Bag Lunch Series Free! instructor: Chip Cheek Do you work downtown and want to fit some writing into your day? Or do you have a schedule that gives you free afternoons instead of evenings? Bring your lunch and come on over to Grub Street for a Brown Bag Writing Workshop – a series recently profiled in the Boston Globe. For 45 minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some cool writing exercises. Led by one of our award-winning instructors or ambassadors. Best of all, you’ll leave lunch with some new ideas to ponder for the rest of your day…and beyond. To reserve a spot, email sonya@grubstreet.org or call 617.695.0075.
Saturday October 17 / Sunday October 18 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM	The Real Story Instructor: Corey Mandell $320/$295 members Registration Deadline: October 12th What if most of what’s being taught about screenwriting was wrong? What if most of the rules, paradigms and secrets widely touted in books and seminars not only won’t improve ones chances of success, but could actually end up sabotaging it? This intensive weekend is for writers wishing to move beyond rigid cookie-cutter formulas and recipes to a deeper understanding of the universal patterns of powerful story structure. This seminar gives participants the tools and understanding to shape their ideas into unique well-crafted stories that evoke maximum emotional impact. Topics include the requirements for a successful narrative foundation, the power of the unifying principle, why most scripts fall apart in the second act and how to avoid this, what is required for a reader to care about your protagonist, how to build and sustain momentum, the use of thematic subtext, how to create high-impact builds and resolutions, sequence construction and character driven narration. Through lecture and film clips, participants learn a professional caliber, yet flexible approach to cinematic storytelling that applies to classically structured pieces as well as minimalist and ensemble works. Perfect for both beginning as well as advanced writers.
Tuesday December 29	Mike Heppner Consults On: Short Fiction, The Novel, Memoir, Individual Essay Also Available for: Preparing the MFA Application, Submitting to Literary Magazines, Intensive Line-Editing, Ghost-Writing, Personal Writing "Coaching" Mike Heppner was born in Rhode Island in 1972 and grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. His first novel, The Egg Code, was published in 2002, and his second, Pike's Folly, in 2006. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts and teaches Creative Writing at Emerson College. A third novel is forthcoming. For more information, go to http://www.mikeheppner.com.

events

In this section

calendar of events