Workshops & Events
Get Published: The 800 Word Essay
Saturday, May 25th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In this one-day course, we'll look at the art of writing the 800-word essay. From op-eds, to personal essays, to the New York Times' "Modern Love" column, the modern essay is the best way to get your stories out into mainstream media. This class will include discussion of the art of the idea, practical guidelines, when a piece is a situation and not a story, and how to arrive at the right idea for this medium. By the end of the workshop, you will come away with a workable draft for your ideal essay.
- Instructor: Jennifer Mattson
Jennifer Mattson is a former producer for NPR's nationally syndicated program "The Connection" and worked as an editor for National Public Radio. She spent over six years as a producer for CNN, where she was responsible for CNN's daily live newscasts and producing CNN's international coverage. Jennifer came to CNN to work in the Washington bureau's political unit during the 1996 U.S. presidential election. She later moved to Atlanta, where she worked first as a writer and then as a newscast producer at CNN International. Prior to joining CNN, Jennifer worked as a reporter based in Budapest, Hungary covering Eastern Europe, where she reported on a number of regional stories for USA TODAY including a piece on George Soros and the Clinton-Yeltsin CSCE Summit. She has also reported, most recently, from Asia. Her work has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, USA TODAY, The Boston Globe, The Women's Review of Books, AsianCorrespondent.com, Tablettalk.com and CNN.com. She is the former Managing Editor of AsiaSociety.org. Follow her on Twitter at @jennifermattson
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Flash Fiction Marathon
Saturday, May 25th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
The market for flash fiction is booming, and this seminar is perfect for any writer ready to crank out some new short-short stories. At the end of the day, you’ll walk away with a brand new assortment of stories, each created through writing exercises designed to unleash your flash fiction genius. The seminar will also feature discussion of published flash fiction—which we’ll draw inspiration from—as well as quick, on-the-spot feedback on your own work.
- Instructor: Matthew Salesses
Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Feb 2013), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and the chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, West Branch, and over fifty other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emerson College, the University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. Currently, he serves as the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer for the Good Men Project. On the web, he is matthewsalesses.com and @salesses.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
The Nonfiction Essentials Series: Effective Beginnings
Saturday, May 25th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In any story you need to capture the reader with the first page, on the first paragraph, in the first line. How do you do that? Not every story can lead with a natural disaster or a steamy affair. In this intensive, we’ll talk about the ways you convey mood, tone, and narrative voice in the opening lines. We’ll look at your story and see whether you are seeding the drama to come, where your sentences can be tightened, how you can do more to hook the reader. We’ll also talk more broadly about the work the first pages must accomplish in establishing the narrative arc, introducing themes, and framing the story so that readers continue turning the pages, even if the drama isn’t life or death.
Part of the "Nonfiction Essentials" Series, which includes:
The Nonfiction Essentials Series: Effective Beginnings
The Nonfiction Essentials Series: Interviews and Observed Details
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
There are 4 seats remaining in this class.
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The Novel Series: How to Hold Up Your Middle & Find Your Ending
Saturday, May 25th, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Having trouble keeping the energy of your novel going through the sometimes deadly middle pages? Have no idea where or how to discover your novel’s ending? Though the opening pages grab your reader, a novel that sinks after the first third will never see the light of day. Through craft discussions, the examination of published work, and writing exercises, we will look at how a strong “signature” buttresses the “roof” of your book, and how to increase the stakes at mid-point in order to renew your reader’s interest. We will also discuss how a thorough understanding of your protagonist’s desires and wounds, as well as you own personal vision about the novel’s “premise,” determines where you should end, how, and when. By the end of the course, you will have a plan for getting back to your writing desk and renewed energy about where your novel is going. Bring your laptops or notebooks and a digital or printed copy of your novel-in-progress for reference. Part of a monthly series of 10 one-day classes for novelists at the beginning or more advanced stages of their manuscripts.
- Instructor: Michelle Hoover
Michelle Hoover is a full-time instructor at Boston University and teaches many novel courses at Grub Street, including Grub's intensive year-long novel program, the Novel Incubator. She was a finalist for the Dorothy Churchill Cappon Essay Prize and has published short stories and novel excerpts in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, StoryQuarterly and Confrontation, StoryQuarterly. She has been the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell, a MacDowell Fellow, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in Best New American Voices. Her debut novel, The Quickening, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, was a Finalist for the Indies Choice Debut of 2010 and Forward Magazine's Best Literary Book of 2010, and is a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read" pick. For more, go to www.michelle-hoover.com.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Non-Fiction Career Lab Graduation Reading and Reception
Wednesday, May 29th, 6:30pm - 9:00pm at 162 Boylston, 3rd Floor.
Join students from the competitive 2012-2013 Non-Fiction Career Lab Pilot program for an evening of brief readings from their various types of non-fiction (memoir, journalism and hybrid) . Over the past year, these writers have been working with instructors Ethan Gilsdorf and Pagan Kennedy on their full-length works of non-fiction as well as many other shorter pieces that they have been publishing in journals, newspapers and elsewhere. After the student readings, there will be a short graduating ceremony as well as a Q&A on non-fiction writing, the format of the Career Lab program itself, and anything else writing-related that comes up. Refreshments will be provided. FREE!
- Instructor: TBA
We'll announce this person's name soon!
Provoking Thought: Writing a Nonfiction Book of Ideas
Thursday, May 30th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Nonfiction books about science, medicine, parenting, psychology, architecture, culture, technology, and politics are all books of ideas and require a different approach than fiction or narrative nonfiction. Fortunately, there's a big market for these book: all you need is a great idea--and a great proposal. In this seminar, you'll learn everything you need to know to market your book of ideas to an agent or publisher. We'll pay special attention to the single most important factor in selling your book: the framing. You'll learn about the state of the nonfiction publishing industry, what editors are looking for, what readers are looking for, how to find the best agent for your project, how to craft a winning proposal, and how to come up with the most effective framing for your book. We'll analyze successful and failed books of ideas published in the past few years (especially science books), giving special attention to the different styles of Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers) and Steven Pinker (author of Blank Slate). In addition, we'll discuss how ebooks are changing the industry and opening new opportunities for unpublished nonfiction authors. The class will consist of lecture and highly interactive discussion with plenty of opportunities to ask questions during and after class.
- Instructor: Ogi Ogas
Dr. Ogi Ogas received his PhD in computational neuroscience from Boston University and was a Department of Homeland Security Fellow. His writing has been published in the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Wired, and Seed Magazine. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker called his first nonfiction book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, "a goldmine." His next book, A Billion Angry Brains, (Dutton, 2013) explores the misunderstood emotion of anger. He's presently collaborating with the president of the American Psychiatric Association on a popular book about contemporary psychiatry. He writes the Billion Wicked Thoughts blog for Psychology Today. He also used his knowledge of cognition to reach the million dollar question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and battle Ken Jennings in the finals of Grand Slam. For more information on Ogi, visit www.billionwickedthoughts.com.
There is 1 seat remaining in this class.
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Making Images
Thursday, May 30th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
What makes an image fresh, vivid, astonishing, memorable? What makes an image at all? In the first half of this seminar we'll take a hard look at some surprising and dazzling images in poetry and fiction to articulate a working definition of the image, to observe the choices involved in the making of great images, and to develop a list of image-driven strategies. In the seminar's second half we'll perform some exercises to practice and implement these strategies, and to rethink how we construct images in our own work. Participants are expected to bring an image that they would like to revise, which they'll work on and have the opportunity to share at the seminar's end.
- Instructor: Scott Challener
Scott Challener teaches writing in Boston University’s Writing Program and Metropolitan College and Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies, and volunteers for 826 Boston. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative Magazine, The Rumpus, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. His reviews of five past National Book Award winners appeared recently on the National Book Awards Foundation website. He lives in the Fort Point Channel area of South Boston.
There are 8 seats remaining in this class.
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At Stake: Building Tension in Fiction
Thursday, May 30th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You don’t need to start your story with a car chase or a gun going off to draw your readers in. And you needn’t end every chapter with a cliffhanger to keep them reading. Tension in fiction is created in a variety of ways, and through close reading and discussion, you’ll learn how to craft compelling characters, choose fresh plot lines, manipulate pacing, and highlight setting in ways that support the central conflict of your story. Novelist Lynne Griffin will walk you through how to move your characters closer to their goals while introducing complications to your story that raise stakes, putting at risk what your characters want and need, making failure ever more possible and dangerous. In an attempt to raise reader questions yet keep them grounded in scene, you’ll learn to create the kind of intense curiosity that keeps readers turning those pages. An extended version of the sold-out Muse 2012 session.
- Instructor: Lynne Griffin
Lynne Griffin is the author of the novels Sea Escape (Simon & Schuster) and Life Without Summer (St. Martin’s Press), and the nonfiction parenting guide, Negotiation Generation (Penguin). In addition to teaching at Grub Street, Lynne teaches in the graduate program of family studies at Wheelock College. She is the family life contributor for Boston’s Fox Morning News and writes for The Writer magazine, Parenting magazine, and Psychology Today. For more about Lynne’s work, visit her website, www.LynneGriffin.com or her blog, Field Guide to Families.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
How to Create An Irresistible Narrator
Thursday, May 30th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Many a short story, novel, and memoir have gone unpublished because the author fails to create a strong narrator, one who can act as a wise and entertaining guide to the reader. In this class, we'll examine the work of Ford, Salinger, Austen and others -- and try an in-class exercise -- in an effort to make sure your next narrator isn't just strong, but irresistible.
- Instructor: Steve Almond
Steve Almond is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently the story collection God Bless America. Learn more at stevealmondjoy.com.
There are 5 seats remaining in this class.
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The Nonfiction Essentials Series: Interviews and Observed Details
Friday, May 31st, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
At some point in your career as a memoirist or essayist, you do need to mine more than your memory; you need to venture from your writing desk and into the world to discover new territories and new information. For some people, this means interviewing relatives about sensitive family information or historical events. For others, it means observing a public scene or event or participating in an experience while taking notes like a reporter. In this workshop, we’ll work on two bedrock skills that reporters need to master in order to write complex pieces. The first is interviewing. We’ll talk about how to find experts to interview, the etiquette of interviewing, and the methods of capturing information accurately. The second skill is the ability to describe a place or a moment that’s unfolding in front of you. We’ll discuss and practice ways to include telling details and overheard dialog. We’ll look at some texts in which writers have used reporting and discuss how this information has enhanced each narrative. You’ll leave with some ideas for doing your own interviewing and reporting as a way of creating or strengthening your essays.
Part of the "Nonfiction Essentials" Series, which includes:
The Nonfiction Essentials Series: Effective Beginnings
The Nonfiction Essentials Series: Interviews and Observed Details
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
- Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
There are 4 seats remaining in this class.
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20 Revision Lessons
Saturday, June 1st, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
We often hear writers talk about how revision is the key to writing well, but we don't often get concrete strategies for how to do it. Yet there are indeed several non-abstract steps you can take to make your writing better through revision. In this class, we will go over 20 strategies writers can use to revise their stories, and we will put some of these into practice on the spot. We will also use exercises and mini-workshops to get an idea how to proceed on revising a longer story. Students should bring the first two pages of a story with them to class.
- Instructor: Matthew Salesses
- Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Feb 2013), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and the chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, West Branch, and over fifty other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emerson College, the University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. Currently, he serves as the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer for the Good Men Project. On the web, he is matthewsalesses.com and @salesses.
There are 5 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing and Pitching the Op-Ed
Saturday, June 1st, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Get your op-ed out of your head and into the headlines! You have ideas and opinions about Middle East foreign policy or parenting trends; you feel strongly about health care reform or Red Sox reform; or you have a poignant story about your or your parents' experience with the health care system (or the Red Sox). Whatever the topic, in this seminar you'll learn the basics for writing and submitting the standard 600- to 900-word op-ed column. Via lecture, discussion of great examples from op-eds, short exercises, and Q&A, we'll show you how to 1) recognize and find great, timely, marketable topics for your op-eds that editors want; 2) how to leverage your personal experience and expertise; 3) where to publish your op-eds; and 4) how to pitch them to newspapers, magazines, online publications, and blogs. We'll look at exemplary pitch letters and go over standard protocol for working with editors. For any writers with an axe to grind or strong opinions who are looking for practical tips to get their op-eds into the marketplace.
- Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
A journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com and Christian Science Monitor, and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today Washington Post and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, former bicycling culture columnist for the Boston Globe, and is the film columnist for Art New England. He is a core contributor to the blog "GeekDad" at wired.com and his blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com. He also writes for blogs at Boston.com's Globetrotting; Tor.com; ForcesofGeek.com, and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, Exquisite Corpse and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro and, for younger students, in schools and community centers. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Grub Street. Follow Ethan’s adventures at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
There are 7 seats remaining in this class.
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Ten Common Pitfalls of Middle Grade and Young Adult Writing -- and How to Avoid Them!
Saturday, June 1st, 10:00am-1:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
From opening chapters that lack conflict, to white protagonists with token ethnic best friends, to unresolved endings that scream “Sequel!” well-intentioned writers of middle grade and young adult novels employ certain problematic clichés again and again. This seminar will highlight ten of these pitfalls, giving participants strategies to navigate around them and make their novels fresh and appealing to an editor’s weary eyes. Before the seminar, each participant will submit the first chapter of his or her novel-in-progress via email to the instructor, who will deliver feedback regarding the writer’s strengths and troubleshoot for potential pitfalls.
- Instructor: Elaine Dimopoulos
Elaine Dimopoulos served as the 2010-2011 Boston Public Library Children’s Writer-in-Residence. She teaches children's literature at Boston University and Simmons College. In 2008, she was named a St. Botolph Club Emerging Artist. She is a graduate of Yale, Columbia, and Simmons, where she earned an M.F.A. in Writing for Children. Elaine is represented by Edward Necarsulmer at McIntosh & Otis. To learn more, visit elainedimopoulos.com.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Happy Neurons: Writing Sensory Detail That's Truly Sensory
Saturday, June 1st, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
A recent article in the New York Times outlined the ways in which the reading mind responds to sensory detail in written language: neurons trace more or less the same paths they would when reacting to actual sense-impressions. In case anybody needed convincing, here is scientific evidence to back up the idea that creative writing is greatly enhanced by rich description and evocative word choices. But getting to this level of writing doesn’t necessarily come naturally. How can you create a sensuous linguistic landscape in every essay, story, or chapter―one that will keep your readers’ neurons jumping? In this weekend intensive we’ll do close readings of inspirational examples of rich sensory description and do in-class exercises. We’ll discuss the dampening effect of cilches and predictable phrasing, as well as the value of idiosyncratic or slightly unexpected turns of phrase. In-class exercises will help us identify less than exciting descriptive techniques and possible ways to replace them with more vivid, distinctive, and memorable language.
- Instructor: Kim Adrian
Kim Adrian's short stories, essays, and memoir excerpts have appeared in Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Raritan, Crazyhorse, New England Review, /nor, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a P.E.N. New England Discovery Award, an Artist's Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Editor's Prize in Nonfiction from the New Ohio Review, as well as residencies at the Edward Albee Barn, Ragdale, and the VCCA. She teaches creative writing at Grub Street, reads nonfiction for Agni magazine, and serves on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her essay, "Questionnaire for My Grandfather" will appear in the upcoming anthology YOU: Essays in the Second Person (Welcome Table Press, 2012). Currently, she is at work on a book-length memoir. More at kimadrian.com.
Kim is the founder of Thumbtack, a website production company for authors.
There are 6 seats remaining in this class.
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Adaptation for Screenwriters
Saturday, June 1st, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In Hollywood today, adaptations are hot properties. Films based on books, comics, television shows, historical events, video games, and theme-park rides are among the highest-grossing box office successes and dominate the list of Oscar-nominated projects. One reason for their popularity is that bestselling works in other mediums are known quantities, minimizing risk for the studios and producers by bringing built-in audiences to theaters. As writers, we are poised to take advantage of this trend.
In this class, we will explore strategies for adapting stories from other mediums, including your own novels or short stories, for the screen. We will view clips from several successful adaptations, and also read or view excerpts from the source materials, to understand the process of creating stories for the screen. We will look specifically at the requirements for visual storytelling. We will also discuss the importance of obtaining rights to source materials before beginning a screenplay adaptation.
Students should bring an idea for an adaptation to class for discussion purposes. This seminar will provide an introduction to the process of adaptation for screenwriters and is open to writers in all genres who have completed an introductory screenwriting course. Experienced and beginning screenwriters will learn how to expand the market potential of their work and how to develop story ideas into effective screenplays. Suggested text for this course is Make Your Story a Movie, by John Robert Marlow.
- Instructor: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She studied writing and literature at Goddard College, has a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She has published poetry and articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches screenwriting at BU’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts and at Northeastern University. Her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, is based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name. Cheryl is a lecturer at Shakespeare conferences around the country. Her new ten-minute play, Ve-Ri-Tas, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and was the 2012 Judge for the WIFVNE Annual Screenwriting Competition. She also served as a panelist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2012 Play/Screenwriting Fellowship. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts.
There are 7 seats remaining in this class.
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Summer Open House (Monday Gathering)
FREE! Monday, June 3rd, 5:30-6:30pm, at Grub Street headquarters.
Want to learn about all the events and classes coming up at Grub Street this summer? Looking for a chance to mingle with fellow members, students, instructors and staff? We'll be holding several open houses in June and hope you'll drop by for drinks, snacks, and good company. Drop by at anytime, or RSVP using this link and we'll send you a reminder!
- Instructor: TBA
- We'll announce this person's name soon!
Using Social, Visual Storytelling to Market Your Work
Monday, June 3rd, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
It used to be that your primary challenge as a writer was to find someone to publish your book.
Today, anyone can publish a book. The challenge now is to have your voice heard in an increasingly
crowded, online marketplace. But you’re not a marketer, and you’re certainly not a salesperson.
Social, visual storytelling may be the answer. A natural extension of a writer’s creative focus, social,
visual storytelling is about sharing your life experiences and stories through social networks using
a mix of writing and visual elements. It enables you to share your voice with potential new readers
while avoiding “promotion.”
By the end of this seminar, writers will understand why social, visual storytelling is the most powerful
discovery tool a writer can use both before and after publication; how to construct a wide variety of
effective, engaging visual stories for social sharing; how to use these stories to spark engagement
with readers to grow your fan base; and which free tools are most useful for creating these types of
stories and measuring their effectiveness.
Come ready for hands-on, interactive learning. Bring your smartphones, tablets, computers, and
story ideas so you can fully participate. During the class, we’ll create our own social, visual story
about what we’re doing and learning. We’ll share it in real time throughout the class, then use some
of the tools we explore to turn it into a single piece of content that we can continue to share even
after the class is over. In the middle of the session, we’ll be virtually visited by a number of writers
and publishing experts from around the globe who have successfully used social, visual storytelling
to share their voice and increase their readership. They’ll walk us through their examples and help
answer your questions.
This class is open to all students, from those contemplating their first book to those who have
already published.
- Instructor: Kathy Meis
Kathy Meis has been a television news reporter, a print journalist, a magazine editor, and a ghostwriter of books. She has worked for CBS, Forbes, and many well-know writers. Last year, she founded Bublish, an award-winning social book discovery platform that is revolutionizing the way writers share their stories and readers find books and authors they'll love. Kathy enjoys working with creators to transform book promotion from drudgery into a natural extension of their creative life. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband, four children, and Ava, her German Shorthaired Pointer.
There are 8 seats remaining in this class.
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An Afternoon of Memoirs: Stories from the South End
Monday, June 3rd, 1:00-3:00 pm at THE HARVARD CLUB.
Join us for a public reading celebrating the work of the South End writers of The Memoir Project. A joint venture between Mayor Menino's Elderly Commission and Grub Street, The Memoir Project aims to teach Boston Residents 60 and older the rudiments of memoir writing. By capturing stories of older adults we intend to document the history of Boston and, by doing so, provide a greater understanding of the city's past and present for all its residents. Light refreshments will be served.
- Instructor: TBA
- We'll announce this person's name soon!
There are 25 seats remaining in this class.
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"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, June 4th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
Grub Street Book Club - A Question of Freedom
Tuesday, June 4th, 6:30-8:30pm at Grub Street Headquarters.
The Grub Book Club offers a chance to read and discuss great books with a focus on reading from a writer's perspective. The book club's next pick is the memoir A Question of Freedom by Reginald Dwayne Betts. Grub instructor Michelle Seaton will lead a discussion on A Question of Freedom for the first hour, and we'll then be joined by author Reginald Dwayne Betts for an informal Q&A about his memoir. Russell Simmons calls it "a reminder that no matter how confining our surroundings might seem or how bleak our future might look, as long as we are in touch with our higher selves, we can always tap into both the compassion and the toughness that is in all of our hearts." Check below for a video of Reginald at Grub Street's fundraiser last year speaking about his experiences leading up to the publication of A Question of Freedom.
Must be a current Grub Street member to attend, and members are invited to bring friends.
Reginald Dwayne Betts at Joyride -- 2012 Fall Gala from Grub Street on Vimeo.
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
- Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
- Reginald Dwayne Betts (Author)
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two young sons. In 2012, President Barack Obama appointed Mr. Betts to the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. An award-winning writer and poet, Mr. Betts’ memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. In 2010 he was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship to complete The Circumference of a Prison, a work of nonfiction exploring the criminal justice system. In addition, Mr. Betts is the author of a collection of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm. In addition to his writing, Mr. Betts is involved in a number of non-profit organizations, including the Campaign for Youth Justice for which he serves as a national spokesperson. He received a B.A. from the University of Maryland and was recently a Radcliffe Fellow to Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies.
There are 7 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $0 register as a non-member $0Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Summer Open House (Tuesday Gathering)
FREE! Tuesday, June 4th, 5:30-6:30pm, at Grub Street headquarters.
Want to learn about all the events and classes coming up at Grub Street this summer? Looking for a chance to mingle with fellow members, students, instructors and staff? We'll be holding several open houses in June and hope you'll drop by for drinks, snacks, and good company. Drop by at anytime, or RSVP using this link and we'll send you a reminder!
- Instructor: TBA
- We'll announce this person's name soon!
Grubbie Write-in -- June
Wednesday, June 5th at 6:00pm -8:00pm at Pavement Coffee House.
Need a break from your writing desk? Want to share enthusiasm, feedback, and cappuccinos? Join our next Grubby Write-in at the trendy Pavement Coffee House (1096 Boylston Street). Meet new people and get inspired by writing alongside fellow Grubbies in a cozy cafe setting. If you're interested in attending, please RSVP using this link and we'll send you a reminder ahead of time.
- Instructor: TBA
- We'll announce this person's name soon!
Go Deeper, Baby: Writing Meaningful Erotica
Thursday, June 6th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In this one-night seminar, we'll celebrate erotic fiction, looking at why it's both emotionally valuable and increasingly popular. Drawing on well-respected authors such as Anais Nin and Steve Almond, we'll explore what makes a sexy story sexy, while also tapping the transformational qualities of the genre. Come along with a willingness to be open about feelings and sensations, and you'll leave with a short, sexy story of your own. All sexual and gender identities warmly welcomed. Led by an instructor who regularly publishes erotica and views it as some of her most meaningful work.
- Instructor: Lana Fox
Lana Fox became a sex writer when she realized she couldn't shut up about the subject. As well as publishing in both literary and commercial magazines, Lana has been an online sex columnist for both Boston Magazine and the Nervous Breakdown, and her short stories appear in a variety of anthologies, including Best Women's Erotica 2011 and Best Bondage Erotica 2012. She is represented by the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency in New York and can be found online at www.lanafox.com.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Summer Open House (Thursday Gathering)
FREE! Thursday, June 6th, 5:30-6:30pm, at Grub Street headquarters.
Want to learn about all the events and classes coming up at Grub Street this summer? Looking for a chance to mingle with fellow members, students, instructors and staff? We'll be holding several open houses in June and hope you'll drop by for drinks, snacks, and good company. Drop by at anytime, or RSVP using this link and we'll send you a reminder!
- Instructor: TBA
- We'll announce this person's name soon!
The Hero of a Thousand Stories: Unlocking the Power of Myth for Your Story Structure
Thursday, June 6th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces has influenced writers and filmmakers for decades. The book accesses centuries of myth and culture to reveal that all stories follow a similar pattern. By understanding that pattern, the writer can deeply connect with their audience. “The Monomyth” has been used by creators such as George Lucas, J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, and Philip Pullman and has influenced films as diverse as The Matrix and Darren Aranofsky’s Black Swan. By the end of this seminar, writers will have a better understanding of the seventeen stages of the Monomyth and be able to use these archetypical scenes to add power and meaning to their work. We will discuss the various stages of the Monomyth while using examples from novels and films to illustrate each stage. During the question-and-answer segment, students may share their work in order to see how the Monomyth fits their writing. This seminar is perfect for novelists, screenwriters, and short story writers interested in using the power of myth to enhance their writing. This class is a great compliment to Screenwriting I or II and Novel in Progress.
- Instructor: Mark Fogarty
Mark Fogarty is the president and Co-founder of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC), a non-profit created to help local filmmakers find resources in the Ocean State. The RIFC has more than 1,900 members and has been involved in the production of dozens of films. For more information, visit www.rifcfilms.com. Mark started Exile Movies in 2003 and has worked as a director of photography and editor on feature-length and short films. Mark recently directed the feature-length epic, smalltown, from his screenplay. You can find out more about the film at www.smalltownmovie.com. As an actor, Mark has been in dozens of films and uses his knowledge of acting to inform his writing. Mark graduated from Emerson College with a degree in filmmaking, and works as a freelance editor and writer.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Scenes and Dialogue in Nonfiction
Thursday, June 6th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Writers often struggle with the best and most efficient way to use scenes in essays and memoir. How many scenes is too many? How much description is necessary? Using examples from both essay and memoir, we'll look at effective use of scenes and micro-scenes in creative nonfiction. We'll discuss the differences between direct and indirect dialogue and do some exercises to get you generating scenes that generate emotional resonance in your work.
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
- Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
There are 8 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
How to Make Your Characters Snap, Crackle & Pop!
Thursday, June 6th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Ever read (or write) a story where the hero or heroine just doesn't seem to pop? I have. Like a thousand times. In this intensive (but fun-filled!) seminar, we'll look at why some characters leap off the page, while others just sit there. We'll discuss the perils of passivity, the allure of action, and look at examples of both from writers way more talented than the instructor. We'll also do an in-class exercise to bring the lesson home.
- Instructor: Steve Almond
- Steve Almond is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently the story collection God Bless America. Learn more at stevealmondjoy.com.
There are 6 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Guerrilla Book Promotion
Friday, June 7th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
If you're about to publish a book -- fiction or nonfiction -- you've probably got questions about how to best get the word out. Your publicist will handle some of the tasks, but what can you do on your own? In this seminar, via lecture, discussion of packet materials, short exercises, and Q&A, we'll explore great ideas and best practices to design your own "thinking out of the box," DIY, guerrilla-style promotional campaign. Whether you have a big or small publisher or chose self-publishing, have a novel or a work of nonfiction, this seminar will explore ways to identify, reach, and build a target audience in various potential book-buying communities. We'll discuss how to create a tool box of publicity materials and a "mobile event kit" so you're ready for any publicity opportunity; organizing a book tour (and not just at bookstores but using non-traditional venues); brainstorming special contests, promotions, and giveaways unique to your book; establishing yourself as an expert and tying in your book to current events; writing tie-in op-eds and commentaries to join the conversation in your field; pitching yourself to traditional media like print, TV, and radio; getting your book into the hands of opinion leaders; and how to develop ancillary income streams and platform-building opportunities via speaking engagements; among other topics. We'll also look at what your publisher ought to be doing (and how to push back and ask for more) and the problems that self-publishing creates (and how to work around them). Come with questions. For writers with forthcoming books or those looking to help build their platform now.
- Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
- A journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com and Christian Science Monitor, and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today Washington Post and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, former bicycling culture columnist for the Boston Globe, and is the film columnist for Art New England. He is a core contributor to the blog "GeekDad" at wired.com and his blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com. He also writes for blogs at Boston.com's Globetrotting; Tor.com; ForcesofGeek.com, and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, Exquisite Corpse and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro and, for younger students, in schools and community centers. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Grub Street. Follow Ethan’s adventures at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Media Training for Authors
Saturday, June 8th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Your book is out! Now it's time to spread the word. Exciting things are on the horizon: radio interviews, television appearances, and readings. But you are terrified. What if you choke? What if you gush? Will you be able to talk about your book so that people run out and buy it? This intensive day of training will prepare you well for a variety of media opportunities coming your way. You will: learn how to combat nerves; get tips on how to perform best, depending on the media outlet; practice interviews and get invaluable feedback on body language, content, and tone; and learn how to avoid common pitfalls. Authors Katrin Schumann and Lynne Griffin have extensive experience promoting their work on TV, radio, and in readings large and small. Come prepared to put your fears behind you by learning how to put your best foot forward.
- Instructor: Katrin Schumann
Katrin Schumann is the co-author of The Secret Power of Middle Children and Mothers Need Time-Outs, Too. She has been featured on the TODAY show, Talk of the Nation and in The Times, as well as other newspapers, magazines and radio, nationally and internationally. Schumann’s latest projects include a historical novel set in the Baltic, various non-fiction books in development, and on-going editorial work for editors, agents and writers. For the past ten years she has been teaching fiction and non-fiction, most recently at a local women’s prison, and running parenting focus groups and surveys. Before going freelance, she helped produce talk shows at NPR, where she won the Kogan Media Award. Schumann has been granted writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Norman Mailer Writer's Colony. Awarded scholarships to Oxford and Stanford Universities, she studied literature, language and journalism. Schumann was born in Freiburg, Germany, grew up in New York City and London, and now lives in Massachusetts.
- Lynne Griffin (Author)
- Lynne Griffin is the author of the novels Sea Escape (Simon & Schuster) and Life Without Summer (St. Martin’s Press), and the nonfiction parenting guide, Negotiation Generation (Penguin). In addition to teaching at Grub Street, Lynne teaches in the graduate program of family studies at Wheelock College. She is the family life contributor for Boston’s Fox Morning News and writes for The Writer magazine, Parenting magazine, and Psychology Today. For more about Lynne’s work, visit her website, www.LynneGriffin.com or her blog, Field Guide to Families.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Shaping a Short Story Collection
Saturday, June 8th, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You’ve got a great idea for a collection of tales or a file folder full of completed stories. Congratulations! Now what? Well, before you go sending your probably weighty and disorganized manuscript off to agents and publishers, there’s a critical step: shaping your collection. In this one day workshop you’ll learn how to take stock of what you’ve got and shape it into a well-rounded and dynamic book. We’ll discuss traditional and experimental structures (such as linked collections) and organizing imperatives as well as examining the successes and failures of published manuscripts. You’ll learn how to create a blueprint for your collected work and through in class exercises will begin the building process. Each student will get a chance to share a short sample of their collection or their blueprint with the class. Students should bring a one page synopsis of their idea or their completed collection to class.
- Instructor: KL Pereira
KL Pereira is a teaching artist who lives mostly in her head; she's interested in the creaky, creepy underbelly of life and whatever lies beyond. She holds a BA in Literature and Languages from Bard College, an MA in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Mythic Deliruim, Jabberwocky, The Medulla Review, Bitch Magazine, Clamor Magazine, and other fine magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, and journals. You can read her column: Slaying Genre: A Monthly Column on Horror, Noir, Fantasy, and the Other Red-Headed Step-Children of the Literary World here. Pereira publishes erotic horror under a different name and is currently working on a collection of flash fiction fairy tales, a mytho-punk noir, and some zombie apocalyptica. For more information, visit www.darknesslovescompany.com.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
The Ten Most Common Problems in Submitting Your Work and How to Fix Them
Saturday, June 8th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Want to know why agents and publishers are ignoring or rejecting your query letters, proposals and manuscripts? This class will provide an insider’s perspective on mistakes from failure to research the competition to crafting a narrative arc that never reaches an emotionally satisfying conclusion. We’ll discuss specific examples that cut deeper than issues regarding cosmetic presentation but penetrate the creative weaknesses at heart of the work.
Be sure to bring a one page query letter, proposal outline or first page manuscript to receive on-the-spot feedback in this class.
- Instructor: Alan Rinzler
Alan Rinzler has edited and published Toni Morrison, Tom Robbins, Hunter S. Thompson, Jerzy Kosinski, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Ludlum, Andy Warhol, Clive Cussler, Bob Dylan, and others while working as Assistant to the Managing Editor at Simon and Schuster, Senior Editor at Macmillan and Holt, Director of Trade Publishing at Bantam Books, VP and Associate Publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine, President of Straight Arrow Books, West Coast Editor for the Grove Press, and elsewhere.
There are 7 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Dealing with the Dilemmas of Memoir Writing
Saturday, June 8th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
The art and craft of writing memoir is full of pitfalls. In this workshop, we'll examine some of the memoirist's unique challenges, such as: how to create a character out of oneself; how to create characters out of loved ones; how to keep your memoir separate from the sort of emotional work best done in a therapist’s office; how to handle issues of shaping, structure, chronology, and plot when your material is “real life”; how to negotiate the fine line between fabrication, or lying, and writing an honest but engaging nonfiction narrative; how to prevent your memoir from turning into a "me-moir"; how to provide anonymity to certain characters or events as needed; and, perhaps most important of all, how to cultivate an attitude of mature retrospection that's capable of transforming personal memory and experience into a rewarding narrative journey for your readers. This one-day intensive will include an overview of useful terms and concepts in memoir-writing, in-class readings (of both memoirs and texts about writing memoir), discussion, and in-class exercises designed to illuminate potential solutions to some of your own memoir-writing challenges. Please bring a brief synopsis (up to 300 words) of your memoir project, which may be either in progress or in the planning/exploration stage.
- Instructor: Kim Adrian
- Kim Adrian's short stories, essays, and memoir excerpts have appeared in Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Raritan, Crazyhorse, New England Review, /nor, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a P.E.N. New England Discovery Award, an Artist's Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Editor's Prize in Nonfiction from the New Ohio Review, as well as residencies at the Edward Albee Barn, Ragdale, and the VCCA. She teaches creative writing at Grub Street, reads nonfiction for Agni magazine, and serves on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her essay, "Questionnaire for My Grandfather" will appear in the upcoming anthology YOU: Essays in the Second Person (Welcome Table Press, 2012). Currently, she is at work on a book-length memoir. More at kimadrian.com.
Kim is the founder of Thumbtack, a website production company for authors.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Writing Irresistible Queries
Saturday, June 8th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You only get one chance to make a first impression. But as writers, we get the chance to perfect our first impression--the query--before it goes out to agents. In this one-day workshop, participants will learn the structure of a successful query, keeping in mind the ultimate goal: convincing an agent that they can (will! must!) sell your book to a publisher. We’ll adapt the query structure to each participant’s project, workshop multiple revisions, and (time permitting) discuss strategy for building and implementing your submission list. This class is open to all levels. Please come prepared with a description of your book project.
- Instructor: Trish Ryan
Trish Ryan is the author of two memoirs, A Maze of Grace: A Memoir of Second Chances (Hachette 2010) and He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Hope, and Happily Ever After (Hachette 2008). This fall she will be an Evelyn Danzig Haas ’39 Visiting Artist at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. Trish lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Steve and their genetically improbable mixed-breed dog. You can visit Trish online at www.trishryanonline.com.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, June 11th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
What’s Temperament Got to Do With It? Creating Authentic Characters
Thursday, June 13th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In this seminar, you'll learn how to get to the heart of character motivation. Lynne Griffin has over twenty years' experience as a family life educator, with specific expertise in the impact of individual differences on human behavior, and she'll share her unique ideas for crafting characters from the inside out -- ones who are more than the sum of their physical traits. You’ll learn how to use behavioral research to answer all kinds of questions such as, “What would this character really do?” “What makes a person do this or that?” “How would my character react to that?” Through lecture, discussion, and writing exercises, you’ll learn new techniques for crafting three-dimensional, compelling, and memorable major as well as minor characters.
- Instructor: Lynne Griffin
- Lynne Griffin is the author of the novels Sea Escape (Simon & Schuster) and Life Without Summer (St. Martin’s Press), and the nonfiction parenting guide, Negotiation Generation (Penguin). In addition to teaching at Grub Street, Lynne teaches in the graduate program of family studies at Wheelock College. She is the family life contributor for Boston’s Fox Morning News and writes for The Writer magazine, Parenting magazine, and Psychology Today. For more about Lynne’s work, visit her website, www.LynneGriffin.com or her blog, Field Guide to Families.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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The Visual Art of Fiction
Thursday, June 13th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
It is no accident that so much of our great literature has been adapted into films, plays, comics, and other visual art forms. Great literature leaves us not just with extraordinary stories; the language also leaves an image—a rich and expansive painting of the world written on the page.
Most of this class will be spent in lecture and discussion on how the techniques and processes employed by visual artists can be used by the writer to great effect. We will look at images both in literature and art and learn what it is that makes these images endure so clearly in our imaginations. Through a range of techniques and exercises students will learn how to infuse their writing with vividness and make their work “pop” by choosing and exaggerating certain details. The instructor will share a variety techniques on how to access the most visual parts of the brain and how to translate those visions into stories.
This class is for writers of all levels with a consistent discipline of writing looking for a fresh new way to approach their work.
For further information please visit the workshop tab of www.annieweatherwax.com.
- Instructor: Annie Weatherwax
Annie Weatherwax's novel, How It Ends will be published by Scribner in the summer of 2014. Her short stories have appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Southern Review, Other Voices, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She was the 2009 winner of the Robert Olen Butler Prize for Fiction. Her writing on language and art has appeared in The New York Times in a review of The Graphic Canon. She is a painter and sculptor and for years earned a living sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for Nickelodeon, DC Comics, Pixar and others. www.annieweatherwax.com.
There are 6 seats remaining in this class.
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Micro-Editing
Thursday, June 13th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Before an editor evaluates your manuscript’s themes, plot, characters, or voice, he or she judges its sentences. The best way to impress any reader is to write clear and efficient prose. Good sentence-level editing can increase the pace, enhance the description, and deepen the mood of your work. In short, it can make your writing more compelling. In this workshop, we will take apart and reassemble sentences and paragraphs from both fiction and nonfiction drafts. You will learn to read like an editor, to question every word and remove abstraction in order to take your writing to the next level.
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
- Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
There are 7 seats remaining in this class.
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Swinging Singles: The Art of the Single Scene Story
Thursday, June 13th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
The ultimate challenge for any story writer is how to pack the maximum pathos and humor into the minimum space. We'll look at the work of masters such as Tobias Wolff, Carolyn Forche, and others to figure out how a single, sustained scene can prove even more dramatically satisfying than stories that leap around. Bonus: awesome in-class exercise included!
- Instructor: Steve Almond
- Steve Almond is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently the story collection God Bless America. Learn more at stevealmondjoy.com.
There are 13 seats remaining in this class.
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Taming Time: Pacing, Compression, and Slowing Down
Saturday, June 15th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Creating a believable sense of time is one of the novelist's greatest triumphs and most painful of headaches. This course will offer an array of techniques to help keep your reader with you and use time to its most significant effect. Through craft lectures, in-class reading of published works, as well as the sharing of personal writing and concerns, students will learn the art of pacing scenes and using summary, how to compress time within scenes and chapters and handle time jumps, as well as how to add emphasis to specific moments by slowing down. In addition, we will cover cinematic techniques important to fiction writers, such as scene cuts and the montage. By the end of the course, you will not only have gained a greater sense of time in reading the works of others but be able to grapple with time’s difficulties in your own work. Students should bring thirteen copies of a 500- to 750-word scene or part of a scene-in-progress that they are having trouble with in terms of time and pacing. You may also wish to bring your laptops or notebooks and a digital or printed copy of your novel-in-progress for personal reference. This course is part of a monthly series of 10 one-day classes for novelists at the beginning or more advanced stages of their manuscripts.
- Instructor: Michelle Hoover
- Michelle Hoover is a full-time instructor at Boston University and teaches many novel courses at Grub Street, including Grub's intensive year-long novel program, the Novel Incubator. She was a finalist for the Dorothy Churchill Cappon Essay Prize and has published short stories and novel excerpts in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, StoryQuarterly and Confrontation, StoryQuarterly. She has been the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell, a MacDowell Fellow, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in Best New American Voices. Her debut novel, The Quickening, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, was a Finalist for the Indies Choice Debut of 2010 and Forward Magazine's Best Literary Book of 2010, and is a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read" pick. For more, go to www.michelle-hoover.com.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Kickstart Your Writing Mojo with A Random Exercise
Saturday, June 15th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Write a story in 100 words or less. Write an essay as it it were captions to a personal museum exhibit. Write a poem as an instructional manual. Without fail, arbitrary exercises like these refresh your writing mojo and force you to produce unexpected, shimmering work in a voice or style you never thought you could pull off. In this 6 hour writing workshop, the instructor will throw at the class a series of 15 to 30 minute, in-class writing exercises -- prose (both fiction or nonfiction), as well as a fun poem or two. The idea? To get you to try as many modes and voices as possible, using arbitrary rules and emulating writers we love. There will be minimal sharing, but no workshopping. You'll leave the workshop with new energy and excitement about your work, having generated a series of starts on a variety of projects.
- Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
- A journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com and Christian Science Monitor, and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today Washington Post and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, former bicycling culture columnist for the Boston Globe, and is the film columnist for Art New England. He is a core contributor to the blog "GeekDad" at wired.com and his blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com. He also writes for blogs at Boston.com's Globetrotting; Tor.com; ForcesofGeek.com, and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, Exquisite Corpse and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro and, for younger students, in schools and community centers. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Grub Street. Follow Ethan’s adventures at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
There are 2 seats remaining in this class.
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Short Story Clinic
Saturday, June 15th, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You’ve worked and re-worked your story to death but there’s no denying it: you’re at the end of your rope. Even after countless drafts and what seems like endless hours in workshop you still have no idea how to fix your story (or even where the fatal flaws lie). Or perhaps you’ve submitted and resubmitted your tale and editors keep rejecting it. This one day workshop is all about saving your story from your garbage can and the slush pile. Through in class exercises, intense critiquing sessions, and one-on-one appointments with your instructor (aka “The Story Doctor”), you’ll develop the tools your need to heal your ailing prose. We’ll look at common issues that can drag a draft down, discuss and practice basic and advanced revision technique, and examine drafts from pros.
Prior to the beginning of class, you will receive a reading assignment from the instructor.
- Instructor: KL Pereira
- KL Pereira is a teaching artist who lives mostly in her head; she's interested in the creaky, creepy underbelly of life and whatever lies beyond. She holds a BA in Literature and Languages from Bard College, an MA in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Mythic Deliruim, Jabberwocky, The Medulla Review, Bitch Magazine, Clamor Magazine, and other fine magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, and journals. You can read her column: Slaying Genre: A Monthly Column on Horror, Noir, Fantasy, and the Other Red-Headed Step-Children of the Literary World here. Pereira publishes erotic horror under a different name and is currently working on a collection of flash fiction fairy tales, a mytho-punk noir, and some zombie apocalyptica. For more information, visit www.darknesslovescompany.com.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
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Prose with a Pulse: Techniques to Energize Your Work
Saturday, June 15th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Have you ever noticed how really good writing seems almost alive on the page? Have you sometimes sensed this kind of vitality in your own work, but been unsure how it got there, not to mention how you might reliably access this quality on a regular basis? In this class we'll use close readings to identify where and why the energy in a given piece of writing might rally or flag by examining issues of voice, authenticity, word choice, and sense of audience. We’ll discuss strategies for developing a clear feeling of purpose for any piece of writing, which is so essential to creating vital and engaging prose. In-class exercises and some soul searching about what drives us to write in the first place will round out the day’s activities. Please bring (and be prepared to share) a 3-4 page excerpt of your own writing to class, preferably one in which in which you detect—even if just faintly—that feeling of aliveness on the page.
- Instructor: Kim Adrian
- Kim Adrian's short stories, essays, and memoir excerpts have appeared in Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Raritan, Crazyhorse, New England Review, /nor, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a P.E.N. New England Discovery Award, an Artist's Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Editor's Prize in Nonfiction from the New Ohio Review, as well as residencies at the Edward Albee Barn, Ragdale, and the VCCA. She teaches creative writing at Grub Street, reads nonfiction for Agni magazine, and serves on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her essay, "Questionnaire for My Grandfather" will appear in the upcoming anthology YOU: Essays in the Second Person (Welcome Table Press, 2012). Currently, she is at work on a book-length memoir. More at kimadrian.com.
Kim is the founder of Thumbtack, a website production company for authors.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Revision Strategies for Screenwriters
Saturday, June 15th, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
A screenplay is not ready to submit to contests, agents, or producers until it has gone through a series of revisions, each focusing on different aspects of the form and bringing the various components of character, dialogue, action, and story arc to their peak performance levels.
In this class, screenwriters who have completed a first draft of a screenplay will be introduced to a variety of strategies and techniques for revising their work and completing subsequent drafts. We will do quick in-class exercises to add subtext and realism to dialogue, replace passive verbs with active verbs and find precise nouns to create visual description, evaluate concept, structure, and character, review individual scenes, refine formatting by adding white space, eliminate camera directions, create secondary scene headings, and work backward to test for cause and effect relationships between scenes.
Students should bring five pages of a completed screenplay to class to share and use for writing exercises. Students will receive informal, constructive feedback from peers and the instructor on the pages and the screenplay concepts presented, as well as suggestions for further development.
This seminar is designed to provide practical revision tools for beginning screenwriters who have recently completed the first draft of a screenplay, as well as techniques for experienced screenwriters looking for fresh ways to approach the process of editing and rewriting. The suggested text for this seminar is Pilar Alessandra’s The Coffee Break Screenwriter.
- Instructor: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
- Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She studied writing and literature at Goddard College, has a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She has published poetry and articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches screenwriting at BU’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts and at Northeastern University. Her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, is based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name. Cheryl is a lecturer at Shakespeare conferences around the country. Her new ten-minute play, Ve-Ri-Tas, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and was the 2012 Judge for the WIFVNE Annual Screenwriting Competition. She also served as a panelist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2012 Play/Screenwriting Fellowship. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, June 18th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
5 Legal Myths About Writing
Tuesday, June 18th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
The poor man's copyright. The 20% rule. Writing about office scandals and your neighbor's drug habits. Each of these concepts involves a myth associated with the law that all authors should know. By the end of this seminar you will have learned how to identify common legal myths related to writing, and about legal realities that can protect your hard work. Sorry; this session will not discuss how you can get out of parking or speeding tickets.
Come ready for an interactive lecture and Q&A session. Fiction writers take notice: this class is for more than just writers of nonfiction. In fact, writers of all genres can and should attend. Please send your top two legal questions (related to your writing, of course!) to mab@ascentagelaw.com at least two days before the class.
- Instructor: Mitchell Bragg
Mitchell Bragg is a founding partner and attorney at Ascentage Law, PLLC in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mitch focuses his work there on transactional business and intellectual property law for creative individuals of all mediums. He currently assists clients ranging from authors to software developers to protect their intellectual endeavors. This includes helping with the protection of copyrights, trademarks, and domain names as well as with negotiating and drafting contracts and licenses. Mitch also helps clients on the business side with counseling related to entity formation and advice for best business practices. His writing career started in high school as a reporter for "The Buffalo News," in Buffalo, NY as a reporter for "NeXt," a teen-focused weekly insert, but since then his writing aspirations have taken a back seat to his legal career. He has a dream to one day write a memoir about growing up in a rural community and becoming the first person in his family to attend college.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
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At Stake: Building Tension in Fiction: Section B
Tuesday, June 18th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You don’t need to start your story with a car chase or a gun going off to draw your readers in. And you needn’t end every chapter with a cliffhanger to keep them reading. Tension in fiction is created in a variety of ways, and through close reading and discussion, you’ll learn how to craft compelling characters, choose fresh plot lines, manipulate pacing, and highlight setting in ways that support the central conflict of your story. Novelist Lynne Griffin will walk you through how to move your characters closer to their goals while introducing complications to your story that raise stakes, putting at risk what your characters want and need, making failure ever more possible and dangerous. In an attempt to raise reader questions yet keep them grounded in scene, you’ll learn to create the kind of intense curiosity that keeps readers turning those pages. An extended version of the sold-out Muse 2012 session.
- Instructor: Lynne Griffin
- Lynne Griffin is the author of the novels Sea Escape (Simon & Schuster) and Life Without Summer (St. Martin’s Press), and the nonfiction parenting guide, Negotiation Generation (Penguin). In addition to teaching at Grub Street, Lynne teaches in the graduate program of family studies at Wheelock College. She is the family life contributor for Boston’s Fox Morning News and writes for The Writer magazine, Parenting magazine, and Psychology Today. For more about Lynne’s work, visit her website, www.LynneGriffin.com or her blog, Field Guide to Families.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Beginnings: Starting Strong in Short Fiction
Tuesday June 18th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
A quick, compelling beginning is a marketplace necessity for short fiction. It is also essential to engage contemporary readers. In this seminar, you will learn and practice three principles for effective openings, three strategies you can apply to your own work, and the foundational concept on which all this is built. The evening will combine a brief lecture, analysis of published examples, and a writing exercise. Bring a problematic story opening to re-work, or generate something new.
- Instructor: Ron MacLean
Ron MacLean is author of the story collection Why the Long Face? (2008) and the novel Blue Winnetka Skies (2004). His fiction has appeared in GQ, Greensboro Review, Prism International, Night Train, Other Voices and other quarterlies. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and has been a proud part of team Grub since 2004.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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The Little People: Developing Minor Characters in Fiction and Memoir
Tuesday, June 18th, from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
The greatest novelists in the English language—Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Herman Melville, Henry James, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald—gave them voices and cameos that make them hard to forget. They are the prophets and idiots, shepherds and choristers, financiers and secretaries, golfers and grandfathers of the short story and the novel. Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, George Orwell, E. B. White, and, more recently, Malcolm Gladwell made use of them, too, in their nonfiction, in an effort to give smaller but still significant moments and bizarre social patterns their due. And contemporary authors J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and John le Carré have traded in the circus of obscurity and oddity which minor characters can provide. This seminar will ask you to examine the usual suspects of your stories (from fiction and from life), and start holding auditions for some new parts—the third-grade nerd with bad dandruff, the great aunt who never stops talking, the intellectual postman, the poker-playing nurse, and the pet ferret who ruled your days though he never said a word (think Sredni Vashtar). This workshop will ask you to give minor characters in your own writing their moment in the spotlight, whether that means being seen, or seeing the action. We will place the microscope on them; we will let them talk in monologues and in dialogues; we will construct their back stories; and most importantly, we will pay attention to their perspective on the main characters of your story or memoir. The aim will be to get you thinking about the ‘little people’ who already populate your consciousness, and to give them a larger life on the page.
This seminar will serve intermediate and advanced writers of literary fiction and creative nonfiction who are interested in broadening their subject matter, breaking “type,” and deepening realism in their narrative world. Come with a list of your favorite minor characters, if you have some, and in addition to the lecture, we will do a number of point-of-view and memory-jogging exercises toward generating a bunch of new voices/perspectives/figures for you to explore in your future writing.
- Instructor: Nicole Miller
Nicole Miller has published both fiction and non-fiction in the US and the UK, with two appearances in the May Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Jill Paton Walsh and Sebastian Faulks. After completing an M.Phil in English Literature at Oxford, she worked at The New Yorker and The Oxford English Dictionary, where she still serves as a scholarly reader for the department of etymology, with a specialty in British Dialects. At Emerson College, she held the Emerson Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing for three years, gaining her MFA in 2012. She was also awarded a PhD in Victorian Literature from University College, London in 2012 and publishes criticism on the works of Charles Dickens. She has taught in the Harvard College Writing Center since 2010 and edits faculty manuscripts for Harvard’s English Department. Her interests span the novel, short story, essay, and memoir form and the translation of Modern Greek poetry. Nicole is thrilled to share her love of words, literature, story-writing, and life-writing with the students of Grub Street this winter.
There are 5 seats remaining in this class.
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Eye of the Beholder: Crafting Character through Description
Tuesday, June 18th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
He sees the remote and a Pats fleece thrown over an overstuffed recliner. She sees a worn easy chair, a busted seam revealing yellowed foam, and a sagging leg. They're headed for trouble. Intended for beginning or intermediate fiction and nonfiction writers, this seminar focuses on using description in a selective manner to develop characterization. No prior work is necessary. During the seminar, we’ll read a few examples, from fiction and nonfiction, to see how writers use description to develop character. Then we’ll spend some time writing, working with prompts. There will be some time to share and discuss the work you produce in class and to receive some feedback, though you won’t be required to share. Writers will take away some techniques for manipulating description to shape character.
- Instructor: Kim Freeman
Kim Freeman, author of Love American Style: Divorce and the American Novel 1881-1976, writes fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and literary criticism. She has published in The Long River Review, The Grub Street Free Press, New England Fiction’s Meeting House, The Bicycle Review, The Bare Root Review, and Prick of the Spindle, among other journals. Currently she teaches writing at Northeastern University, where is Interim Director of Advanced Writing in the Disciplines. She lives in Somerville. She also teaches yoga at O2 in Somerville and Boston.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
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Steal, Borrow, Channel: How Emulating Other Voices Can Energize Your Own Work
Wednesday, June 19th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Stealing -- OK, channeling or borrowing -- the style and tone and rhythm of prose writers we love can be like speed for writers. Inhabiting their voices and taking them out for a test drive can also be a fantastic way to get you out of your head and "un-stuck yourself" if you feel trapped in or bored by your writing moves. In this workshop, we'll examine exemplary "voice-y" passages by established writers -- from Geoff Dyer to Virginia Woolf, Jess Walter to Jamaica Kincaid, Keith Richards to Bill Bryson. Then, in a series of lightning-fast in-class exercises (with minimal sharing), we'll emulate these writers. Voila! You've broken out of your old patterns and tired voice and tried on some new ones for size. Students can apply these exercise to both fiction and nonfiction, depending on their interests. You'll exit the class with several beginnings to new essays or stories, and hopefully new and energizing voices bouncing around in your head to try out in future work. Feel free to come with a passage or chunk of writing that for you feel dull or stuck.
- Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
- A journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com and Christian Science Monitor, and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today Washington Post and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, former bicycling culture columnist for the Boston Globe, and is the film columnist for Art New England. He is a core contributor to the blog "GeekDad" at wired.com and his blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com. He also writes for blogs at Boston.com's Globetrotting; Tor.com; ForcesofGeek.com, and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, Exquisite Corpse and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro and, for younger students, in schools and community centers. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Grub Street. Follow Ethan’s adventures at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
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How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book: Section B
Saturday, June 22nd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Books often start with a simple yearning to explore new territory: fascinating topics, characters who won’t leave you alone, a good story. But manuscripts get unwieldy, fast. Nine out of ten writers never finish their manuscripts because most first-time book writers get lost without good structure and planning. Mary Carroll Moore, award-winning author of 13 books in three genres and a PEN/Faulkner nominee, will guide you through a simple and successful book-writing process that can take your book from idea to publication, a process using a three-act structure that eases organization and makes a manuscript vivid and engaging to readers. Find out why Aristotle believed that three acts formed a perfect structure for all stories, why humans lean toward beginning, middle, and end, and why we crave the emotional catharsis of that format in literature too. For all levels of writers working on nonfiction, memoir, or novels, at any stage from seed idea to draft. Learn why strong structuring is the key to selling a book in today's competitive publishing industry.
- Instructor: Mary Carroll Moore
Mary Carroll Moore’s twelve published books include the PEN/Faulkner nominated novel Qualities of Light (Bella Books); How to Master Change in Your Life: Sixty-seven Ways to Handle Life’s Toughest Moments (Eckankar Books); Cholesterol Cures (Rodale Press), and the award-winning Healthy Cooking (Ortho Publications). Your Book Starts Here: Create, Craft, and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir, or Nonfiction Book, based on her How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book writing workshops, will be released in fall 2010. A former nationally syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, over 300 of Mary’s essays, short stories, articles, and poetry have appeared in literary journals, magazines, and newspapers around the U.S. and have won awards with the McKnight Awards for Creative Prose, Glimmer Train Press, the Loft Mentor Series, and other writing competitions. She teaches creative writing in New York, Boston, New Hampshire, and Minnesota and writes a weekly blog for book writers at http://howtoplanwriteanddevelopabook.blogspot.com.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Writing a Hypertext
Saturday, June 22nd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Are writers doing enough to take advantage of the ways people read now? Our attention spans are short, we read online, we keep multiple tabs open all the time, we Google or Wikipedia things we don't know, and we like to click from one thing to the next. Enter into these reading habits the hypertext, narrative that gives people the freedom to read as they do online. Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? Why not create a story in which the reader can follow different paths by clicking on different decisions? Why not a poem in which an idea in one line opens to an entire other poem, and an idea in a line in that poem becomes another poem after that? Why not an essay like a Google map, where the reader can navigate from one place to the next, get lost or reorient herself, while learning something at each location that lets her see the bigger picture? In this 6-hour course, we will let our writing (and our readers) go wherever it wants. And then we will look at how to organize it so that we can create pathways from one piece to the next. We will each create one work of hypertext in this class, and we'll discuss how to bring that work online, via various new media.
- Instructor: Matthew Salesses
- Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Feb 2013), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and the chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, West Branch, and over fifty other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emerson College, the University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. Currently, he serves as the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer for the Good Men Project. On the web, he is matthewsalesses.com and @salesses.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing Dialogue
Saturday, June 22nd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Writing dialogue can be one of the most difficult and significant tasks a writer faces. The techniques a writer learns along the way may prepare them for every kind of prose, but when faced with dialogue, the writer is lost. How do you create dialogue that feels and sounds real, yet also works to communicate your story? This workshop is designed for playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, and short fiction writers interested in writing crisp, realistic-sounding dialogue. We will study several great scenes from films, plays, and fiction to break down what makes the dialogue so effective.
Topics explored will include creating subtext, hiding exposition, working with slang, and how to get the characters in your head speaking with a voice of their own. You will learn how to break down a scene into beats and intentions, and approach the scene as an actor would. Most importantly, during the workshop portion, we will act out your dialogue so you may hear it the way dialogue is meant to be heard -- out loud. The first half of the class will be spent discussing techniques for creating effective dialogue. During the second session, students will use what they have learned to write a dialogue scene and receive peer and instructor feedback.
- Instructor: Mark Fogarty
- Mark Fogarty is the president and Co-founder of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC), a non-profit created to help local filmmakers find resources in the Ocean State. The RIFC has more than 1,900 members and has been involved in the production of dozens of films. For more information, visit www.rifcfilms.com. Mark started Exile Movies in 2003 and has worked as a director of photography and editor on feature-length and short films. Mark recently directed the feature-length epic, smalltown, from his screenplay. You can find out more about the film at www.smalltownmovie.com. As an actor, Mark has been in dozens of films and uses his knowledge of acting to inform his writing. Mark graduated from Emerson College with a degree in filmmaking, and works as a freelance editor and writer.
There are 7 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing the Multicultural Thriller or Mystery
Saturday, June 22nd, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Are you interested in writing suspense? Thriller/mystery is a genre that offers many opportunities to the debut author, including a large, dedicated readership and the ability to write a series of interconnected books.
In the last few years, thriller/mystery writers have shed their Cold War roots and taken the genre in a new direction. Instead of plots dominated by evil foreign spymasters, the genre increasingly explores specific cultures and milieus: Colin Cotterill writes about a coroner in Cambodia, John Burdett’s Buddhist detective works in Bankok, Thailand, and Martin Limon’s investigators solve crimes in post-war Korea.
Join a published thriller writer to learn more about the genre and to explore this new direction. This three-hour seminar will consist of lecture, writing exercises, and discussion. Topics covered will include the rules of writing within genre, the basics of a fast-moving plot, how to research and incorporate multicultural settings, how to formulate a vision for your book, and industry connections: agents, publishing houses, and conferences. Come prepared with some idea of settings for your book and a scenario to explore. Leave with a much greater idea of how the new multicultural thriller/mystery works!
- Instructor: A.X. Ahmad
A.X. Ahmad studied writing at Grub Street, The New School, and NYU. His literary work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Harvard Review, The New England Review, Narrative Magazine and The Good Men Project. He's been a finalist for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award, and been listed in Best American Essays. His articles have been published in The Sun Magazine, Utne Reader, and forthcoming in Slate.
His first book, THE CARETAKER, was published by St. Martin’s Press this year, and a sequel, BOLLYWOOD TAXI, will be published next year.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Make It Or Break It: Your Novel's Opening Pages
Saturday, June 22nd, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Often the writer’s easiest entry point into a novel’s first draft is not the most dynamic place for the story to begin. What strategies do novelists use to hook readers – including agents and editors – from the first sentence, paragraph, page, scene? In this class, we’ll examine narrative strategies used in a variety of novels; do exercises related to the opening pages; and provide feedback on your novel’s opening page and summarized opening scene. Please bring 12 copies of your novel’s first page and a one-paragraph summary of your opening scene to class.
- Instructor: Lisa Borders
Lisa Bordersis the author of two novels, The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing's Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land also received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her essay "Enchanted Night" was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Lisa has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Newport Review and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and fellowships at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. More information on Lisa and her work is available at lisaborders.com.
There are 7 seats remaining in this class.
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Moments of Being: Capturing Consciousness in Your Writing
Saturday, June 22nd, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
"The moment was all. The moment was enough," Virginia Woolf wrote in The Waves, bringing everything down to the pocket-sized glory of appreciating a single fine point of experience. Woolf was a master of the moment, and this seminar asks you to concentrate on this smallest of units in your writing and inhabit it. The moment can take the form of a thought, a dream, a fantasy, an epiphany, an observation, or a philosophical, religious, or scientific meditation that begins with a second and stretches out to form what Woolf called "a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope" over a series of pages. We will treat the moment both as an end in itself and as a way to illuminate your characters' outer or inner landscapes. The aim of this class is to give "the life of the mind"—reflection, realization, memory, mirage, wonder, or faith—a place to expand in your writing. The class is appropriate for all kinds of creative writers, from novelists who want to get into the heads of their protagonists, to memoirists who need to spend time contemplating a particular event, to essayists who wish to unravel a twist, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.
This class will divided into part lecture, with analysis and discussion of writing by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Eudora Welty, Frank Conroy, and Ethan Canin, and part workshop, in which you will experiment with moments, turning points, and consciousness to produce new scenes and passages.
- Instructor: Nicole Miller
- Nicole Miller has published both fiction and non-fiction in the US and the UK, with two appearances in the May Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Jill Paton Walsh and Sebastian Faulks. After completing an M.Phil in English Literature at Oxford, she worked at The New Yorker and The Oxford English Dictionary, where she still serves as a scholarly reader for the department of etymology, with a specialty in British Dialects. At Emerson College, she held the Emerson Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing for three years, gaining her MFA in 2012. She was also awarded a PhD in Victorian Literature from University College, London in 2012 and publishes criticism on the works of Charles Dickens. She has taught in the Harvard College Writing Center since 2010 and edits faculty manuscripts for Harvard’s English Department. Her interests span the novel, short story, essay, and memoir form and the translation of Modern Greek poetry. Nicole is thrilled to share her love of words, literature, story-writing, and life-writing with the students of Grub Street this winter.
There are 8 seats remaining in this class.
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Creative Non-Fiction I: Section B
10 Mondays from 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 24th.
This course is an introduction to the craft of writing compelling creative non-fiction, with a focus on the memoir and personal essay genre. Topics discussed include voice, detail, perspective, and use of language. By the end of ten weeks, you will practice your writing style, learn the process of workshopping what you’ve written, and maybe even look at the world around you differently. Each student will workshop at least two manuscripts up to fifteen pages each. In the meantime, you’ll examine and discuss published personal essay to strengthen and hone your writing skills. This class is ideal for novice writers or more experienced writers looking to dive into a new genre.
- Instructor: Trish Ryan
- Trish Ryan is the author of two memoirs, A Maze of Grace: A Memoir of Second Chances (Hachette 2010) and He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Hope, and Happily Ever After (Hachette 2008). This fall she will be an Evelyn Danzig Haas ’39 Visiting Artist at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. Trish lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Steve and their genetically improbable mixed-breed dog. You can visit Trish online at www.trishryanonline.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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The Lyric Essay
Monday-Thursday, 10:30am-1:30pm from June 24th-27th at Grub Street headquarters.
The personal essay is currently enjoying an exciting renaissance. Suddenly, everyone seems attuned to the apparently limitless possibilities of creative nonfiction. One of the great champions of the personal essay, John D’Agata, along with the late Deborah Tall, former editor of the Seneca Review, came up with the term “Lyric Essay” to describe a specific type of personal essay that expresses an almost jubilant sense of freedom as it moves between genres, often borrowing the condensed language and associative explorations of poetry, the plot-driven narrative force of fiction, and the love of facts and careful scrutiny that have always been the hallmarks of classic nonfiction. In this workshop, we will read some stellar examples of the Lyric Essay, discuss the merits and pitfalls of writing in this more experimental mode, and create our own lyric essays, finishing with a review of publication venues that embrace this unique and exciting hybrid form.
- Instructor: Kim Adrian
- Kim Adrian's short stories, essays, and memoir excerpts have appeared in Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Raritan, Crazyhorse, New England Review, /nor, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a P.E.N. New England Discovery Award, an Artist's Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Editor's Prize in Nonfiction from the New Ohio Review, as well as residencies at the Edward Albee Barn, Ragdale, and the VCCA. She teaches creative writing at Grub Street, reads nonfiction for Agni magazine, and serves on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her essay, "Questionnaire for My Grandfather" will appear in the upcoming anthology YOU: Essays in the Second Person (Welcome Table Press, 2012). Currently, she is at work on a book-length memoir. More at kimadrian.com.
Kim is the founder of Thumbtack, a website production company for authors.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
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Novel Intensive: Section A
Monday-Friday, 2:00-5:00pm from June 24th-28th at Grub Street headquarters.
Do you have a great idea for a novel but don’t know where to start? Or maybe you’re well on your way, but lately your manuscript has become a flabby mass of pages? Either way, this course will whip that novel into shape. Over the course of five days, we will focus on the elements of craft necessary to sustain a book-length narrative, from structure to scene, character arcs to subplots. We will read excerpts from a range of published novels, pick them apart as writers, and apply these lessons to our own projects. The course will include substantial in-class writing time and an optional homework assignment every evening and will culminate in a one-on-one meeting with the instructor to discuss your opening chapter and outline. Writing a novel is a long, unpredictable journey, but you will end this course with a new set of tools to navigate your way.
- Instructor: Becky Tuch
Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
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Jumpstart Your Memoir
6 Mondays from 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 24th.
One of our most popular courses has a very clear mission: to get you started on your memoir. Through a series of fun directed writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of memoir writing: mining for material, constructing characters and settings, shaping vivid dialogue, understanding point of view, and finding your voice. We will discuss the process of writing and the strengths and weaknesses of the work we produce in class. We may read and discuss some short published texts in regards to craft, then write exercises inspired by the texts. A supportive and generative experience for both new and practicing writers.
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
- Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Fiction I: Section A
10 Mondays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 24th
In the beginning, there was the short story, and it was good. In this course, you'll learn and practice the tried-and-true elements of fiction—- character, plot, dialogue, setting, point of view, and revision-– with an emphasis on the short story form. As you mine for material, you will also explore new possibilities in subject, style, and voice. Classes include short lectures and discussions on various elements of craft, skill-based writing exercises and workshopping of student work. The goal is to write and/or revise two complete stories (up to 25 pages each), giving you the momentum you need to continue writing well after the workshop ends. While this course will focus on short stories, it also serves as an introduction to the elements of fiction that every novelist will need to know.
- Instructor: Shuchi Saraswat
Shuchi Saraswat received her MFA from Emerson College, where she primarily worked on a novel. She is the recipient of The 2012 Gulliver Travel Research Grant from The Speculative Literature Foundation and has received fellowships to Writers Omi at Ledig House and The Writers' Room of Boston and scholarships to Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. While at Emerson, Shuchi served as the nonfiction editor and then the fiction editor at Fringe Magazine, and worked as an editorial assistant in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's adult trade division. She currently helps manage the fiction section and hosts author readings at Brookline Booksmith.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $430.00 register as a non-member $455.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Jumpstart Your Novel
10 Mondays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 24th.
Writing a novel can be an incredible journey of self-discovery. It can also be quite a struggle as you trek through the middle chapters, re-write your outlines, and wonder if you will ever finish the thing. Not only is finding time to write difficult, but overcoming psychological blocks and narrative slumps takes patience and practice. In this workshop, students will generate new material each week based on prompts from the instructor. Additionally, students will read one novel over the course of the term. The text will be discussed and analyzed in order to better understand fictional elements such as character development, scene building, conflict, chapter structure, and narrative arc. Students will come away with a clear understanding of how these elements work in fiction, as well as strategies for employing them in their own writing. Each student will share 3 pages of writing out loud each week (in response to the weekly prompt). The focus is on support and feedback, rather than critique. This class is suitable for writers at all stages of the novel-writing process.
- Instructor: Becky Tuch
- Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $$430.00 register as a non-member $$455.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Advanced Techniques in Fiction: ONLINE CLASS
10 weeks in Grub Street's online space with live meetings on Mondays from 8:00-10:00pm EST, beginning June 24th.
To be a great writer, you need to be a ruthless in revision; more importantly, you need to understand the implications of the revision decisions you make. In this advanced fiction workshop, author Amanda Eyre Ward will help students more deeply examine fictional techniques such as voice, point of view, structure, character development, and more. Each week students will have an intense two-hour on-line workshop. In addition, students will be a part of an on-line "Technique of the Week" forum where Amanda will post essays, videos, and published work and encourage students to begin blowing their work to pieces and thoughtfully reassembling it. Students will workshop two stories or novel excerpts and be expected to comment on colleague's work and be active participants in the "Technique of the Week" forums.
This class is for accepted students only. Apply via the form below or at this link by 12:00pm on Tuesday, June 11th. The class is $430 for members and $455 for non-members.
- Instructor: Amanda Eyre Ward
Amanda Eyre Ward is the author of the novels Sleep Toward Heaven and How to Be Lost. She has been published in Tin House, Zoetrope, StoryQuarterly, and on Salon.com. She lives in Austin, TX with her family. Please visit her at www.amandaward.com.
"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, June 25th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
Novel in Progress: Section C
8 Tuesdays from 6:30-9:30pm at the Welch Building 146 Front Street, Scituate, MA 02066. Begins June 25th.
First drafts of novels can be messy, amorphous and daunting. Some writers feel extensive critical feedback can be counterproductive before the first draft is finished, yet find themselves losing their focus without support and guidance. In class, we will do exercises, discuss craft issues -- characterization, plot and outlining, point of view, voice, dialogue, setting -- and read short scenes from each other's work, providing guidance and feedback in an environment that recognizes the specific challenges of the novel in progress. Before the last class, all writers will be invited to submit twenty-five pages of their novels to receive a written critique from the instructor or have a one-on-one meeting to discuss the writer's work with suggested strategies for finishing the manuscript. Please bring the first page (double-spaced) of your novel to the first class.
- Instructor: Lynne Griffin
- Lynne Griffin is the author of the novels Sea Escape (Simon & Schuster) and Life Without Summer (St. Martin’s Press), and the nonfiction parenting guide, Negotiation Generation (Penguin). In addition to teaching at Grub Street, Lynne teaches in the graduate program of family studies at Wheelock College. She is the family life contributor for Boston’s Fox Morning News and writes for The Writer magazine, Parenting magazine, and Psychology Today. For more about Lynne’s work, visit her website, www.LynneGriffin.com or her blog, Field Guide to Families.
There are 8 seats remaining in this class.
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6 Weeks, 6 Stories
6 Tuesdays from 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 25th.
Tired of workshopping the same stories? Can't come up with new plots and characters? All writers go through this, but here’s a way to shake up your writing world. In this always-sold-out workshop, you will write both brand-new complete stories ranging from 300 to 1500 words or brand-new beginnings of longer stories. Each week, you'll be given a different exercise to explore an interesting and tighter way to write plot, character, setting, and language; you will get quick on-the-spot feedback on what you write from both the instructor and fellow students. Classes may also include some discussion of published short shorts and/or elements of craft. The goal is to leave the class with new beginnings, a few complete short-shorts, and at least one revised piece to submit for publication. Recommended for students who’ve taken Fiction I or an equivalent. Students should come to our first class with three different ideas for an original opening sentence; we'll pick one of the sentences and use it as the basis for a short-short story at our first session.
- Instructor: Mike Heppner
Mike Heppner is the author of two novels, The Egg Code and Pike's Folly, which were published by Knopf in 2002 and 2006, as well as 2012's short fiction collection, The Man Talking Project, which was published by Another Sky Press. His work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Golden Handcuffs Review, The New Guard, Esquire Online, and Nerve, and his books have been reviewed in The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and The Washington Post. He teaches Creative Writing at Emerson College.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Jumpstart Your Writing: Section A
6 Tuesdays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 25th.
This course has a very clear mission: devote three hours of your week to writing. Through a series of fun directed writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of fiction and non-fiction: mining for material, constructing characters and settings, shaping vivid dialogue, understanding point of view, and finding your voice. We will discuss the process of writing and the strengths and weaknesses of the work we produce in class. We may read and discuss some short published texts in regards to craft, then write exercises inspired by the texts. A supportive and generative experience for both new and practicing writers. Note that this is not a course in the fundamentals of fiction and non-fiction, but an opportunity for beginners and advanced students to generate new stories and scenes.
- Instructor: Nadine Kenney Johnstone
Nadine Kenney Johnstone teaches at Framingham State University, Dean College, and Grub Street Inc. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and recently completed her novel, DISTANCE. Currently, she is at work on a memoir about facing death while on her quest to create life through IVF. Nadine has been published in Pank, The Drum, Chicago magazine, and Hair Trigger, among other publications. She has worked in all aspects of writing: as a literary magazine editor, reporter, fiction contest judge, story performer, and creative writing instructor. Find her writing advice at Beyond The Margins, The Review Review, and at Grub Street Daily. A Chicago native and Massachusetts transplant, Nadine spends her free time exploring the outdoors with her husband and their dog. Follow her at http://www.facebook.com/NadineKenneyJohnstone or on Twitter @nadinekenney.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Master Novel in Progress
10 Tuesdays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 25th.
You’ve taken fiction workshops in the past, are comfortable discussing manuscripts in process, and have made significant headway on your novel. Still, some sections remain spotty, you sense the plot going off course, your characters have lost their chutzpah, some scenes are less than riveting, you question how to begin or end, or suspect the middle is mush. In this workshop, there will be no manuscripts to read and critique outside of class; all outside work will be devoted to one's own writing. In class, we will do exercises, discuss craft issues—characterization, plot, structure, scenes, point of view, and voice—and read short sections (no more than 5 pages) from each other's work aloud, providing guidance and feedback. By the end of the course, you will have a firm structure for your book from beginning to end, understand how the complexity of your characters drives your story, know which scenes you need to create, which you can cut, and how to breathe life into those that remain. In the last class, all writers will be invited to hand in 20 revised pages of their novels to receive an oral critique in a one-on-one meeting with the instructor, with suggested strategies for finishing the manuscript. If accepted, please bring the first five pages (double-spaced) of your novel and a one-page summary or outline to the first class. The class cost is $555 for non-members, $530 for members.
Apply via the form below or through this link by 12:00pm on Wednesday, June 12th. You will hear from the reading committee by Monday, June 17th.
- Instructor: Michelle Hoover
- Michelle Hoover is a full-time instructor at Boston University and teaches many novel courses at Grub Street, including Grub's intensive year-long novel program, the Novel Incubator. She was a finalist for the Dorothy Churchill Cappon Essay Prize and has published short stories and novel excerpts in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, StoryQuarterly and Confrontation, StoryQuarterly. She has been the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell, a MacDowell Fellow, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in Best New American Voices. Her debut novel, The Quickening, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, was a Finalist for the Indies Choice Debut of 2010 and Forward Magazine's Best Literary Book of 2010, and is a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read" pick. For more, go to www.michelle-hoover.com.
Fiction II
10 Tuesdays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 25th.
Whether your model is Carver or Coover, Kafka or Krantz, your voice and narratives are unique. That doesn't mean you don't have to revise. Fiction II is designed to give intermediate/more experienced writers, and those with workshop experience, the intensive review and analysis they need to make their stories deeper and sharper. Classes are primarily focused on discussion of student work, but may also include writing exercises and instruction on craft issues that arise in participants' writing. In addition to the class's comments, you will get in-depth written feedback from the instructor. The goal is to write and revise two short stories, up to 25 pages each. While this course focuses on short stories only, and novelists may find the creation of self-contained narratives useful, workshopping novel chapters is discouraged.
- Instructor: Calvin Hennick
Calvin Hennick’s nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, Runner’s World, Eating Well, Budget Travel, and Teacher magazine, among other publications. He has taught writing at UMass – Boston and in New York City’s public schools.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
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Creative Non-Fiction I: Section A
10 Tuesdays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 25th.
This course is an introduction to the craft of writing compelling creative non-fiction, with a focus on the memoir and personal essay genre. Topics discussed include voice, detail, perspective, and use of language. By the end of ten weeks, you will practice your writing style, learn the process of workshopping what you’ve written, and maybe even look at the world around you differently. Each student will workshop at least two manuscripts up to fifteen pages each. In the meantime, you’ll examine and discuss published personal essay to strengthen and hone your writing skills. This class is ideal for novice writers or more experienced writers looking to dive into a new genre.
- Instructor: Christopher Boginski
Christopher Boginski is a graduate from the MFA program at the University of Washington, where he taught creative writing and English as a second language and where he was a research assistant for David Shields. He lives in Jamaica Plain and is in the process of finalizing his first novel, The Etymologist, the story of a man reinventing himself during his impending divorce and deep fear of losing the one thing he still loves, teaching. He is also working on a collection of personal essays, What it Means to be Known, exploring memory loss and identity. To learn more, visit cjboginski.com and click on “Creative Writing.”
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing for Children & Young Adults
6 Tuesdays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 25th.
Writing a story for children requires certain ingredients: a cup of plot, a stick of character, four tablespoons of story arc, a heaping cup of voice, six teaspoons of point of view, a tube of magic, a handful of humor and dialogue to taste. If your characters are misbehaving or your manuscript is stuck, it might be your pantry. Each week, we will explore a specific ingredient in the context of current and past children’s favorites, as well as in-class writing exercises. In addition, your picture books, and middle grade and young adult excerpts will be workshopped in a supportive and engaging kitchen. Writers will leave knowing how to take the next step in their writing process. This workshop is designed for writers who are new to kid's lit and new and intermediate writers of any genre who want to hone their skills. Students can expect to be workshopped 1-2 times over the course of six weeks, depending on the class size.
- Instructor: Cheryl Lawton Malone
Cheryl Lawton Malone holds degrees in international relations, law and creative writing from Lehigh University, Suffolk University School of Law, and Lesley University. Her children's writing and poetry have received several awards, recently making it to the finals of the 2013 March Madness Poetry contest (check out her final poem at www.thinkkidthink.com) and placing 16th in the 2012 7th Annual Writer's Digest Poetry Awards, and were selected for artists' workshops and retreats at the Norman Mailer Writer's Colony. Her stories and poetry have appeared online and in journals and anthologies such as Daily Flash 2013: 365 Days of Flash Fiction, Infective Ink, Writers.org, bumples.org, Healthy Artists, Magic Cat Press, Lady Ink Magazine, the Storyteller and the Lutheran Journal. A nonfiction book she is coauthoring titled Hot on the Trail: the American Mystery Sleuth’s Escape from Domesticity will be published by MacFarland & Co in 2015. Lawton Malone is also an adjunct professor at Lesley University where she teaches classes on writing children's and young adult literature.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
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Novel in Progress: Section B
10 Tuesdays from 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 25th
First drafts of novels can be messy, amorphous and daunting. Some writers feel extensive critical feedback can be counterproductive before the first draft is finished, yet find themselves losing their focus without support and guidance. In class, we will do exercises, discuss craft issues -- characterization, plot and outlining, point of view, voice, dialogue, setting -- and read short scenes from each other's work, providing guidance and feedback in an environment that recognizes the specific challenges of the novel in progress. Before the last class, all writers will be invited to submit twenty-five pages of their novels to receive a written critique from the instructor or have a one-on-one meeting to discuss the writer's work with suggested strategies for finishing the manuscript. Please bring the first page (double-spaced) of your novel to the first class.
- Instructor: Steven Lee Beeber
Steven Lee Beeber is the author of The Heebie-jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press), the editor of AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press), and the associate editor of the literary journal Conduit. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Fiction, Bridge, Memorious, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and teaches creative writing and creative nonfiction at Lesley University.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Jumpstart Your Fiction: Online Edition
10 weeks in Grub Street's online space with live meetings on Tuesdays from 5:00-7:00pm EST, beginning June 25th.
This introductory course is packed with cool, interactive exercises designed to generate new work while also covering the basic elements of fiction: mining for material, constructing believable and vivid settings and characters, writing convincing dialogue, experimenting with different approaches to narration and voice, and much more. In identifying your strengths and pushing each other to flex our creative muscles, we'll work together to create a positive and constructive environment where new ideas for (and approaches to) stories can blossom.
- Instructor: Jennine Capó Crucet
Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the John Gardner Book Prize, the Devil’s Kitchen Award, and was named a Best Book of the Year by The Miami Herald, the New Times, and the Latinidad List. She’s published stories in the O. Henry Prize Anthology, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, The Rumpus, and other magazines. A former sketch comedienne and NPR scriptwriter, she’s the fiction editor of the most recent edition of PEN Center USA’s Handbook for Writers and a faculty member of Florida State University’s Creative Writing Program. On Twitter, she is @crucet.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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The Perfect Crime (Novel): Writing Mystery and Suspense: ONLINE CLASS
10 weeks in Grub Street's online space with live meetings on Tuesdays from 11:00am-1:00pm EST, beginning June 25th.
Join two-time Edgar Award nominee Ben H. Winters for a ten-week online course on the mechanics of crafting the smart mystery, thriller, or novel of suspense. During the ten weeks of this intense class we will move through different aspects of craft, from take-their-breath-away beginnings to unique heroes to the elusive question of tone. Your instructor will offer a series of lectures—“live,” via the magic of the internet—on these and other subjects, and additionally assign supplemental readings via links and uploads, to broaden our understanding of how the great ones, from Conan Doyle to Highsmith to Connelly, make it look easy. There will also be a significant writing component, with the expectation that each student will “turn in” (via upload) approximately three pages of material each week, in response to prompts and exercises, to be returned with comments from the instructor. The ideal student will begin the course with a rough draft of a mystery or thriller, or at least an idea and a couple of chapters—the lessons and exercises will all be designed for immediate application to a work in progress.
This class is for accepted students only. Apply via the form below or at this link by 12:00pm on Tuesday, June 11th. The class is $430 for members and $455 for non-members.
- Instructor: Ben H. Winters
Ben H. Winters is the author, most recently, of The Last Policeman, which was selected as an Amazon “Best Book” of July 2012 and for the Indy NEXT List of the American Bookseller’s Association. His other works of fiction include the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the middle-grade novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, an Edgar Award nominee and a Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of 2011. Winters’ other books include the science-fiction Tolstoy parody Android Karenina, the Finkleman sequel The Mystery of the Missing Everything, and the supernatural thriller Bedbugs, which has been optioned for the screen by Warner Brothers.
The Structure of Short Fiction
6 Wednesdays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 26th.
Structure is a mystery for many writers, but it shouldn't be. It is one of most emulable and learnable elements of a short story. In this course, we will break down several stories in detail and determine how they employ structure. We will look at stories that are organized by plot, memory/association, circles, and more. We will talk about the theory of structure, story arcs, and traditional and nontraditional plots, and will learn through concrete examples. Each week we will study one approach to structure, and then put those lessons to use in stories of our own. As a group, we will demystify structure as a tool in our writerly toolbox, as something that serves and enhances the story, rather than something that “just happens.”
- Instructor: Ron MacLean
- Ron MacLean is author of the story collection Why the Long Face? (2008) and the novel Blue Winnetka Skies (2004). His fiction has appeared in GQ, Greensboro Review, Prism International, Night Train, Other Voices and other quarterlies. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and has been a proud part of team Grub since 2004.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Writing the Novella
10 Wednesdays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 26th.
Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan says the novella is the "perfect form of prose fiction," and indeed the novella is on the rise, from Denis Johnson's recent Pulitzer-finalist Train Dreams to Justin Torres's We the Animals to new publishers like Nouvella focusing on the in-between form. Over ten weeks each student will take an idea - whether from a story that didn't seem long enough or a novel that seemed too long, or from a character or situation or voice, etc. still in the mind - and turn it into a full-length draft between 10,000 and 40,000 words. We will use some of the techniques of screenwriting, short story-writing, and novel-writing, but the result will be all its own: a story of the "perfect" length. Please bring ideas and enthusiasm to our first class. Plan to write 1,000-4,000 words per week and to read two novellas total over the course duration. In-class lessons will help put this goal within reach by providing ideas, momentum, and direction. Each week we will be reading our words aloud and doing micro-workshops as well as talking about how to shape our narratives through subplots, increasing conflict, agency, consequences, secrets, and more. The goal is to have a full novella draft at the end of the course.
- Instructor: KL Pereira
- KL Pereira is a teaching artist who lives mostly in her head; she's interested in the creaky, creepy underbelly of life and whatever lies beyond. She holds a BA in Literature and Languages from Bard College, an MA in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Mythic Deliruim, Jabberwocky, The Medulla Review, Bitch Magazine, Clamor Magazine, and other fine magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, and journals. You can read her column: Slaying Genre: A Monthly Column on Horror, Noir, Fantasy, and the Other Red-Headed Step-Children of the Literary World here. Pereira publishes erotic horror under a different name and is currently working on a collection of flash fiction fairy tales, a mytho-punk noir, and some zombie apocalyptica. For more information, visit www.darknesslovescompany.com.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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6 Weeks, 6 Poems
6 Wednesdays from 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 26th.
Whether you're looking to experiment, produce new works for a collection, or work on revisions, this workshop offers the opportunity to broaden and deepen your knowledge of poetry. Each week, you will study the craft and vision of contemporary poets and write your own poems to be workshopped the following week. This class will allow you to break old habits, play with unconventional forms, and, most importantly, leave the course with both fresh and revised drafts of many poems.
- Instructor: Scott Challener
- Scott Challener teaches writing in Boston University’s Writing Program and Metropolitan College and Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies, and volunteers for 826 Boston. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative Magazine, The Rumpus, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. His reviews of five past National Book Award winners appeared recently on the National Book Awards Foundation website. He lives in the Fort Point Channel area of South Boston.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
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Master Memoir
10 Wednesdays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 26th.
A ten-week workshop intended for writers who want to think seriously about memoir in the context of framing, structure, and how the relationship between the two clarifies or obscures the writer's intentions. We’ll work with prompts, exercises and strategies for revision to help participants see their memoirs in a new light. Each student will be expected to present a new or revised piece for workshop each week. While new writing is encouraged, interested writers should consider this an opportunity to work through problems that have arisen with an existing manuscript. Students should expect to generate a good amount of new writing during the workshop. Please bring the first two pages of your memoir to the first class. The class cost is $555 for non-members, $530 for members.
Apply via the form below or through this link by 12:00pm on Wednesday, June 12th. You will hear from the reading committee by Monday, June 17th.
- Instructor: Howie Axelrod
Howie Axelrod has been the recipient of a Michael C. Rockefeller fellowship, and has been awarded residencies in non-fiction or poetry from the Blue Mountain Center, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Hambidge Center, and the Anderson Center. His non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Harvard Magazine, and his fiction has appeared in The Moral Intelligence of Children (Random House) and 25 and Under: Fiction (Norton/DoubleTake). He has held teaching positions at Harvard, University of Arizona, and Wentworth Institute of Technology.
Novel in Progress: Section A
10 Wednesdays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 26th.
First drafts of novels can be messy, amorphous and daunting. Some writers feel extensive critical feedback can be counterproductive before the first draft is finished, yet find themselves losing their focus without support and guidance. In class, we will do exercises, discuss craft issues -- characterization, plot and outlining, point of view, voice, dialogue, setting -- and some of our favorite novels, and read short scenes from each other's work, providing guidance and feedback in an environment that recognizes the specific challenges of the novel in progress. Before the last class, all writers will be invited to submit twenty-five pages of their novels to receive a written critique from the instructor or have a one-on-one meeting to discuss the writer's work with suggested strategies for finishing the manuscript. Novels of all genres are welcome. Please bring the first page (double-spaced) of your novel to the first class.
- Instructor: Becky Tuch
- Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.
There are 7 seats remaining in this class.
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Screenwriting II
10 Wednesdays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 26th.
Screenwriting is an entirely different form of writing with its own complex set of rules and principles. In this ten-week workshop, we will study Hollywood structure and format while also exploring works that defy the norm and challenge the way films are written. Students will bring in a dozen pages every other week and receive peer and instructor feedback on their script. Writers may also distribute their script via e-mail to get even more feedback. We will analyze a variety of film scripts to break down the structure and gain an in-depth understanding of what makes a great film. Topics covered will include writing dialogue, creating conflict, creating original characters and how to work with non-linear structure. By the end of this workshop, writers will have a first draft of a screenplay as well as a detailed step-outline and character biography. This class is perfect for students who have taken introduction to screenwriting or have some screenwriting experience.
- Instructor: Mark Fogarty
- Mark Fogarty is the president and Co-founder of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC), a non-profit created to help local filmmakers find resources in the Ocean State. The RIFC has more than 1,900 members and has been involved in the production of dozens of films. For more information, visit www.rifcfilms.com. Mark started Exile Movies in 2003 and has worked as a director of photography and editor on feature-length and short films. Mark recently directed the feature-length epic, smalltown, from his screenplay. You can find out more about the film at www.smalltownmovie.com. As an actor, Mark has been in dozens of films and uses his knowledge of acting to inform his writing. Mark graduated from Emerson College with a degree in filmmaking, and works as a freelance editor and writer.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Jumpstart Your Writing: Section B
6 Wednesdays from 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 26th.
This course has a very clear mission: devote three hours of your week to writing. Through a series of fun directed writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of fiction and non-fiction: mining for material, constructing characters and settings, shaping vivid dialogue, understanding point of view, and finding your voice. We will discuss the process of writing and the strengths and weaknesses of the work we produce in class. We may read and discuss some short published texts in regards to craft, then write exercises inspired by the texts. A supportive and generative experience for both new and practicing writers. Note that this is not a course in the fundamentals of fiction and non-fiction, but an opportunity for beginners and advanced students to generate new stories and scenes.
- Instructor: Shuchi Saraswat
- Shuchi Saraswat received her MFA from Emerson College, where she primarily worked on a novel. She is the recipient of The 2012 Gulliver Travel Research Grant from The Speculative Literature Foundation and has received fellowships to Writers Omi at Ledig House and The Writers' Room of Boston and scholarships to Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. While at Emerson, Shuchi served as the nonfiction editor and then the fiction editor at Fringe Magazine, and worked as an editorial assistant in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's adult trade division. She currently helps manage the fiction section and hosts author readings at Brookline Booksmith.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Creating Complex Characters
Thursday, June 27th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Stories often begin with a character the writer loves -- or loves to hate. But characters who come to life on the page are full of contradictions, neither wholly good nor entirely evil. How do we infuse our characters with the complexity that will make them believable? Through a combination of exercises and discussion of published work, this seminar will help you to create characters whose human contradictions make them vivid and memorable. You may come to class with a character already in mind, or you may start to create one through in-class exercises.
- Instructor: Lisa Borders
- Lisa Bordersis the author of two novels, The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing's Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land also received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her essay "Enchanted Night" was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Lisa has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Newport Review and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and fellowships at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. More information on Lisa and her work is available at lisaborders.com.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Introduction to Screenwriting
10 Thursdays from 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 27th.
Writing a great screenplay begins with the first ten pages. Readers for agents and producers focus exclusively on the opening scenes when looking for a project to represent and develop – many say they stop reading after the first five pages. Understanding the overall structure and specific components of an effective beginning to a screenplay is the first step in becoming a successful screenwriter. In this ten-week class, writers will explore basic screenplay structure, format and techniques. Through weekly lectures and writing assignments, students will learn how to create strong characters, introduce the protagonist’s goal, set the tone for the film, and establish the dramatic situation, all in the first ten pages. We will begin with an overview of traditional, three-act narrative structure and character arcs, focusing on the significance of the first act, and then explore different genres and story types. We will view and discuss the first ten minutes of several films, and compare the screen versions with the first ten pages of the screenplays, as a means of understanding structure.
Students will begin by developing characters and then write scenes that set up the main character in his or her everyday world. The scenes will be constructed to lead up to an inciting incident that sets the story in motion, and hooks the reader into wanting to know what happens next. Students will learn techniques for creating well-rounded, complex characters, writing realistic and effective dialogue, using visual imagery to convey action, and integrating exposition and character back-story into a screenplay without resorting to flashbacks and on-the-nose dialogue. Students will share scenes from in-class and take-home assignments in workshop-style readings weekly and receive informal, constructive feedback from peers and the instructor. The goal of the ten-week class is to write the first ten pages of a feature-length screenplay with at least one revision. For the final submission of the revised first ten pages of each student’s screenplay, the instructor will provide written feedback and suggestions for further development. This course is designed for beginning screenwriters and experienced writers in other genres who seek an introduction to screenwriting format and structure, character development and dialogue. Students should come to the first class with an idea for a screenplay story to develop over the course of the class.
- Instructor: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
- Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She studied writing and literature at Goddard College, has a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She has published poetry and articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches screenwriting at BU’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts and at Northeastern University. Her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, is based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name. Cheryl is a lecturer at Shakespeare conferences around the country. Her new ten-minute play, Ve-Ri-Tas, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and was the 2012 Judge for the WIFVNE Annual Screenwriting Competition. She also served as a panelist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2012 Play/Screenwriting Fellowship. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
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Prose Studio
6 Thursdays from 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 27th.
The idea of this class is that students sometimes need a guarded, reserved, supportive place and time to works on their projects. Here, we make you write. This class provides a time and space every week to work on a novel, short story, memoir, or essay -- anything prose. Each class will begin with a warm up exercise or exercises, and students can share any questions or problems/blocks. If a craft lesson seems necessary (e.g. on characterization, scene, flashbacks, tone, structure) then the instructor will offer a short lesson or lecture. Otherwise, students will simply *write* for the bulk of the class hours (the instructor included). There is an option for sharing what you've written towards the break, or end of the session, but this will be kept to a minimum. Those enrolled have the option of either having a half hour consultation with the instructor, or edits of a five page writing sample. Come to the first class with a your goals for our 6 weeks together.
- Instructor: Kathleen Willis Morton
Kathleen Willis Morton holds an MFA in Creative Writing. Her first book, The Blue Poppy and the Mustard Seed, was published by Wisdom Publications. She has been published in Shambhala Sun Magazine, Hip Mama Magazine, and the anthology, Best Buddhist Writing 2009 published by Shambhala/Random House Publications. She can be reached at www.thebluepoppyandthemustardseed.com.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
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Vulnerable Monsters
Thursday, June 27th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
From fairy-tale wolves to modern-day vampires, monsters have often stood for the violent in us; but many authors stress another side: how vulnerable it can feel to be different. Drawing inspiration from literary examples and classic types, you'll create a monster or human hybrid who exists in a world of people. Through our writing, we'll challenge readers to ask deeper questions, such as, "What is it like to feel monstrous, and how do we cope when we do?" This seminar will be a great way to build a new story or to better understand the character(s) in an existing story or novel.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Getting the Most out of Conferences, Workshops, and Critique Groups
Thursday, June 27th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Want to ensure your best return on investment from the writing conferences this summer? Interested in expanding your capacity to learn strategically? Ever taken copious amounts of notes during a conference and then never looked at them again? Do you yearn to be a more effective networker? Or wish you could give and receive feedback more effectively in critique groups? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, join Christine Carron for a seminar covering a set of practices that will transform forevermore your conference, workshop, and critique group experiences.
- Instructor: Christine Carron
Christine Carron is an innovative, results-oriented consultant who has delivered training on topics ranging from technical tools to process improvement to increasing personal and team effectiveness. Her training style, honed in the US and abroad, is inclusive, entertaining, and motivating. In 2008, Christine took a sabbatical from her corporate career to write. She was delighted to discover how much the tools, frameworks, and techniques she’d learned in business enhanced her creative process, allowing her to craft both a fun and effective writing journey -- her first novel is now under agent representation. To support other writers in creating their own best writing journey, Christine's classes draw upon her twenty years in the corporate world, her lifelong interest in individual and group dynamics, and her own experience with the challenges and joys of being a writer.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Jumpstart Your Nonfiction Book Idea
Thursday, June 27th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Do you have an idea, an obsession, or a hobby that you think would make a great book? In this class, you’ll learn specific strategies for transforming your passion into a workable project. We’ll begin by figuring out what excites you about your topic, and what about it would excite readers. In-class writing exercises will help you pinpoint how your unique interests can speak to a general audience, and how your concrete obsessions relate to larger, more universal ideas. Ultimately, you will learn how to shape your experiences into a concept that will appeal both to agents and readers.
- Instructor: Steven Lee Beeber
- Steven Lee Beeber is the author of The Heebie-jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press), the editor of AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press), and the associate editor of the literary journal Conduit. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Fiction, Bridge, Memorious, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and teaches creative writing and creative nonfiction at Lesley University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Writing the Graphic Novel
Thursday, June 27th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to write a graphic novel? From their older cousins—comic books—to the full-fledged visual experience, the medium has found its way into the hearts and minds of Hollywood along with the general public. Have you ever wondered what it takes to work with artists and illustrators to bring the visual experience to paper and to life? In this course, we will concentrate on what it takes to write a graphic novel, how to rethink the art of storytelling and let the visuals do the talking. We will explore the expectations of working with illustrators, the art of the storyboard and scriptwriting and how they both combine to propel this wonderful medium forward. We will talk about writing in panels, breaking down page layouts and how to arrange for maximum effect. Most importantly, we will discuss the art of the pitch, what publishers are after, and how to get your book into the right hands that lead to success.
- Instructor: Chris Zirpoli
Chris Zirpoli has been a Producer, Marketing and PR Liaison, Lead Designer, Lead Writer, and Cinematic Director for independent video games studios and publishers alike. His titles span many genres and platforms, including Nightcaster (Action/Adventure - Xbox, PS2, GameCube), Sea Trader (Action/Adventure – GBA) Goblin Commander (RTS - Xbox, PS2, GameCube), and Auto Assault (PC - MMORPG). Chris has worked with the many studios at THQ, Inc., as well as Pixar and Walt Disney, doing design work for the cross-platform video game products to accompany film releases like Ratatouille and intellectual properties like De Blob. He has written and edited lectures for the Art Institute of America on writing and game design, and been a guest speaker for numerous classes, panels, and lectures at conventions and colleges all around the country.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing the Political Story, or Making a Difficult Topic Palatable
Thursday, June 27th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
As Frank Capra famously said, “If you want to send a message, try Western Union.” Not many readers like their fiction to be didactic. But fiction can be one of the most effective genres for considering topics such as war or colonialism or environmentalism, and political events lie at the heart of countless celebrated stories. In this workshop, we'll look at examples of fiction that inform without lecturing and explore how authors make description and characters work double-time. Led by a journalist turned fiction writer, the class will also consider the distinction between writing fiction and nonfiction, and whether a work of fiction has to have a specific agenda or stance to be considered political. We will not discuss any political topics themselves, only the mechanics of conveying them through fiction. Participants are invited to bring in around 200 words from a relevant work in progress to read aloud for discussion.
- Instructor: Anne Korkeakivi
Anne Korkeakivi is the author of the novel, An Unexpected Guest (Little, Brown; 2012). Her short fiction has been published by the Atlantic, the Yale Review, Consequence magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, and the Brooklyn Review, among other magazines. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times (UK), Gourmet, Travel & Leisure, Ms., and many other periodicals in the US and the UK. She earned a BA in Classics from Bowdoin College and an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and her awards include a Hawthornden Fellowship for fiction. Anne was born in New York City, and raised there and in western Massachusetts, spent a decade in France, and currently lives most of the year in Geneva, Switzerland, where her husband is a human rights lawyer with the UN. She can be found online at www.annekorkeakivi.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Teen Writing Camp (Multi-Week): Section A
6 Fridays from 3:00-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 28th.
Are you a teen interested in writing poems and stories? Maybe you’re just beginning and want to try your hand at creative writing in a supportive but rigorous atmosphere, or maybe you’ve been filling notebooks with plays and rhymes for years. Either way, this is the class for you! Each week we will read and discuss published short stories and poems, do writing exercises, talk about craft (the tools and techniques in poetry and fiction), and the writing process. For writers age 13-18 ONLY.SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES: Grub Street is happy to be able to offer a limited number of full scholarships for this course. You are eligible for one of these scholarships if you are in a household that receives benefits from Massachusetts SNAP or Massachusetts TANF, if you are a foster child, and/or if your household’s gross income is within the free limits on the Federal Income Guidelines.
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To apply for a scholarship, please complete and submit this online form describing why you want to take this class and stating that you meet the requirements above. The deadline to apply is 12:00pm on Friday, June 14th.
- Instructor: Carrie Kei Heim Binas
Carrie Kei Heim Binas is a writer, mother, former actress, and recovering attorney. In college she studied poetry, literature, creative writing, translation, and education, graduating with a degree in French from Vassar College and a second degree in English from Hunter College. Her work has been published in Boston Literary Magazine, Thaumatrope, and PicFic. When not working on her novel or building Lego pirate ships with her husband and daughter, she blogs about writing, Grub Street, the path to publication, and whatever else is on her mind at HeimBinasFiction.blogspot.com.
There are 2 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $175.00 register as a non-member $195.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Teen Writing Camp (Multi-Week): Section B
6 Fridays from 3:00-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 28th.
Are you a teen interested in writing poems and stories? Maybe you’re just beginning and want to try your hand at creative writing in a supportive but rigorous atmosphere, or maybe you’ve been filling notebooks with plays and rhymes for years. Either way, this is the class for you! Each week we will read and discuss published short stories and poems, do writing exercises, talk about craft (the tools and techniques in poetry and fiction), and the writing process. For writers age 13-18 ONLY.SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES: Grub Street is happy to be able to offer a limited number of full scholarships for this course. You are eligible for one of these scholarships if you are in a household that receives benefits from Massachusetts SNAP or Massachusetts TANF, if you are a foster child, and/or if your household’s gross income is within the free limits on the Federal Income Guidelines.
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To apply for a scholarship, please complete and submit this online form describing why you want to take this class and stating that you meet the requirements above. The deadline to apply is 12:00pm on Friday, June 14th.
- Instructor: TBA
- We'll announce this person's name soon!
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $175.00 register as a non-member $195.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Writing with Style
Friday, June 28th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
What's your writing style and how do you improve it? What makes Michael Ondaatje or George Saunders or Barry Hannah a stylist? Using examples from fiction and nonfiction, we will work out how (and when and why) to add music to your sentences. Students should bring with them the first page of a new story or essay. We will address issues of style in part through micro-editing: choosing the right verbs, using common words in new ways, cutting out unnecessary words and phrases, adding precision and specificity, and looking at how word order can transform a sentence. We'll also borrow poetic techniques, paying attention to the rhythm and cadence of a sentence, to meter and stressed syllables, and to the persona, or attitude, of the narrator. We will do a few in-class exercises and share some feedback on those pieces. You will leave with a cheat sheet of handy techniques that you can try in your own work.
- Instructor: Matthew Salesses
- Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Feb 2013), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and the chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, West Branch, and over fifty other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emerson College, the University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. Currently, he serves as the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer for the Good Men Project. On the web, he is matthewsalesses.com and @salesses.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Writer's Block Bootcamp
Friday, June 28th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Facing the blank page can be a difficult and motivation-killing experience. Writer’s block can be paralyzing, and even a prolific writer may find a moment where it seems the muse has left town. This class is designed to teach you how to kick the muse in the ass and make it work on your terms.
In this interactive workshop, writers will experience a series of exercises and lectures designed to cure you of your writer’s block, demystify the writing process, and teach you how to write on demand. We will discuss the main causes of writer’s block and give you a complex set of tools you can use to overcome it.
The instructor will share how he went from being paralyzed by writer’s block to being able to write sixty pages in a weekend.
This workshop is perfect for writers of any genre looking to put the block behind them for good as well as prolific writers looking for tools to up their output.
- Instructor: Mark Fogarty
- Mark Fogarty is the president and Co-founder of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC), a non-profit created to help local filmmakers find resources in the Ocean State. The RIFC has more than 1,900 members and has been involved in the production of dozens of films. For more information, visit www.rifcfilms.com. Mark started Exile Movies in 2003 and has worked as a director of photography and editor on feature-length and short films. Mark recently directed the feature-length epic, smalltown, from his screenplay. You can find out more about the film at www.smalltownmovie.com. As an actor, Mark has been in dozens of films and uses his knowledge of acting to inform his writing. Mark graduated from Emerson College with a degree in filmmaking, and works as a freelance editor and writer.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Narrative Flair in Memoir
Saturday, June 29th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
It seems that everyone is writing a memoir these days. But what will set yours apart from the others? Agents and editors are looking for memoirs that possess the narrative flair of fiction. In this class, we’ll read excerpts of successful memoirs and learn how to turn our own recollections into riveting reads. Come to class with a list of five memoir scenes you hope to create or write better. During the second half of class, we’ll develop one of those scenes through a guided visualization exercise and in-class writing time. You’ll leave with a newly written passage and a plan for how to turn your other memoir moments into tantalizing tales.
- Instructor: Nadine Kenney Johnstone
- Nadine Kenney Johnstone teaches at Framingham State University, Dean College, and Grub Street Inc. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and recently completed her novel, DISTANCE. Currently, she is at work on a memoir about facing death while on her quest to create life through IVF. Nadine has been published in Pank, The Drum, Chicago magazine, and Hair Trigger, among other publications. She has worked in all aspects of writing: as a literary magazine editor, reporter, fiction contest judge, story performer, and creative writing instructor. Find her writing advice at Beyond The Margins, The Review Review, and at Grub Street Daily. A Chicago native and Massachusetts transplant, Nadine spends her free time exploring the outdoors with her husband and their dog. Follow her at http://www.facebook.com/NadineKenneyJohnstone or on Twitter @nadinekenney.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Writing and Pitching the Op-Ed
Saturday, June 29th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Get your op-ed out of your head and into the headlines! You have ideas and opinions about Middle East foreign policy or parenting trends; you feel strongly about health care reform or Red Sox reform; or you have a poignant story about your or your parents' experience with the health care system (or the Red Sox). Whatever the topic, in this seminar you'll learn the basics for writing and submitting the standard 600- to 900-word op-ed column. Via lecture, discussion of great examples from op-eds, short exercises, and Q&A, we'll show you how to 1) recognize and find great, timely, marketable topics for your op-eds that editors want; 2) how to leverage your personal experience and expertise; 3) where to publish your op-eds; and 4) how to pitch them to newspapers, magazines, online publications, and blogs. We'll look at exemplary pitch letters and go over standard protocol for working with editors. For any writers with an axe to grind or strong opinions who are looking for practical tips to get their op-eds into the marketplace.
- Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
- A journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com and Christian Science Monitor, and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today Washington Post and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, former bicycling culture columnist for the Boston Globe, and is the film columnist for Art New England. He is a core contributor to the blog "GeekDad" at wired.com and his blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com. He also writes for blogs at Boston.com's Globetrotting; Tor.com; ForcesofGeek.com, and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, Exquisite Corpse and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro and, for younger students, in schools and community centers. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Grub Street. Follow Ethan’s adventures at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Novel Essentials: Finding the Big Want
Saturday, June 29th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Kurt Vonnegut has said, “Make [your] characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water.” Indeed, desire is the engine that fuels compelling narrative. Yet showing what your characters want is not always easy. Moreover, showing what’s at stake for your characters—if they don’t get what they want—is one of the hardest aspects of writing fiction. In this seminar, we will look at excerpts of published fiction to see how writers effectively dramatize their characters’ desires. We will also do a series of fun writing exercises geared toward showing your characters’ desires and motivations. This class is suitable for short story writers and novelists at any level. It will be a mix of reading, discussion, and writing, and students will come away with inspiration and several new pages of writing.
Part of the "Novel Essentials" Series, which includes:
Novel Essentials: Finding the Big Want
Novel Essentials: Small Gestures Make Big Characters
Novel Essentials: Novel Essentials: “Don’t Look Back!” Handling Flashback and Backstory
- Instructor: Becky Tuch
- Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Forbidden Fairy Tales
Saturday, June 29th, 2:30-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
From Sleeping Beauty’s kiss to Bluebeard’s room of horrors, the fairy tale has always been a powerful vehicle for fiction. Authors like Angela Carter, Karen Russell, and Anne Rice have used this traditional form to create original work that taps the depths of sexuality and/or darkness. Whether you’re a sensual/erotic writer looking for exciting material or an author of darker fiction with a taste for creative twists, this fairy tale night will challenge and inspire. Together, we will read and explore excerpts from stories that draw on traditional fairy tales, and we'll respond by writing our own scenes and/or short shorts. You'll have a chance to share your writing with members of the group and receive ideas for further development. Expect to leave the class with the first draft of a short short or excerpts that can grow into a unique scene or story.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Query Clinic
Saturday, June 29th, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
A one day intensive session on query letters. For the first half of the class, agent Sorche Fairbank of Fairbank Literary will take the class through the shelf-life of a query, dissect its four most important components, diagram the essential elements of a query’s synopsis, identify the five most common mistakes authors make in their queries, give insight and tips on how to stand out in the slushpile, and provide a review of a laundry list of query Dos and Don’ts. After covering all the basics, the instructor will hand back students’ queries, with notes on recommended changes. Students will have time to rework their query in class, by hand or by laptop, and then the instructor will lead a group critique of each reworked query with the class. Amazing changes are expected. By the close of the class, students should expect to have a strong query letter that gets an agent’s attention, and will have take home notes and class handouts. Open to all levels, all genres.
Important: Please prepare and email to lauren@grubstreet.org no later than noon on Monday, June 24th, a query letter of no more than 400 words for the instructor, who will provide comments and edits on the query for use in class, and as a take-home reference.
For Class: Bring two copies of your query, and means to work on revisions (pen and paper, or laptop).
- Instructor: Sorche Fairbank
Since establishing Fairbank Literary Representation in 2002, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank has had the pleasure of working with a dynamic and varied list, representing best-selling authors, Edgar recipients, award-winning journalists, and of course one of her favorite kinds of client -- the first-time author. Her tastes in novels tend toward literary fiction, international voices and women's voices, and the mystery/suspense genre. On the nonfiction side, she is most likely to take on books that tackle current events and societal issues with a narrative treatment. She has a strong interest in women's voices and class and race issues, quality lifestyle books (food, wine, and home design), sports, memoir, humor, and pop culture. And to date, she has signed on three terrific clients through Grub Street, with more certain to follow.
Subjects and genres not of interest by Sorche and Fairbank Literary include: sci-fi and fantasy, children's and YA, self-help, romance, sports fiction, and generally anything that opens with a dream scene and/or exhaustive descriptions of weather. Unless, of course, it's really really really good.
Notable authors and books represented by Fairbank Literary include: O. Henry Prize winner Charlotte Forbes; Pulitzer nominee and LA Times Cairo Bureau Chief Jeffrey Fleishman; Matthew Frederick and his best-selling 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School; Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development and author of Solar Revolution; Darci Klein's To Full Term, A Mother's Triumph Over Miscarriage; Jonathan McCullough's A Tale Of Two Subs: An Untold Story Of World War II, Two Sister Ships, And Extraordinary Heroism; the estate of Robin Moore (The French Connection, The Green Berets, etc.); Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker); syndicated cartoonist Man Martin (Days of the Endless Corvette); Edgar-winning mystery writer and host of Anatomy Of A Mystery, Rex Burns; and Robert McKinnon, founder of Yellow Brick Road and editor of the forthcoming Legacy: Today's Leaders on Tomorrow's World, a collection of essays by such luminaries as Al Gore, Paul Simon, Mia Hamm, Richard Louv, and others.
Updated information on Sorche Fairbank and Fairbank Literary, their clients, and recent deals can be found at www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/SorcheFairbank
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Finding Your Book
6 Sundays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 30th.
Go on a six-week journey with literary agent Joanne Wyckoff of the Carol Mann Agency to “find your book” and start crafting a book proposal. Perhaps you have a number of essays that you think might be the beginnings of a book. Or you’ve written chapters of a memoir or nonfiction narrative. Or perhaps you’ve written a long article and are wondering if it can be expanded into a book. Through class discussion and sharing of manuscript material, students will explore their book idea to figure out if their concept or storyline is workable. The aim of the class is to help students find their book before embarking on writing a book proposal. We'll also discuss the importance of doing market research to determine the uniqueness of a book idea or storyline, as well as developing an author profile or platform. By the end of class, it is my hope that all students will have a workable synopsis/overview of their book and the beginnings of chapter-by-chapter summaries. This is a course that focuses on narrative nonfiction and memoir. The course is part lecture and part workshop. Students who wish to take this class should have taken writing classes before and should feel comfortable reading and critiquing other students’ work. Led by an instructor who has worked extensively as both a literary agent and an editor.
- Instructor: Joanne Wyckoff
Joanne Wyckoff is an agent with the Carol Mann Agency. Prior to joining CMA, she was an agent with Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. Before becoming an agent, Joanne worked as Senior Editor at Ballantine Books/Random House, and as Executive Editor at Beacon Press. As an agent, Joanne represents nonfiction and selected fiction. She has a particular love of the memoir and narrative nonfiction and is always looking for exciting new writing in these genres. She has a lot of experience working with academics and experts in diverse fields, helping them develop and write books for a broad market. Her nonfiction list includes books in psychology, women’s issues, education, health and wellness, self-help, natural history and anything about animals, religion and spirituality, and African-American issues.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Introduction to Playwriting
6 Sundays from 6:00-9:90pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 30th.
Write the bulk of a new full-length play over the course of six weeks. Conquer the blank page with interactive exercises and assignments. Develop your unique playwriting voice, hear new pages out loud and get feedback as you write your first draft. Readings will include diverse classic and contemporary plays that highlight master techniques for compelling structure, dialogue, action and character development. Classes will be a mix of discussion of student work, examination of particular craft issues and writing exercises. Please bring a copy of David Ball's Backwards and Forwards to your first class.
- Instructor: Nina Louise Morrison
Nina Louise Morrison is a playwright, actor, director and dramaturg. Her plays include Mad Props, House Rules, The Red Plague, Constitution and Three Patriotic Acts. She is a Richard Rodgers Fellow, a Shubert Foundation grantee, and an affiliated artist with Free Hands Theatre Company, Boston Bohemia, Playwrights Commons' Freedom Art Retreat and Company One’s Playground. Before moving to Boston, Nina was the Senior Program Associate at the Philadelphia Theater Initiative. Training: MFA Columbia University, the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, the New Actors Workshop, and Oberlin College. More info at ninalouisemorrison.wordpress.com.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
10 Weeks, 10 Poems
10 Sundays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 30th.
Whether you're looking to experiment, produce new works for a collection, or work on revisions, this workshop offers the opportunity to broaden and deepen your knowledge of poetry. Each week you will read the work of published writers and also offer your own poems to the class for weekly critique. This class will allow you to break old habits, broaden and expand your knowledge of poetry, and, most importantly, leave the course with both fresh and revised drafts of your work.
- Instructor: Elisabeth Houston
Elisabeth Houston received her bachelors degree from Yale and graduated from Boston University’s MFA program in Poetry where she studied with former US Poet Laureates Robert Pinsky and Louise Gluck. She is the recipient of a Cave Canem fellowship. Elisabeth currently teaches poetry at Boston University, and she works at Transition magazine. She also teaches creative writing through The Poem Project, an initiative which works with women who are incarcerated in a prison outside of Boston.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $430.00 register as a non-member $455.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Fiction I: Section B
10 Sundays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins June 30th.
In the beginning, there was the short story, and it was good. In this course, you'll learn and practice the tried-and-true elements of fiction—- character, plot, dialogue, setting, point of view, and revision-– with an emphasis on the short story form. As you mine for material, you will also explore new possibilities in subject, style, and voice. Classes include short lectures and discussions on various elements of craft, skill-based writing exercises and workshopping of student work. The goal is to write and/or revise two complete stories (up to 25 pages each), giving you the momentum you need to continue writing well after the workshop ends. While this course will focus on short stories, it also serves as an introduction to the elements of fiction that every novelist will need to know.
- Instructor: Greg Brown
Greg Brown is a fiction writer living in Portland, Maine. His stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Epoch, and Narrative Magazine, among other journals. He is the recipient of a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University and is at work on a novel.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $430.00 register as a non-member $455.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
10 Weeks, 10 Stories
10 Mondays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins July 1st.
Tired of workshopping the same stories? Can't come up with new plots and characters? All writers go through this, but here’s a way to shake up your writing world. In this often sold-out workshop, you will write both brand-new complete stories ranging from 300 to 1500 words or brand-new beginnings of longer stories. Each week, you'll be given a different exercise to explore an interesting and tighter way to write plot, character, setting, and language; you will get quick on-the-spot feedback on what you write from both the instructor and fellow students. Classes may also include some discussion of published short shorts and/or elements of craft. The goal is to leave the class with new beginnings, a few complete short-shorts, and at least one revised piece to submit for publication. Recommended for students who’ve taken Fiction I or an equivalent.
- Instructor: KL Pereira
- KL Pereira is a teaching artist who lives mostly in her head; she's interested in the creaky, creepy underbelly of life and whatever lies beyond. She holds a BA in Literature and Languages from Bard College, an MA in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Mythic Deliruim, Jabberwocky, The Medulla Review, Bitch Magazine, Clamor Magazine, and other fine magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, and journals. You can read her column: Slaying Genre: A Monthly Column on Horror, Noir, Fantasy, and the Other Red-Headed Step-Children of the Literary World here. Pereira publishes erotic horror under a different name and is currently working on a collection of flash fiction fairy tales, a mytho-punk noir, and some zombie apocalyptica. For more information, visit www.darknesslovescompany.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $430.00 register as a non-member $455.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, July 2nd, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
Jumpstart Your Blog
Monday-Thursday, 10:30am-1:30pm from July 8-11th at Grub Street headquarters.
Blogs are a unique form of communicating, and writing one takes special know-how and skill. They can be a great way to market yourself, build an audience, and exercise your creative impulses. Whether you’re looking to breathe life back into an already established blog or want to start a new one and need a push, this class will offer guidance for creating a blog that others will want to read and return to. You’ll learn what makes a successful blog, read examples from the blogosphere, and begin crafting strategies to build your audience. You’ll practice writing different types of posts that will be workshopped over the course of the week. We will even discuss ways to make a visually appealing blog that’s easy for readers to navigate. The goal is to leave the class with some new posts, inspiration, and a strategy for enriching your content and growing your audience.
- Instructor: Kim Adrian
- Kim Adrian's short stories, essays, and memoir excerpts have appeared in Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Raritan, Crazyhorse, New England Review, /nor, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a P.E.N. New England Discovery Award, an Artist's Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Editor's Prize in Nonfiction from the New Ohio Review, as well as residencies at the Edward Albee Barn, Ragdale, and the VCCA. She teaches creative writing at Grub Street, reads nonfiction for Agni magazine, and serves on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her essay, "Questionnaire for My Grandfather" will appear in the upcoming anthology YOU: Essays in the Second Person (Welcome Table Press, 2012). Currently, she is at work on a book-length memoir. More at kimadrian.com.
Kim is the founder of Thumbtack, a website production company for authors.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $185.00 register as a non-member $205.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Young Adult Novel Workout
Monday-Thursday, 2:30-5:30pm from July 8-11th at Grub Street headquarters.
Do you have a full or partial draft of a Young Adult (YA) novel? Are you ready to give yourself a rigorous YA novel workout? In this one-week intensive you’ll tackle exercises, take up your tools, and employ techniques and strategies for planning, shaping, and revising your work-in-progress. By the end of this class, you can expect to have a much better grasp of your novel and a clear direction for your path going forward—whether toward a complete first draft or a full revision. The course will be structured as follows:Class 1: character, voice, and dialogueClass 2: plot, tension, and pacingClass 3: themes, motifs, and imageryClass 4: the big pictureIn Class 4 participants will workshop brief excerpts from their YA novels-in-progress.Bring your full or partial novel draft on your laptop or as a hard copy. Bring writing implements, highlighters, sticky notes, and paper.
- Instructor: Holly Thompson
Holly Thompson (www.hatbooks.com) is the author of two young adult novels in verse: The Language Inside and Orchards, winner of the APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, both published by Delacorte/Random House. She is also author of the adult novel Ash and the picture book The Wakame Gatherers. Raised in Massachusetts but a longtime resident of Japan, she recently edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories. A graduate of the N.Y.U. Creative Writing Program, she writes poetry and fiction for children, teens and adults, serves as regional advisor for the Japan chapter of SCBWI, and teaches creative writing and literature at Yokohama City University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $185.00 register as a non-member $205.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Playwriting Intensive
Monday-Thursday, 10:30am-1:30pm from July 8-11th at Grub Street headquarters.
In this interactive playwriting boot camp, you will write the core materials for a new play. Come with an idea in mind or discover your play as you write it. Through a series of fun directed writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of writing a new play: mining for material, constructing characters and settings, conjuring vivid dialogue, dramatic conflict and finding your voice. We will read brand new pages aloud, discuss writing practices and the strengths and weaknesses of our work in this supportive and generative experience for both new and practicing writers. We will also read and discuss short published texts in regards to craft, then write exercises inspired by the texts. Note that this is not a course in the fundamentals of playwriting, but an opportunity for beginning and advanced students to generate new scenes and raw materials for a new play.
- Instructor: Nina Louise Morrison
- Nina Louise Morrison is a playwright, actor, director and dramaturg. Her plays include Mad Props, House Rules, The Red Plague, Constitution and Three Patriotic Acts. She is a Richard Rodgers Fellow, a Shubert Foundation grantee, and an affiliated artist with Free Hands Theatre Company, Boston Bohemia, Playwrights Commons' Freedom Art Retreat and Company One’s Playground. Before moving to Boston, Nina was the Senior Program Associate at the Philadelphia Theater Initiative. Training: MFA Columbia University, the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, the New Actors Workshop, and Oberlin College. More info at ninalouisemorrison.wordpress.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $185.00 register as a non-member $205.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Memoir Writers’ Summer Retreat
Monday-Thursday, 2:30-5:30pm from July 8th-11th at Grub Street headquarters.
This summer, go on a writing retreat—without leaving Boston! Monday through Wednesday, we’ll begin with writing exercises that focus on different craft aspects of memoir writing-- for example, character development, setting, shaping scenes, etc. Then we write. Typing (or scribbling) is less lonely when you do it together! The instructor will provide prompts to help keep you moving through generating memoir draft, as well as periodic breaks for stretching and inspiration. Bring whatever you need to work quietly—a laptop, headphones for music, the photo that keeps you centered. Wednesday afternoon we’ll break into small groups to share and workshop. Guidance will be provided on how to workshop such early stage work in a way that emphasizes creative inquiry, never critique—then we’ll use this feedback to deepen our work at the start of our last day together. We’ll conclude the week with a class reading, sharing and celebrating our new work, and each class member will articulate and commit to a plan for future work on his or her memoir.
- Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and elsewhere, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. She teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
There are 4 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $185.00 register as a non-member $205.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, July 9th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
Master Poetry
6 Thursdays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins July 11th.
This workshop is for poets ready for deeper investigations into their own poetry and willing to take risks and engage in serious revision. In a group limited to nine serious poets, we will develop our understanding of how a poem works, looking at image, diction and form in a range of contemporary poets and applying what we learn to our own poems. We will also discuss placement of poems in journals and meet with an editor of a local literary journal. This class is by submission only and previous workshop experience is essential. We request that 2-3 students volunteer to bring in a new poem for workshopping on the first day. The class cost is $345 for non-members, $320 for members.
Apply via the form below or through this link by 12:00pm on Wednesday, June 26th. You will hear from the reading committee by Monday, July 1st.
- Instructor: Allison Adair
Allison Adair has taught poetry workshops and literature seminars at Boston University and the University of Iowa, where she held a Writers' Workshop Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She has written for curricular guides, academic texts, and the Massachusetts Long Road to Justice exhibit, and she served on the editorial board of The Iowa Review. A joint fellowship from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design allowed her to study painting and poetry in Dublin, Galway, and Belfast, and she was a finalist in the Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition. In 2007 she participated in the National Braille Association's Twice Seen photography exhibit with "Air Show." Other original poems, as well as translations of French and Italian poets, have appeared in various publications, including Emic, The Boston Globe, and Chris Castellani's The Saint of Lost Things. Allison holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Reading Like a Writer
6 Thursdays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins July 11th.
To become better writers, we must not only read great books, but read them more actively. This term, get back to the reason why you wanted to write in the first place: to create fiction that lasts, that matters. For six weeks, we will read and discuss some of the best stories in contemporary and classic literature, as well as selected essays from Francine Prose’s book, Reading Like A Writer. We will also do short, weekly writing exercises designed to get us inside authors’ heads and unlock their secrets. By the end, we’ll have trained ourselves to read for craft as well as for pleasure, and you’ll see that your favorite writers aren’t magically gifted beings, to be admired and exalted — they’re your teachers. Please bring a copy of Reading Like a Writer to the first day of class.
- Instructor: Nicole Miller
- Nicole Miller has published both fiction and non-fiction in the US and the UK, with two appearances in the May Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Jill Paton Walsh and Sebastian Faulks. After completing an M.Phil in English Literature at Oxford, she worked at The New Yorker and The Oxford English Dictionary, where she still serves as a scholarly reader for the department of etymology, with a specialty in British Dialects. At Emerson College, she held the Emerson Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing for three years, gaining her MFA in 2012. She was also awarded a PhD in Victorian Literature from University College, London in 2012 and publishes criticism on the works of Charles Dickens. She has taught in the Harvard College Writing Center since 2010 and edits faculty manuscripts for Harvard’s English Department. Her interests span the novel, short story, essay, and memoir form and the translation of Modern Greek poetry. Nicole is thrilled to share her love of words, literature, story-writing, and life-writing with the students of Grub Street this winter.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Jumpstart Your Writing: Fiction Summer Camp
6 Thursdays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins July 11th.
It’s finally summer. Why not spend some of that extra daylight lighting a fire under your fiction? This intensive six-week intermediate writing boot camp is designed to get you excited and inspired. We’ll focus on fun in-class writing prompts and read and discuss great stories and novel excerpts (and what we can steal/learn from them). The majority of class time will be devoted to generative writing and sharing our successes and challenges. We’ll meet wonderful characters, map new worlds, and chart the courses of our stories and novels. When camp is over, you’ll have a treasure trove of new ideas and fresh fiction—to rejuvenate your current writing projects or start brand new ones. Students should have taken at least Fiction I. Fiction writers of all genres are welcome.
- Instructor: Kate Racculia
Kate Racculia is a writer and researcher living in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her first novel, This Must Be the Place, was published by Henry Holt & Company in 2010 and named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her second novel, Bellweather Rhapsody, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2014. You can find her online at www.kateracculia.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing Social Justice
Friday, July 12th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
To change the world, first you've got to make people care. In this one-day class, we'll explore how writers have used the power of storytelling to give life to social justice issues in both fiction and nonfiction. What goes into such a narrative? What gets left out? And what strategies do writers use in researching and shaping their work? We'll look at published examples and do writing exercises to help you identify issues you're passionate about and get you started on the path of turning them into story. The instructor will also provide a list of suggested further reading in multiple genres and on multiple issues.
- Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
- Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and elsewhere, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. She teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Go Deeper, Baby: Writing Meaningful Erotica
Friday, July 12th, 2:30-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In this one-night seminar, we'll celebrate erotic fiction looking at why it's both emotionally valuable and increasingly popular. Drawing on well-respected authors such as Anais Nin and Steve Almond, we'll explore what makes a sexy story sexy, while also tapping the transformational qualities of the genre. Come along with a willingness to be open about feelings and sensations, and you'll leave with a short, sexy story of your own. All sexual and gender identities warmly welcomed. Led by an instructor who regularly publishes erotica and views it as some of her most meaningful work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Story Seeds for Young Adult Writing: Preserving, Sowing and Growing YA Story Ideas
Friday, July 12th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
The Young Adult literature category is a hot market. So where can you get ideas for YA stories? This seminar will introduce practices for gathering and preserving YA story ideas plus methods for nurturing them into creative works of powerful fiction. We’ll zoom in specifically on situations as YA story seeds, and with a situation plotting exercise, we’ll generate and discuss our plot ideas for YA stories and novels.
- Instructor: Holly Thompson
- Holly Thompson (www.hatbooks.com) is the author of two young adult novels in verse: The Language Inside and Orchards, winner of the APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, both published by Delacorte/Random House. She is also author of the adult novel Ash and the picture book The Wakame Gatherers. Raised in Massachusetts but a longtime resident of Japan, she recently edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories. A graduate of the N.Y.U. Creative Writing Program, she writes poetry and fiction for children, teens and adults, serves as regional advisor for the Japan chapter of SCBWI, and teaches creative writing and literature at Yokohama City University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Playwriting 101
Friday, July 12th, 2:30-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Want to sample the tools and techniques a playwright uses to tell a story that leaps off the page? Thinking about writing a play, but not sure where to begin? This 3-hour crash course will teach you the nuts and bolts of how to write a compelling play. Discover key approaches to plot, conflict, character, dialogue, action, and theatricality. Learn to find inspiration in classic and contemporary plays. Try your hand at a writing exercise or two and leave armed with ideas and methods for getting started with your first play.
- Instructor: Nina Louise Morrison
- Nina Louise Morrison is a playwright, actor, director and dramaturg. Her plays include Mad Props, House Rules, The Red Plague, Constitution and Three Patriotic Acts. She is a Richard Rodgers Fellow, a Shubert Foundation grantee, and an affiliated artist with Free Hands Theatre Company, Boston Bohemia, Playwrights Commons' Freedom Art Retreat and Company One’s Playground. Before moving to Boston, Nina was the Senior Program Associate at the Philadelphia Theater Initiative. Training: MFA Columbia University, the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, the New Actors Workshop, and Oberlin College. More info at ninalouisemorrison.wordpress.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Beginnings, for Our Times
Friday, July 12th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In today’s world, writers have to compete with the effects of new media, hand-held computers, and publishing industry belt-tightening. If you can't grab your reader right away--be it a prospective agent, an acquisition editor, someone flipping the pages of a literary magazine, or a browser in the bookstore--chances are you will lose him or her. An effective story opening doesn’t need an explosion, but it does have to capture attention. It also has to introduce your story's voice and set up the rest of the manuscript without being expository. In this workshop, a selection of effective openings from long and short fiction will be read and considered. For the latter part of the class, participants are invited to bring in the opening 200 words or less of a work in progress to share with the group, followed by discussion.
- Instructor: Anne Korkeakivi
- Anne Korkeakivi is the author of the novel, An Unexpected Guest (Little, Brown; 2012). Her short fiction has been published by the Atlantic, the Yale Review, Consequence magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, and the Brooklyn Review, among other magazines. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times (UK), Gourmet, Travel & Leisure, Ms., and many other periodicals in the US and the UK. She earned a BA in Classics from Bowdoin College and an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and her awards include a Hawthornden Fellowship for fiction. Anne was born in New York City, and raised there and in western Massachusetts, spent a decade in France, and currently lives most of the year in Geneva, Switzerland, where her husband is a human rights lawyer with the UN. She can be found online at www.annekorkeakivi.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Novel Essentials: “Don’t Look Back!”…Handling Flashback and Backstory
Friday, July 12th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Done effectively, backstory can enrich a reader’s sense of character and inform the plot of your story. On the other hand, too much backstory or unnecessary flashbacks can take the reader out of the story and slow your narrative’s forward momentum. What is the appropriate amount of “looking back”? When are backstory and flashbacks useful and when does it make a story drag? And what, exactly, is the difference between flashback and backstory? In this seminar, we will look at published examples of effective backstory and flashback, as well as scenes which deliver useful information without using backstory at all. Students will do writing exercises geared toward overcoming the need to rely on backstory in order to flesh out their characters, and will learn ways to determine if and when flashbacks are necessary in their own work. This class is ideal for novelists and short story writers at all levels. Part of a 4-part series of sessions on essential elements of writing fiction.
Part of the "Novel Essentials" Series, which includes:
Novel Essentials: Finding the Big Want
Novel Essentials: Small Gestures Make Big Characters
Novel Essentials: Novel Essentials: “Don’t Look Back!” Handling Flashback and Backstory
- Instructor: Becky Tuch
- Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
The Murky Middle
Saturday, July 13th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Writing the middle of a novel can feel, for many writers, like being lost in the forest with neither a breadcrumb trail nor a compass. You know where you want to end up, but are not sure how to get there. If you’ve written at least 50 pages and feel lost in the murky middle of your novel, this class will help you forge a path toward the story’s climax. Through intensive in-class exercises and brainstorming, you will leave at the end of the day with a better understanding of your novel's structure, and a possible path out of the forest.
Please come to class with 12 copies of both the first paragraph of your novel and a one-page plot summary of what you’ve written so far. We will be working with these outlines in class.
- Instructor: Lisa Borders
- Lisa Bordersis the author of two novels, The Fifty-First State and Cloud Cuckoo Land, chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing's Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land also received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her essay "Enchanted Night" was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Lisa has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Newport Review and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and fellowships at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. More information on Lisa and her work is available at lisaborders.com.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Flash Fiction Marathon
Saturday, July 13th, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters..
The market for flash fiction is booming, and this seminar is perfect for any writer ready to crank out some new short-short stories. At the end of the day, you’ll walk away with a brand new assortment of stories, each created through writing exercises designed to unleash your flash fiction genius. The seminar will also feature discussion of published flash fiction—which we’ll draw inspiration from—as well as quick, on-the-spot feedback on your own work.
- Instructor: Matthew Salesses
- Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Feb 2013), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and the chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, West Branch, and over fifty other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emerson College, the University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. Currently, he serves as the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer for the Good Men Project. On the web, he is matthewsalesses.com and @salesses.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
The Novel Series: Facing Your Revision
Saturday, July 13th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You’ve completed a first draft or the last of many drafts, but now you face the daunting task of where to begin with your revision. Often, this process feels like breaking down a brick wall with a toothpick or trying to lasso a dozen frenzied pigeons. This course will offer revision techniques for many different writing personalities, detail the major concerns you should be looking for, and help you simplify the process and feel more in control. By the end of the course, you will have created a revision plan to help you move forward in the next phase of your work. Students should bring their laptops or notebooks and a digital or printed copy of your novel-in-progress for reference. Much of the course will consist of individual work as led by specific exercises in organization and planning as well as sharing and finding solutions for individual trouble spots within the group. This course is part of a monthly series of 10 one-day classes for novelists at the beginning or more advanced stages of their manuscripts.
- Instructor: Michelle Hoover
- Michelle Hoover is a full-time instructor at Boston University and teaches many novel courses at Grub Street, including Grub's intensive year-long novel program, the Novel Incubator. She was a finalist for the Dorothy Churchill Cappon Essay Prize and has published short stories and novel excerpts in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, StoryQuarterly and Confrontation, StoryQuarterly. She has been the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell, a MacDowell Fellow, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in Best New American Voices. Her debut novel, The Quickening, was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, was a Finalist for the Indies Choice Debut of 2010 and Forward Magazine's Best Literary Book of 2010, and is a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read" pick. For more, go to www.michelle-hoover.com.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing Killer Pitch Letters
Saturday, July 13th, 2:30pm-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In this seminar, via lecture, discussion of packet materials, short exercises, and Q&A, you will learn how to write killer pitch letters (a.k.a. “query letters”) for submitting short-form nonfiction (essays, op-eds, articles, and feature stories) to editors of mainstream and trade magazines, newspapers, literary magazines, blogs, and online publications; we'll also discuss how to write pitch letters for submitting nonfiction book proposals to agents and editors. By examining pitch letters that actually worked, we'll go over different strategies for making sure your idea is sharp, focused, original, and targeted, and how to express your idea in a well-crafted pitch letter. We'll also go over the top mistakes writers make when pitching editors and agents. Even if you don't have much publishing experience, we'll talk about how to leverage your background and expertise to best present yourself. Sorry, there won't be time to critique your pitch letters or stories themselves, but we will do in-class exercises to help you fine-tune your pitch letter skills. Please bring questions about communicating with editors and agents, and any questions or problems about any pitch letters you're currently working on. For anyone looking to learn how to pitch their nonfiction projects and get them out into the marketplace. (NOTE: This seminar is NOT about submitting poems, short stories, novels, children's or YA lit, screenplays, or literary nonfiction to literary magazines.)
- Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
- A journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com and Christian Science Monitor, and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today Washington Post and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, former bicycling culture columnist for the Boston Globe, and is the film columnist for Art New England. He is a core contributor to the blog "GeekDad" at wired.com and his blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com. He also writes for blogs at Boston.com's Globetrotting; Tor.com; ForcesofGeek.com, and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, Exquisite Corpse and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro and, for younger students, in schools and community centers. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Grub Street. Follow Ethan’s adventures at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Required Reading: The Craft-Book Review
Saturday, July 13th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In the sea of books on becoming a writer and mastering one’s craft, which volumes form the life-raft? This seminar will offer critiques of a number of the classics, including E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction, selections from Virginia Woolf’s The First Common Reader and Henry James’s famous prefaces to the New York Edition of his books. We will talk about the value of these idiosyncratic approaches to reading and writing, and the extent to which “the cult of personality” still matters in finding a voice and courting a readership. From these oldies but goodies, we will turn to fiction’s more recent gurus and apostles, John Gardner, Charles Baxter, James Wood, and Graywolf’s Art Of series for some controversial do’s and don’ts, and the merit of learning technique through example, exercise, and wide exposure.
Our last hour will be dedicated to the writing life—Dorothea Brande’s On Becoming a Writer, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer—and the writer’s toolbox, The Elements of Style, The Synonym Finder, and Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence. Please bring your thoughts on the essays and guides which have been most helpful to you, and we’ll all pitch our knowledge and preferences into the general pool of resources which you can take home with you. At the end of class, I’ll offer my “best of” bibliography, and an evaluation of textbooks and sets (such as the Paris Review Interviews) which reward a more serious investment.
- Instructor: Nicole Miller
- Nicole Miller has published both fiction and non-fiction in the US and the UK, with two appearances in the May Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Jill Paton Walsh and Sebastian Faulks. After completing an M.Phil in English Literature at Oxford, she worked at The New Yorker and The Oxford English Dictionary, where she still serves as a scholarly reader for the department of etymology, with a specialty in British Dialects. At Emerson College, she held the Emerson Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing for three years, gaining her MFA in 2012. She was also awarded a PhD in Victorian Literature from University College, London in 2012 and publishes criticism on the works of Charles Dickens. She has taught in the Harvard College Writing Center since 2010 and edits faculty manuscripts for Harvard’s English Department. Her interests span the novel, short story, essay, and memoir form and the translation of Modern Greek poetry. Nicole is thrilled to share her love of words, literature, story-writing, and life-writing with the students of Grub Street this winter.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, July 16th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
6 Weeks, 6 Essays
6 Thursdays from 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins July 18th.
Sometimes the smallest moment--or the shortest essay--holds the greatest revelation. In this class you will write six personal essays between 500 and 1000 words. You’ll generate a lot of material, refine your editing skills, explore challenges in style and voice, and take a fresh look at your life experience. By working in a shorter format, you’ll also find ways to tighten your prose and heighten your storytelling skills. Each week you will bring a finished essay into class for presentation and discussion. There will also be brief discussions of published essays provided by the instructor. This course is geared towards intermediate and advanced students.
- Instructor: Christopher Boginski
- Christopher Boginski is a graduate from the MFA program at the University of Washington, where he taught creative writing and English as a second language and where he was a research assistant for David Shields. He lives in Jamaica Plain and is in the process of finalizing his first novel, The Etymologist, the story of a man reinventing himself during his impending divorce and deep fear of losing the one thing he still loves, teaching. He is also working on a collection of personal essays, What it Means to be Known, exploring memory loss and identity. To learn more, visit cjboginski.com and click on “Creative Writing.”
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Starting Your Freelance Writing Career
6 Thursdays from 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters. Begins July 18th.
Making money from your writing isn’t magic. Plenty of people are doing it, and it’s not because they’re any smarter or more talented than you are. It’s because they’ve figured out how to forge relationships with editors at the publications they want to write for, and because they’re incredibly persistent. In this course, we’ll learn how to craft irresistible pitches, get them into the hands of the right editors at the publications you want to write for, and follow up and turn your pitches into assignments. We’ll also discuss how to get your first clips—or, if you’ve already published, how to use the clips you have to score work in bigger and better publications. Students should bring copies of three magazines they want to write for to the first class.
- Instructor: Calvin Hennick
- Calvin Hennick’s nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, Runner’s World, Eating Well, Budget Travel, and Teacher magazine, among other publications. He has taught writing at UMass – Boston and in New York City’s public schools.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Novel Essentials: Small Gestures Make Big Characters
Friday, July 19th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Essayists like Sedaris got their start by making fun of it. Others, like Anthony Bourdain, have sold millions of memoir copies about it. Meanwhile, reality TV has exploded by highlighting odd sectors of it. Work: it’s where you spend the majority of your days. Why not transform that material into something read-worthy? Whether you have a hilarious, heartbreaking, or horrifying work experience, in this class you’re going to write about it. We’ll start by reading and discussing job-related essays and excerpts, then, during the second part of class, you’ll develop and write an essay-start of your own. You’ll leave with a plan for finishing and submitting your essay.
Part of the "Novel Essentials" Series, which includes:
Novel Essentials: Finding the Big Want
Novel Essentials: Small Gestures Make Big Characters
Novel Essentials: Novel Essentials: “Don’t Look Back!” Handling Flashback and Backstory
- Instructor: Becky Tuch
- Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
The Hook and the Book
Friday-Saturday, July 19-20th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Most literary agents receive at least one hundred query letters each week, yet respond positively to less than two percent. Decisions on writing samples (partials) are often made within the first five pages. Would yours make the cut? Do you know the secrets to writing a winning query? Join agent Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank of Fairbank Literary Representation for a weekend of intensive query and writing critique, lessons on the basics of a powerful synopsis, tips on how to stand out in a pile of queries, help on the first five pages, a review of a laundry list of Dos and Don’ts, and both group and one-on-one analysis of your submission package. By the time you leave on Sunday, you can expect to have a strong query letter that gets an agent’s attention, (or at least a strong framework), and first pages that sing. Open to all levels, all genres.
Important: Please prepare and email to lauren@grubstreet.org no later than noon on Monday, July 8th, a query letter of no more than 400 words, and the first five pages of your manuscript (double spaced, single sided, 12pt font, 1 inch margins, pages numbered) for the instructor.
For Day One: Bring four copies of the query and the first five pages to the first class for group review.
Note: you will be reworking your query and first five pages between classes.
For Day Two: Please bring thirteen copies of your reworked query and first five pages. If the class size is smaller than 12, you will be notified on the correct number of copies.
- Instructor: Sorche Fairbank
- Since establishing Fairbank Literary Representation in 2002, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank has had the pleasure of working with a dynamic and varied list, representing best-selling authors, Edgar recipients, award-winning journalists, and of course one of her favorite kinds of client -- the first-time author. Her tastes in novels tend toward literary fiction, international voices and women's voices, and the mystery/suspense genre. On the nonfiction side, she is most likely to take on books that tackle current events and societal issues with a narrative treatment. She has a strong interest in women's voices and class and race issues, quality lifestyle books (food, wine, and home design), sports, memoir, humor, and pop culture. And to date, she has signed on three terrific clients through Grub Street, with more certain to follow.
Subjects and genres not of interest by Sorche and Fairbank Literary include: sci-fi and fantasy, children's and YA, self-help, romance, sports fiction, and generally anything that opens with a dream scene and/or exhaustive descriptions of weather. Unless, of course, it's really really really good.
Notable authors and books represented by Fairbank Literary include: O. Henry Prize winner Charlotte Forbes; Pulitzer nominee and LA Times Cairo Bureau Chief Jeffrey Fleishman; Matthew Frederick and his best-selling 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School; Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development and author of Solar Revolution; Darci Klein's To Full Term, A Mother's Triumph Over Miscarriage; Jonathan McCullough's A Tale Of Two Subs: An Untold Story Of World War II, Two Sister Ships, And Extraordinary Heroism; the estate of Robin Moore (The French Connection, The Green Berets, etc.); Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker); syndicated cartoonist Man Martin (Days of the Endless Corvette); Edgar-winning mystery writer and host of Anatomy Of A Mystery, Rex Burns; and Robert McKinnon, founder of Yellow Brick Road and editor of the forthcoming Legacy: Today's Leaders on Tomorrow's World, a collection of essays by such luminaries as Al Gore, Paul Simon, Mia Hamm, Richard Louv, and others.
Updated information on Sorche Fairbank and Fairbank Literary, their clients, and recent deals can be found at www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/SorcheFairbank
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $195.00 register as a non-member $220.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
20 Revision Lessons
Saturday, July 20th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Stories often begin with a character the writer loves -- or loves to hate. But characters who come to life on the page are full of contradictions, neither wholly good nor entirely evil. How do we infuse our characters with the complexity that will make them believable? Through a combination of exercises and discussion of published work, this seminar will help you to create characters whose human contradictions make them vivid and memorable. You may come to class with a character already in mind, or you may start to create one through in-class exercises.
- Instructor: Matthew Salesses
- Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Feb 2013), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and the chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, West Branch, and over fifty other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emerson College, the University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. Currently, he serves as the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer for the Good Men Project. On the web, he is matthewsalesses.com and @salesses.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Essentials of Nonfiction: Scenes & Dialogue in Nonfiction
Saturday, July 20th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Writers often struggle with the best and most efficient way to use scenes in essays and memoir. How many scenes is too many? How much description is necessary? Using examples from both essay and memoir, we'll look at effective use of scenes and micro-scenes in creative nonfiction. We'll discuss the differences between direct and indirect dialogue and do some exercises to get you generating scenes that generate emotional resonance in your work.
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
- Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Writing Magical Realism
Saturday, July 20th, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
“When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug.” So begins Franz Kafka’s famous novella, The Metamorphosis, which is yes, about a man turning into a giant insect, but is also about a alienation and familial obligation – themes that are more familiar to us. Incorporating the abnormal into your fiction can be a wonderful way to expand the rules of an imaginary world, but how do writers do this without completely jumping into the realm of fantasy? By studying the masters of magical realism – like Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino and Toni Morrison, among others – we will learn how they believably envelope the strange without sacrificing story or alienating their readers. We will then take what we’ve learned and work on exercises that stretch our imagination and help us find a way to seamlessly blend the strange with the real.
- Instructor: Shuchi Saraswat
- Shuchi Saraswat received her MFA from Emerson College, where she primarily worked on a novel. She is the recipient of The 2012 Gulliver Travel Research Grant from The Speculative Literature Foundation and has received fellowships to Writers Omi at Ledig House and The Writers' Room of Boston and scholarships to Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. While at Emerson, Shuchi served as the nonfiction editor and then the fiction editor at Fringe Magazine, and worked as an editorial assistant in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's adult trade division. She currently helps manage the fiction section and hosts author readings at Brookline Booksmith.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, July 23rd, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
The Lie That Tells The Truth
Friday, July 26th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
A personal essay comprised of scenes that never happened. A memoir narrated by someone other than the writer. Perhaps the most controversial question about creative nonfiction is, just how much are you allowed to make up? We’ve all heard about the hoaxes and James Freys of the world, but what about the writers who use artful lying to explore deeper truths? In this class, we’ll examine how judicious use of lying might actually increase the truth-telling stakes of your work—without sacrificing your nonfiction cred. We’ll look at how different writers have signaled the reader that what she’s about to read is not strictly nonfictional, from the subtle phrase “I imagine” to using the title of a piece to undermine any veridical claims. Come with a nonfiction project in mind, whether essay or book, and together we’ll explore how to open up that work in ways you never imagined—by using what comes from the imagination.
- Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
- Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and elsewhere, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. She teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
3 Hours, 3 Stories
Friday, July 26th, 2:30pm-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Having trouble getting going on new stories? In this fast-paced, one-night course, procrastination is not an option. Through a series of writing exercises, we’ll produce three flash fiction stories (or starts to longer stories) in a single night. You’ll also get rapid-fire feedback to ensure that you leave class with a plan to revise your stories and send them out into the world.
- Instructor: Calvin Hennick
- Calvin Hennick’s nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, Runner’s World, Eating Well, Budget Travel, and Teacher magazine, among other publications. He has taught writing at UMass – Boston and in New York City’s public schools.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal: Finding Your Voice through Mimicry
Friday, July 26th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
All writers begin as readers in love with the works of those more accomplished, and when they begin writing they tend to imitate what they have read. This mimicry is an important step in finding one’s voice and helps beginning writers come to understand the power of their own words. Moreover, it helps them understand how the voices of various characters are created and can be based on careful mimicry of real voices encountered in one’s non-writing life. In this class we will read works both by writers with clearly distinctive voices and voices that are deceptively simple, examining their techniques and then attempting to replicate them in our own work. This will allow us to incorporate those elements of their techniques that we find useful, putting in action the well-known dictum, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
- Instructor: Steven Lee Beeber
- Steven Lee Beeber is the author of The Heebie-jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press), the editor of AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press), and the associate editor of the literary journal Conduit. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Fiction, Bridge, Memorious, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and teaches creative writing and creative nonfiction at Lesley University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Character Development Intensive
Friday, July 26th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
An in-depth exploration of the process of creating authentic, memorable characters, this one-day seminar will focus on protagonists and how to use screenwriting models and methods to develop unique characters for all literary genres. We will view scenes from several different screen adaptations of novels, plays, and short stories to deconstruct the on-screen characters and examine their origins.
In addition to viewing and discussing film clips, students will complete writing exercises designed to facilitate the creation of complex characters through backstory, dialogue, action, and visual imagery, share their writing exercises, and receive informal, constructive feedback from peers and the instructor.
We will focus on combining archetypes with individual personality traits, using the concept of the hero’s journey as a tool for character development, writing effective dialogue with subtext, writing against stereotype, and adapting other screenwriting techniques to create truly unique yet iconic protagonists for all literary genres.
Writers in all genres will gain a fresh perspective on the challenge of creating multi-faceted, engaging characters, and acquire new tools for the process of developing complex protagonists for the page, stage and screen.
- Instructor: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
- Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She studied writing and literature at Goddard College, has a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She has published poetry and articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches screenwriting at BU’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts and at Northeastern University. Her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, is based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name. Cheryl is a lecturer at Shakespeare conferences around the country. Her new ten-minute play, Ve-Ri-Tas, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and was the 2012 Judge for the WIFVNE Annual Screenwriting Competition. She also served as a panelist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2012 Play/Screenwriting Fellowship. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Writing a Hypertext
Saturday, July 27th, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Are writers doing enough to take advantage of the ways people read now? Our attention spans are short, we read online, we keep multiple tabs open all the time, we Google or Wikipedia things we don't know, and we like to click from one thing to the next. Enter into these reading habits the hypertext, narrative that gives people the freedom to read as they do online. Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure series? Why not create a story in which the reader can follow different paths by clicking on different decisions? Why not a poem in which an idea in one line opens to an entire other poem, and an idea in a line in that poem becomes another poem after that? Why not an essay like a Google map, where the reader can navigate from one place to the next, get lost or reorient herself, while learning something at each location that lets her see the bigger picture? In this 6-hour course, we will let our writing (and our readers) go wherever it wants. And then we will look at how to organize it so that we can create pathways from one piece to the next. We will each create one work of hypertext in this class, and we'll discuss how to bring that work online, via various new media.
- Instructor: Matthew Salesses
- Matthew Salesses is the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Feb 2013), The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and the chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, West Branch, and over fifty other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Emerson College, the University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. Currently, he serves as the Fiction Editor and a Contributing Writer for the Good Men Project. On the web, he is matthewsalesses.com and @salesses.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Micro-Editing
Saturday, July 27th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Before an editor evaluates your manuscript’s themes, plot, characters, or voice, he or she judges its sentences. The best way to impress any reader is to write clear and efficient prose. Good sentence-level editing can increase the pace, enhance the description, and deepen the mood of your work. In short, it can make your writing more compelling. In this workshop, we will take apart and reassemble sentences and paragraphs from both fiction and nonfiction drafts. You will learn to read like an editor, to question every word and remove abstraction in order to take your writing to the next level.
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
- Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Writing About Work
Saturday, July 27th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Essayists like Sedaris got their start by making fun of it. Others, like Anthony Bourdain, have sold millions of memoir copies about it. Meanwhile, reality TV has exploded by highlighting odd sectors of it. Work: it’s where you spend the majority of your days. Why not transform that material into something read-worthy? Whether you have a hilarious, heartbreaking, or horrifying work experience, in this class you’re going to write about it. We’ll start by reading and discussing job-related essays and excerpts, then, during the second part of class, you’ll develop and write an essay-start of your own. You’ll leave with a plan for finishing and submitting your essay.
- Instructor: Nadine Kenney Johnstone
- Nadine Kenney Johnstone teaches at Framingham State University, Dean College, and Grub Street Inc. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and recently completed her novel, DISTANCE. Currently, she is at work on a memoir about facing death while on her quest to create life through IVF. Nadine has been published in Pank, The Drum, Chicago magazine, and Hair Trigger, among other publications. She has worked in all aspects of writing: as a literary magazine editor, reporter, fiction contest judge, story performer, and creative writing instructor. Find her writing advice at Beyond The Margins, The Review Review, and at Grub Street Daily. A Chicago native and Massachusetts transplant, Nadine spends her free time exploring the outdoors with her husband and their dog. Follow her at http://www.facebook.com/NadineKenneyJohnstone or on Twitter @nadinekenney.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Novel Woes: Doubt, Anxiety, Fear of Commitment…and Getting Over It
Saturday, July 27th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
For some, writing a novel can be a pleasing journey of self-discovery and a time to play. For the rest of us, novel writing is a daily battle with one’s inner demons. Is the story you’re telling worthwhile? Will anyone care? How do you choose one path for your character and simply stick with it until the end? What if your mother hates it? These are just some of the concerns that you might have as you sit down with your work-in-progress. In this seminar, you will do a series of fun writing exercises aimed at transforming that inner editor into a useful literary asset. We will discuss strategies for outlining, doing research, and creating solid building blocks upon which to grow your narrative. You will also learn strategies for harnessing self-doubt into vibrant creative work. Students should bring to class their empathy, compassion, and a sense of humor.
- Instructor: Becky Tuch
- Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Slow Prose: Description, Setting and Texture in Fiction
Saturday, July 27th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
T.S. Eliot once wrote that “the great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognize how extraordinarily difficult this is ... each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language.” This one-day seminar will focus on the difficulties and the pleasures of setting, mood, character description, and the telling detail: the subtle elements which constitute the fabric of fiction. We’ll examine examples of rich descriptions of landscape, weather, city, and country such as one finds in Dickens, Hardy, and Melville; attend to house and home (Edith Wharton and the Brontë sisters); and explore wilderness, prairie, and faraway climes (Steinbeck, Cather, Maugham). We will also study the oil-painting portraiture of George Eliot and Annie Proulx, and the quicker and quirkier dabs of Flannery O’Connor and Tobias Wolff.
Exercises will ask students to engage the five senses in their evocations of place and people, to turn the ineffable into the concrete, and the solid into the evanescent. Students should bring two to five pages of writing that they would like to rework. In addition to a lecture and in-class reading, we will use class time to rewrite and enhance these excerpts, and to write about landscape, living spaces, and physical appearance in a way that will put our discoveries immediately to work and help you to locate your particular strengths in this arena. This seminar is designed for intermediate students who want to take the time to texture and fully realize the worlds they are building in their short stories or novels.
- Instructor: Nicole Miller
- Nicole Miller has published both fiction and non-fiction in the US and the UK, with two appearances in the May Anthology of Short Stories, edited by Jill Paton Walsh and Sebastian Faulks. After completing an M.Phil in English Literature at Oxford, she worked at The New Yorker and The Oxford English Dictionary, where she still serves as a scholarly reader for the department of etymology, with a specialty in British Dialects. At Emerson College, she held the Emerson Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing for three years, gaining her MFA in 2012. She was also awarded a PhD in Victorian Literature from University College, London in 2012 and publishes criticism on the works of Charles Dickens. She has taught in the Harvard College Writing Center since 2010 and edits faculty manuscripts for Harvard’s English Department. Her interests span the novel, short story, essay, and memoir form and the translation of Modern Greek poetry. Nicole is thrilled to share her love of words, literature, story-writing, and life-writing with the students of Grub Street this winter.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, July 30th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
Get Unstuck: Start Writing Again
Friday, August 2nd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You love to write, or perhaps it's torture ... Either way, you wish you were doing more of it. In this day-long class, we'll get you writing again through a series of tools, exercises, and discussions from famous creativity and writing experts such as Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down The Bones, and Julia Cameron, of The Artist's Way.
Bring a pen and paper. We will be writing by hand. You can also bring a laptop for our afternoon session, if you want. You'll be glad you took the plunge.
- Instructor: Jennifer Mattson
- Jennifer Mattson is a former producer for NPR's nationally syndicated program "The Connection" and worked as an editor for National Public Radio. She spent over six years as a producer for CNN, where she was responsible for CNN's daily live newscasts and producing CNN's international coverage. Jennifer came to CNN to work in the Washington bureau's political unit during the 1996 U.S. presidential election. She later moved to Atlanta, where she worked first as a writer and then as a newscast producer at CNN International. Prior to joining CNN, Jennifer worked as a reporter based in Budapest, Hungary covering Eastern Europe, where she reported on a number of regional stories for USA TODAY including a piece on George Soros and the Clinton-Yeltsin CSCE Summit. She has also reported, most recently, from Asia. Her work has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, USA TODAY, The Boston Globe, The Women's Review of Books, AsianCorrespondent.com, Tablettalk.com and CNN.com. She is the former Managing Editor of AsiaSociety.org. Follow her on Twitter at @jennifermattson
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Finish It: Revising the Essay
Friday, August 2nd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You’ve been through the workshop, received constructive feedback or maybe confusing feedback. If at this point you feel stuck, you’re not alone. Many writers don’t know where to go from here. In this workshop, we’ll dissect your essay (literally) and take a look at its parts. How is the balance between scene and exposition? Is the beginning clear and compelling? Are you taking the reader on a journey? Does your ending resonate with the reader? We’ll address these questions and still have time for micro-editing, for punching up individual sentences. When you sign up for class, you’ll be asked to email the instructor a copy of your essay. Also plan to bring a copy of that essay-in-progress to class—along with a pair of scissors.
- Instructor: Michelle Seaton
- Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
The Lyric Essay
Friday, August 2nd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Some of the most exciting and innovative nonfiction being written today falls into the category of the lyric essay. But just what is this strange new hybrid beast? How can you get started writing it-- and what can you do with your essays once they're finished? Throughout the day, we'll alternate looking at published examples of lyrics essays with doing fun writing exercises designed to get you started developing your own.
- Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
- Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and elsewhere, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. She teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Jumpstart Your Poetry
Friday, August 2nd, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
It's all too easy to fall into patterns in our writing. We find ourselves writing not only about the same subjects, but with the same style, using similar word choice, syntax and diction from poem to poem. In this workshop, we will do several free-writing exercises and explore how these free-writes can expand our choices in both new work and our efforts at revision. This is especially fun to do in a group, where the language each of us puts in the air helps fuel us all.
- Instructor: Ben Berman
Ben Berman has been teaching writing to teenagers and adults for many years, and currently teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. He has received numerous honors from the New England Poetry Club and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Somerville Arts Council. His book of poems, Strange Borderlands, is forthcoming soon.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Get Published: The 800 Word Essay
Saturday, August 3rd, 10:30am-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In this one-day course, we'll look at the art of writing the 800-word essay. From op-eds, to personal essays, to the New York Times' "Modern Love" column, the modern essay is the best way to get your stories out into mainstream media. This class will include discussion of the art of the idea, practical guidelines, when a piece is a situation and not a story, and how to arrive at the right idea for this medium. By the end of the workshop, you will come away with a workable draft for your ideal essay.
- Instructor: Jennifer Mattson
- Jennifer Mattson is a former producer for NPR's nationally syndicated program "The Connection" and worked as an editor for National Public Radio. She spent over six years as a producer for CNN, where she was responsible for CNN's daily live newscasts and producing CNN's international coverage. Jennifer came to CNN to work in the Washington bureau's political unit during the 1996 U.S. presidential election. She later moved to Atlanta, where she worked first as a writer and then as a newscast producer at CNN International. Prior to joining CNN, Jennifer worked as a reporter based in Budapest, Hungary covering Eastern Europe, where she reported on a number of regional stories for USA TODAY including a piece on George Soros and the Clinton-Yeltsin CSCE Summit. She has also reported, most recently, from Asia. Her work has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, USA TODAY, The Boston Globe, The Women's Review of Books, AsianCorrespondent.com, Tablettalk.com and CNN.com. She is the former Managing Editor of AsiaSociety.org. Follow her on Twitter at @jennifermattson
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Non-Linear Narratives and Interactive Storytelling
Saturday, August 3rd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In this one-day seminar, writers will explore basic screenplay structure and techniques for traditional screenwriting that can be adapted to create narratives for use in interactive game design, webisodes, and other digital storytelling vehicles.
We will begin by looking closely at classic linear narrative structure and traditional screenplay story and character arcs as the foundation of visual communication. We will view and deconstruct film clips, complete writing exercises that focus on character development and narrative structure as keys to effective story-world creation, and then consider how story structure can be used to create nonlinear narratives and truly interactive experiences for audiences. In addition to excerpts from films, we will look at examples of transmedia projects including webisodes and online games, and then assess how users interface with these story worlds.
- Instructor: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
- Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She studied writing and literature at Goddard College, has a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She has published poetry and articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches screenwriting at BU’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts and at Northeastern University. Her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, is based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name. Cheryl is a lecturer at Shakespeare conferences around the country. Her new ten-minute play, Ve-Ri-Tas, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and was the 2012 Judge for the WIFVNE Annual Screenwriting Competition. She also served as a panelist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2012 Play/Screenwriting Fellowship. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Parts of the Whole: Structure, Details, and the Big Picture
Saturday, August 3rd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
What do you remember about a favorite work of fiction -- a particular scene, a surprising detail, the unforgettable plot reversal? This workshop looks at fiction through both macro and micro lenses to understand what makes a satisfying story for the reader. By examining the component parts of your manuscript, we'll identify how thematic threads support and enhance the entire work. Our workshop will include discussions of Charles Baxter's notion of dramatic urgency, James Wood's ideas about symbolic or functional details, and Robert Boswell's theory of Narrative Spandrels. We'll do several in-class revision exercises to address related issues in your current manuscript. Bring opening pages, a climactic scene, a short section you can't seem to get right, and the "map" of your plot's trajectory.
- Instructor: Lara JK Wilson
Lara JK Wilson's short stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, and American Fiction, among others. Her prizewinning story in the 2007 Nelson Algren Awards was featured in the Chicago Tribune book section. Other stories have won the So to Speak Fiction Contest, first-runner-up in the Mark Twain Award contest, and nominations for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize. She was a fiction scholar at both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, and is currently working on a novel.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Finish Your Story: Short Story Camp
Monday-Thursday, 2:30-5:30pm from August 5th-8th at Grub Street headquarters.
You’ve been working on a story, but no matter what you do, you never seem to be able to find the end! Maybe you've written a few juicy paragraphs of a new piece but have no idea where to go next with your prose. Or perhaps you've got a great idea for a story but aren't sure how to begin the drafting process. Do any of the above sound familiar? If so, then during this week of intense instruction, we will walk you through the steps you need to take in order to complete the story you'd like to tell. Through in-class exercises, readings, one-on-one appointments with your instructor, and plenty of studio time in which to write, you’ll figure out where you are with your story and where you need to go to reach a finished product. We’ll look at common issues that can drag a draft down, discuss and practice basic and advanced writing and revision techniques, and examine drafts from pros. Part inspiration, part revision, and part generation, one thing's for sure: regardless of where you are in your short-story writing process, you will finish a draft of your tale during this weeklong workshop.
- Instructor: KL Pereira
- KL Pereira is a teaching artist who lives mostly in her head; she's interested in the creaky, creepy underbelly of life and whatever lies beyond. She holds a BA in Literature and Languages from Bard College, an MA in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Mythic Deliruim, Jabberwocky, The Medulla Review, Bitch Magazine, Clamor Magazine, and other fine magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, and journals. You can read her column: Slaying Genre: A Monthly Column on Horror, Noir, Fantasy, and the Other Red-Headed Step-Children of the Literary World here. Pereira publishes erotic horror under a different name and is currently working on a collection of flash fiction fairy tales, a mytho-punk noir, and some zombie apocalyptica. For more information, visit www.darknesslovescompany.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $185.00 register as a non-member $205.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Introduction to Food Writing
Monday-Thursday, 10:30am-1:30pm from August 5th-8th at Grub Street headquarters.
“Tell me what you eat,” said Brillat-Savarin, “and I will tell you what you are.” In recent years an increasing number of writers having been doing just that, turning to food writing to tell the stories of their lives. From the success of lush chef memoirs like Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter; memoir-cookbook hybrids from beloved food bloggers like Luisa from The Wednesday Chef (My Berlin Kitchen), Molly from Orangette (A Homemade Life), and countless others; and food travelogues, food writing has never been quite this hot—or quite so accessible to writers. In this week-long class we’ll use a mix of readings and prompts to explore how to get started in food writing, with an emphasis on blogging, food-based personal essays, and food memoir. We’ll discuss the particular craft demands of this content—how *do* you find yet another word for delicious?—as well as where to publish it. Come ready to read and ready to write!
- Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
- Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and elsewhere, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. She teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $185.00 register as a non-member $205.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Creative Writing Weeklong Camp for Teens: Section B
Monday-Friday, 10:30am-3:30pm from August 5th-9th at Grub Street headquarters.
We'll have prompts, writing time, outdoor activities to get our sensory descriptions flowing, and workshop. By the end of the week, you'll have your toolbox full of ideas, beginnings, and some drafts to keep you going all fall. We will discuss the submission process/publication opportunities for teens, and end the week with a reading. Limited to students aged 13-18.SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES: Grub Street is happy to be able to offer a limited number of full scholarships for this course. You are eligible for one of these scholarships if you are in a household that receives benefits from Massachusetts SNAP or Massachusetts TANF, if you are a foster child, and/or if your household’s gross income is within the free limits on the Federal Income Guidelines.
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To apply for a scholarship, please complete and submit this online form describing why you want to take this class and stating that you meet the requirements above. The deadline to apply is 12:00pm on Friday, July 19th.
- Instructor: Nadine Kenney Johnstone
- Nadine Kenney Johnstone teaches at Framingham State University, Dean College, and Grub Street Inc. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and recently completed her novel, DISTANCE. Currently, she is at work on a memoir about facing death while on her quest to create life through IVF. Nadine has been published in Pank, The Drum, Chicago magazine, and Hair Trigger, among other publications. She has worked in all aspects of writing: as a literary magazine editor, reporter, fiction contest judge, story performer, and creative writing instructor. Find her writing advice at Beyond The Margins, The Review Review, and at Grub Street Daily. A Chicago native and Massachusetts transplant, Nadine spends her free time exploring the outdoors with her husband and their dog. Follow her at http://www.facebook.com/NadineKenneyJohnstone or on Twitter @nadinekenney.
There are 6 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $315.00 register as a non-member $340.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, August 6th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
The Hero of a Thousand Stories: Unlocking the Power of Myth for Your Story Structure
Friday, August 9th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces has influenced writers and filmmakers for decades. The book accesses centuries of myth and culture to reveal that all stories follow a similar pattern. By understanding that pattern, the writer can deeply connect with their audience. “The Monomyth” has been used by creators such as George Lucas, J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, and Philip Pullman and has influenced films as diverse as The Matrix and Darren Aranofsky’s Black Swan. By the end of this seminar, writers will have a better understanding of the seventeen stages of the Monomyth and be able to use these archetypical scenes to add power and meaning to their work. We will discuss the various stages of the Monomyth while using examples from novels and films to illustrate each stage. During the question-and-answer segment, students may share their work in order to see how the Monomyth fits their writing. This seminar is perfect for novelists, screenwriters, and short story writers interested in using the power of myth to enhance their writing. This class is a great compliment to Screenwriting I or II and Novel in Progress.
- Instructor: Mark Fogarty
- Mark Fogarty is the president and Co-founder of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC), a non-profit created to help local filmmakers find resources in the Ocean State. The RIFC has more than 1,900 members and has been involved in the production of dozens of films. For more information, visit www.rifcfilms.com. Mark started Exile Movies in 2003 and has worked as a director of photography and editor on feature-length and short films. Mark recently directed the feature-length epic, smalltown, from his screenplay. You can find out more about the film at www.smalltownmovie.com. As an actor, Mark has been in dozens of films and uses his knowledge of acting to inform his writing. Mark graduated from Emerson College with a degree in filmmaking, and works as a freelance editor and writer.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
The Confident Writer
Friday, August 9th, 2:30-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
If you had more faith in your writing, what would you do? Submit more work to magazines? Finish that draft of your novel? Share your nonfiction in public? Receive critiques with delight? In a world where writers are often asked, "What novels have you published?" it can be difficult to build the confidence we need to progress. In this one-night seminar, we'll view our writing through an honest and encouraging lens, learning the art of positive self-talk and interpretation, while also finding ways to celebrate and inspire. Led by a writing teacher and psychology grad who has specialized in self-esteem, we'll practice tried and tested techniques including self-talk, community building, the praise sandwich, achievable goal-setting, arts activism, and alternative methods of showcasing our work. If possible, please come with two 500 word samples of your writing or excerpts from a longer piece, which you would be willing to share.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Tackling Novel Revision: Techniques and Tips
Friday, August 9th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Your novel’s first draft is done; now to revise. But how to create order from chaos? How to keep the big picture in mind while focusing on details? How to keep track of story elements and deepen themes? For students with a completed novel draft, this workshop offers helpful techniques and practical approaches to tackling revision in order to ready your work for submission. Bring along your own methods to share, and bring your novel draft to class on your laptop or as a hard copy, along with writing implements, highlighters, sticky notes, and paper. Be prepared to dive into revision.
- Instructor: Holly Thompson
- Holly Thompson (www.hatbooks.com) is the author of two young adult novels in verse: The Language Inside and Orchards, winner of the APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, both published by Delacorte/Random House. She is also author of the adult novel Ash and the picture book The Wakame Gatherers. Raised in Massachusetts but a longtime resident of Japan, she recently edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories. A graduate of the N.Y.U. Creative Writing Program, she writes poetry and fiction for children, teens and adults, serves as regional advisor for the Japan chapter of SCBWI, and teaches creative writing and literature at Yokohama City University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Making Stuff Up: Creative Research Methods
Friday, August 9th, 2:30-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
What do creative writers mean by research and development? How do you plan and prepare to write? How do you develop your own unique writing practice? This 3-hour seminar will introduce you to four ways of thinking about a new project -- question, study, observe, and imagine -- and give you concrete tools and writing exercises to help you master the blank page. Designed for playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, and short fiction writers.
- Instructor: Nina Louise Morrison
- Nina Louise Morrison is a playwright, actor, director and dramaturg. Her plays include Mad Props, House Rules, The Red Plague, Constitution and Three Patriotic Acts. She is a Richard Rodgers Fellow, a Shubert Foundation grantee, and an affiliated artist with Free Hands Theatre Company, Boston Bohemia, Playwrights Commons' Freedom Art Retreat and Company One’s Playground. Before moving to Boston, Nina was the Senior Program Associate at the Philadelphia Theater Initiative. Training: MFA Columbia University, the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, the New Actors Workshop, and Oberlin College. More info at ninalouisemorrison.wordpress.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Adaptation for Screenwriters
Friday, August 9th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In Hollywood today, adaptations are hot properties. Films based on books, comics, television shows, historical events, video games, and theme-park rides are among the highest-grossing box office successes and dominate the list of Oscar-nominated projects. One reason for their popularity is that bestselling works in other mediums are known quantities, minimizing risk for the studios and producers by bringing built-in audiences to theaters. As writers, we are poised to take advantage of this trend.
In this class, we will explore strategies for adapting stories from other mediums, including your own novels or short stories, for the screen. We will view clips from several successful adaptations, and also read or view excerpts from the source materials, to understand the process of creating stories for the screen. We will look specifically at the requirements for visual storytelling. We will also discuss the importance of obtaining rights to source materials before beginning a screenplay adaptation.
Students should bring an idea for an adaptation to class for discussion purposes. This seminar will provide an introduction to the process of adaptation for screenwriters and is open to writers in all genres who have completed an introductory screenwriting course. Experienced and beginning screenwriters will learn how to expand the market potential of their work and how to develop story ideas into effective screenplays. Suggested text for this course is Make Your Story a Movie, by John Robert Marlow.
- Instructor: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
- Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She studied writing and literature at Goddard College, has a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She has published poetry and articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches screenwriting at BU’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts and at Northeastern University. Her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, is based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name. Cheryl is a lecturer at Shakespeare conferences around the country. Her new ten-minute play, Ve-Ri-Tas, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and was the 2012 Judge for the WIFVNE Annual Screenwriting Competition. She also served as a panelist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2012 Play/Screenwriting Fellowship. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Intro to Magazine Writing
Friday, August 9th, 2:30pm-5:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Have you always wanted to write for magazines, but don’t know where to start? In this one-night seminar, we’ll cover how to come up with ideas for great magazine articles, what types of stories magazines are looking for, how to pitch your ideas to editors, and how to power through rejection. By the end of the night, you’ll have starts on three solid pitches and ideas on what magazines you might be able to sell them to. Students should bring a copy of at least one magazine they want to write for to class with them.
- Instructor: Calvin Hennick
- Calvin Hennick’s nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, Runner’s World, Eating Well, Budget Travel, and Teacher magazine, among other publications. He has taught writing at UMass – Boston and in New York City’s public schools.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book
Saturday, August 10th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Books often start with a simple yearning to explore new territory: fascinating topics, characters who won’t leave you alone, a good story. But manuscripts get unwieldy, fast. Nine out of ten writers never finish their manuscripts because most first-time book writers get lost without good structure and planning. Mary Carroll Moore, award-winning author of 13 books in three genres and a PEN/Faulkner nominee, will guide you through a simple and successful book-writing process that can take your book from idea to publication, a process using a three-act structure that eases organization and makes a manuscript vivid and engaging to readers. Find out why Aristotle believed that three acts formed a perfect structure for all stories, why humans lean toward beginning, middle, and end, and why we crave the emotional catharsis of that format in literature too. For all levels of writers working on nonfiction, memoir, or novels, at any stage from seed idea to draft. Learn why strong structuring is the key to selling a book in today's competitive publishing industry.
- Instructor: Mary Carroll Moore
- Mary Carroll Moore’s twelve published books include the PEN/Faulkner nominated novel Qualities of Light (Bella Books); How to Master Change in Your Life: Sixty-seven Ways to Handle Life’s Toughest Moments (Eckankar Books); Cholesterol Cures (Rodale Press), and the award-winning Healthy Cooking (Ortho Publications). Your Book Starts Here: Create, Craft, and Sell Your First Novel, Memoir, or Nonfiction Book, based on her How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book writing workshops, will be released in fall 2010. A former nationally syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, over 300 of Mary’s essays, short stories, articles, and poetry have appeared in literary journals, magazines, and newspapers around the U.S. and have won awards with the McKnight Awards for Creative Prose, Glimmer Train Press, the Loft Mentor Series, and other writing competitions. She teaches creative writing in New York, Boston, New Hampshire, and Minnesota and writes a weekly blog for book writers at http://howtoplanwriteanddevelopabook.blogspot.com.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Literary Magazines: The Essentials of Submission
Saturday, August 10th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Publishing in literary magazines is an important step in building your career as a writer. Yet, with over 1,000 journals on the market, how does a writer know where to submit work? Is it better to aim for prestigious journals and hope to catch the eye of literary agents? Or is it better to submit to journals with high acceptance rates? What are the advantages of publishing online? What should go in the cover letter? In this seminar, we will answer these questions and more, while discussing effective strategies for getting your work out into the world. Students will spend time in class exploring literary magazines and finding journals appropriate for their own writing. With the help of the instructor, students will also write a cover letter and an author bio. This workshop is open to writers who are brand new to publishing as well as those in need of more effective submission strategies.
- Instructor: Becky Tuch
- Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
How to Write a Lot
Monday-Thursday, 10:30am-1:30pm from August 12th-15th at Grub Street headquarters.
Why do some writers seem to write effortlessly, turning out page after page, chapter after chapter, and book after book, while so many others struggle over every word? The difference often comes down to how one relates to one’s work. If you feel a lot of fear and ambivalence when you write, or set too-high expectations for productivity or quality, then writing will probably be hard. But if you can avoid those traps, it becomes easier and even a joy. Through workshops and exercises, Hillary Rettig (The 7 Secrets of the Prolific) will teach you how to do just that. We’ll begin by identifying the forces that create procrastination and blocks, including our own fears, damaging societal messages, and the pernicious habits of perfectionism and negativity. Then we’ll work on solutions, including “compassionate objectivity,” writing without hesitation, writing through “the wall,” and using timers and other tools. Please note that this is primarily a discussion class. There will be some in-class writing assignments, but most course writing will happen outside of class with the student reporting in each week on their writing progress, process, and experience.
- Instructor: Hillary Rettig
Hillary Rettig is an author, workshop leader and coach who specializes in helping people overcome procrastination and use their time better. Her latest book is The Seven Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism and Writer's Block (Infinite Art, 2011). Of her prior book, The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way (Lantern Books, 2006), the leading liberal blog, DailyKos.com, said, "If I had but one book to spend hard-earned cash on this year, The Lifelong Activist would be it, hands down." Hillary is a Bronx native who currently enjoys living in East Boston. She has published numerous nonfiction articles, and also short fiction. Some of the acclaimed science fiction writers she has studied with are Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delaney and the late Octavia Butler. Hillary is also a kidney donor, foster parent, lover of dogs and other animals, and vegan. Download free ebooks and other information on productivity and related fields at www.hillaryrettig.com, and Hillary welcomes your emails at hillaryrettig@yahoo.com.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $185.00 register as a non-member $205.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Creative Writing Weeklong Camp for Teens: Section A
Monday-Friday, 10:30am-3:30pm from August 12th-16th at Grub Street headquarters.
We'll have prompts, writing time, outdoor activities to get our sensory descriptions flowing, and workshop. By the end of the week, you'll have your toolbox full of ideas, beginnings, and some drafts to keep you going all fall. We will discuss the submission process/publication opportunities for teens, and end the week with a reading. Limited to students aged 13-18.SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES: Grub Street is happy to be able to offer a limited number of full scholarships for this course. You are eligible for one of these scholarships if you are in a household that receives benefits from Massachusetts SNAP or Massachusetts TANF, if you are a foster child, and/or if your household’s gross income is within the free limits on the Federal Income Guidelines.
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To apply for a scholarship, please complete and submit this online form describing why you want to take this class and stating that you meet the requirements above. The deadline to apply is 12:00pm on Friday, July 19th.
- Instructor: Drew Jameson
Drew Balfour Jameson has been telling stories all his life. He graduated from Reed College with a degree in English, writing a series of inter-connected short stories as his senior thesis. In 2003 he won the fiction contest of the IdeaFestival at the University of Kentucky. His short story “Drown” appeared in the April 2011 installment of The Drum. Currently he teaches 9th grade English Language Arts in Dorchester, Massachusetts and plans to complete his M.Ed at the University of Massachusetts in late 2012. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts with his wife, Minna.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.
Advanced Screenwriting Intensive
Monday-Thursday, 2:30-5:30pm from August 12th-15th at Grub Street headquarters.
A screenplay is not ready to submit to contests, agents, or producers until it has gone through a series of revisions, each focusing on different aspects of the form and bringing the various components of character, dialogue, action, and story arc to their peak performance levels.
In this four-day intensive class, screenwriters who have completed a first draft of a screenplay, or those working on a second or third draft, will be introduced to a variety of strategies and techniques for revising their work and completing subsequent drafts. We will do in-class exercises that focus on adding subtext and realism to dialogue; replacing passive verbs with action verbs and finding precise nouns to create visual description; evaluating concept, structure, and character; reviewing individual scenes; refining formatting by adding white space, eliminating camera directions, and creating secondary scene headings; and working backward to test for cause-and-effect relationships between scenes. Strategies for adapting material from other sources, creating A-list characters, and working with non-linear narratives will also be discussed.
In addition to active revision work in class, each day will include intensive workshopping of students’ screenplay pages, including genre-specific, constructive feedback from peers and the instructor.
Students should send a completed screenplay to the instructor in advance, and bring 10-15 pages of the screenplay to class to share and use for writing exercises each day. At the conclusion of the course, students will receive detailed, strategic feedback from the instructor on the pages and the screenplay concepts presented, as well as suggestions for further development.
This seminar is designed to provide practical revision tools for screenwriters who have recently completed the first draft of a screenplay, as well as techniques for experienced screenwriters looking for fresh ways to approach the process of editing and rewriting. The suggested text for this seminar is Pilar Alessandra’s The Coffee Break Screenwriter.
- Instructor: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
- Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She studied writing and literature at Goddard College, has a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She has published poetry and articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches screenwriting at BU’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts and at Northeastern University. Her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, is based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name. Cheryl is a lecturer at Shakespeare conferences around the country. Her new ten-minute play, Ve-Ri-Tas, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and was the 2012 Judge for the WIFVNE Annual Screenwriting Competition. She also served as a panelist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2012 Play/Screenwriting Fellowship. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts.
There are 10 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $185.00 register as a non-member $205.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
"Boosts" for Your Writing Project or Career
Tuesday, August 13th, 1:30-4:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In most workshops, instructors tend to focus on constructive criticism rather than constructive praise. Instructors do this mostly in the interest of time, and because constructive criticism is often easier to illustrate with examples or to compare with texts that are "working better." But these 1-on-1 Boost consultations work in a different way, focusing instead on what you are doing well. Choose from a 30-minute boost for $37.50 or a 60-minute boost for $75. You don't need to email any work in advance. All pages are looked at within the Boost session itself. If you're unable to meet in person, Boosts are available via a phone call or Skype session as well.To proceed, fill out the following form and Grub Street will follow up with you about payment and scheduling.
30-Minute Short Story/Nonfiction Boost (For a Short Piece of up to 3000 words)
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
In this consultation, the instructor will start by reading and reviewing one of your stories (or part of a story) that has already been workshopped and spend time discussing the strengths of the piece and, more importantly, why they are strengths. Not only will this bring you confidence, but it will also help you understand your strengths and how you might use them to best effect. If appropriate, you will also receive personally tailored tasks that seek to bring you confidence in areas where you need it. Short Fiction or Non-Fiction Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 60-Minute Book-Length Boost (For an Ongoing Novel, Novella or Book-Length Manuscript)
In this consultation, the instructor will look at an overview or outline of your project, along with an excerpt/excerpts from your manuscript in progress. The focus will be on your strengths so far and why they are strengths. Your instructor will also examine how you might best make use your talents in the rest of your project. Time will be taken to study any feedback that you received in class and put it to use in positive ways. Book-Length Boosts can also involve mini-tasks that will help you to work on your skills in a precise way, with the promise of motivational feedback. These Boosts can be booked one at a time, or as a string of ongoing consultations. 30- or 60-Minute Writing Career Boost
All writers deal with rejection. In fact, it is part and parcel of a successful writing career. But when it comes to getting published, it is all too easy to grind to a halt in the face of ongoing rejection slips. Yet submission is how we move forward, and as Pamela Painter advises, it can help to “keep hope in the mail.” In this Boost, you will discuss your career and/or aspirations with an instructor who has been an editor at a literary magazine and is a Senior Editor at an indie press. Not only will you discuss ways of dealing with ongoing rejection while continuing to write more rather than less, but you will also consider alternative ways of showcasing your work and receiving meaningful feedback as you move forward. This Boost can also involve a review of your cover letter and advice on researching markets/venues for your work.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
Telling Stories in Verse: An Intro to Narrative Poetry and Verse Novels
Friday, August 16th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
This intensive introduces the craft of narrative poetry and verse novels. First we’ll consider narrative poetry—poems that tell a story. We’ll look at structural devices, tension-building techniques, and passage of time in sample narrative poems. Next we’ll consider verse novels—the what, the why, and the how—and examine the use of poetry tools in contemporary novel-length narrative verse. Bring writing implements or a laptop/iPad. Participants will draft a narrative poem or a scene in verse for sharing during the intensive.
- Instructor: Holly Thompson
- Holly Thompson (www.hatbooks.com) is the author of two young adult novels in verse: The Language Inside and Orchards, winner of the APALA Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, both published by Delacorte/Random House. She is also author of the adult novel Ash and the picture book The Wakame Gatherers. Raised in Massachusetts but a longtime resident of Japan, she recently edited Tomo: Friendship Through Fiction—An Anthology of Japan Teen Stories. A graduate of the N.Y.U. Creative Writing Program, she writes poetry and fiction for children, teens and adults, serves as regional advisor for the Japan chapter of SCBWI, and teaches creative writing and literature at Yokohama City University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Going Through Your Parents’ Drawers: Transforming Your Family into Fiction
Friday, August 16th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Our families are often a great source for fictional ideas. In this class, we’ll draw on our personal family memories as well our family “archives"—photographs, diaries, childhood art, etc.—to feed our creative inspiration. Students will come to class with examples from their “archives" and use these in writing exercises designed to generate ideas. If appropriate, they will take this archival research to the next level, putting their families in context by conducting online research into the time period various members came of age. By the end of the workshop, students will have developed a plan for interviewing family members and finding public archives containing period newspapers, maps, and other ephemera so that we can sort this information into strands of narrative that can be used in either fiction or memoir.
- Instructor: Steven Lee Beeber
- Steven Lee Beeber is the author of The Heebie-jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press), the editor of AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press), and the associate editor of the literary journal Conduit. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Fiction, Bridge, Memorious, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and teaches creative writing and creative nonfiction at Lesley University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Short Essay, Big Topic: Tackling Major Themes in 1000 Words or Less
Saturday, August 17th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Nowadays, magazine editors want narrative non-fiction essays, and they want them short. So, how do you tackle life’s major themes like love and loss in less than 1000 words? The easiest way to do so is by using a "container". What’s that you ask? Learn more about it in this Grub post, and if it sounds enticing, explore the technique fully in this seminar. We’ll spend the first half of class reading and discussing published container essays. Then, you’ll spend the rest of the time developing and writing your own essay. You’ll leave with a plan for finishing and submitting your work.
- Instructor: Nadine Kenney Johnstone
- Nadine Kenney Johnstone teaches at Framingham State University, Dean College, and Grub Street Inc. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and recently completed her novel, DISTANCE. Currently, she is at work on a memoir about facing death while on her quest to create life through IVF. Nadine has been published in Pank, The Drum, Chicago magazine, and Hair Trigger, among other publications. She has worked in all aspects of writing: as a literary magazine editor, reporter, fiction contest judge, story performer, and creative writing instructor. Find her writing advice at Beyond The Margins, The Review Review, and at Grub Street Daily. A Chicago native and Massachusetts transplant, Nadine spends her free time exploring the outdoors with her husband and their dog. Follow her at http://www.facebook.com/NadineKenneyJohnstone or on Twitter @nadinekenney.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Writing Dialogue
Saturday, August 17th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Writing dialogue can be one of the most difficult and significant tasks a writer faces. The techniques a writer learns along the way may prepare them for every kind of prose, but when faced with dialogue, the writer is lost. How do you create dialogue that feels and sounds real, yet also works to communicate your story? This workshop is designed for playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, and short fiction writers interested in writing crisp, realistic-sounding dialogue. We will study several great scenes from films, plays, and fiction to break down what makes the dialogue so effective.
Topics explored will include creating subtext, hiding exposition, working with slang, and how to get the characters in your head speaking with a voice of their own. You will learn how to break down a scene into beats and intentions, and approach the scene as an actor would. Most importantly, during the workshop portion, we will act out your dialogue so you may hear it the way dialogue is meant to be heard -- out loud. The first half of the class will be spent discussing techniques for creating effective dialogue. During the second session, students will use what they have learned to write a dialogue scene and receive peer and instructor feedback.
- Instructor: Mark Fogarty
- Mark Fogarty is the president and Co-founder of the Rhode Island Film Collaborative (RIFC), a non-profit created to help local filmmakers find resources in the Ocean State. The RIFC has more than 1,900 members and has been involved in the production of dozens of films. For more information, visit www.rifcfilms.com. Mark started Exile Movies in 2003 and has worked as a director of photography and editor on feature-length and short films. Mark recently directed the feature-length epic, smalltown, from his screenplay. You can find out more about the film at www.smalltownmovie.com. As an actor, Mark has been in dozens of films and uses his knowledge of acting to inform his writing. Mark graduated from Emerson College with a degree in filmmaking, and works as a freelance editor and writer.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
Your First 5 Pages
Saturday, August 17th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
It’s common knowledge that rejection rates in this industry are up around 98 percent, and you have likely felt this bitter sting on more than one occasion, but do you reallyknow why? Do you suspect that even when agents request your material, they sometimes don’t read after the first page? You may be right. Most decisions are made within the first five pages, and not just with agents; reviews, editors, and even readers make quick judgments in the face of so many choices.
Join an eye-opening session with literary agent Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank (formerly of Boston, now back in NY) and dig into the murky world of rejection, and the impact, good or bad, of your first pages. Learn what some standard rejection phrasing means (agent-speak), why decisions are too-often made on the first page, find out if you are guilty of one or more of the top twenty reasons for rejection, know when to listen to advice and when to chalk things up to subjective difference, and through an intense critiquing session, learn how make your first five pages work for you.
Send by email (to lauren@grubstreet.org) a one-page synopsis or query letter, and your first five pages, no later than 12:00pm on Monday, August 12th. For class, please also bring three other random pages out of the first 25, and be prepared to have your work critiqued with other members of the class. Also, feel free to bring in a sampling of some rejection phrasing that has had you perplexed or particularly frustrated. All students will receive handouts and a written critique of their first pages.
- Instructor: Sorche Fairbank
- Since establishing Fairbank Literary Representation in 2002, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank has had the pleasure of working with a dynamic and varied list, representing best-selling authors, Edgar recipients, award-winning journalists, and of course one of her favorite kinds of client -- the first-time author. Her tastes in novels tend toward literary fiction, international voices and women's voices, and the mystery/suspense genre. On the nonfiction side, she is most likely to take on books that tackle current events and societal issues with a narrative treatment. She has a strong interest in women's voices and class and race issues, quality lifestyle books (food, wine, and home design), sports, memoir, humor, and pop culture. And to date, she has signed on three terrific clients through Grub Street, with more certain to follow.
Subjects and genres not of interest by Sorche and Fairbank Literary include: sci-fi and fantasy, children's and YA, self-help, romance, sports fiction, and generally anything that opens with a dream scene and/or exhaustive descriptions of weather. Unless, of course, it's really really really good.
Notable authors and books represented by Fairbank Literary include: O. Henry Prize winner Charlotte Forbes; Pulitzer nominee and LA Times Cairo Bureau Chief Jeffrey Fleishman; Matthew Frederick and his best-selling 101 Things I Learned In Architecture School; Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development and author of Solar Revolution; Darci Klein's To Full Term, A Mother's Triumph Over Miscarriage; Jonathan McCullough's A Tale Of Two Subs: An Untold Story Of World War II, Two Sister Ships, And Extraordinary Heroism; the estate of Robin Moore (The French Connection, The Green Berets, etc.); Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker); syndicated cartoonist Man Martin (Days of the Endless Corvette); Edgar-winning mystery writer and host of Anatomy Of A Mystery, Rex Burns; and Robert McKinnon, founder of Yellow Brick Road and editor of the forthcoming Legacy: Today's Leaders on Tomorrow's World, a collection of essays by such luminaries as Al Gore, Paul Simon, Mia Hamm, Richard Louv, and others.
Updated information on Sorche Fairbank and Fairbank Literary, their clients, and recent deals can be found at www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/SorcheFairbank
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Novel Intensive: Section B
Monday-Friday, 2:30-5:30pm from August 19th-23rd at Grub Street headquarters.
Do you have a great idea for a novel but don’t know where to start? Or maybe you’re well on your way, but lately your manuscript has become a flabby mass of pages? Either way, this course will whip that novel into shape. Over the course of five days, we will focus on the elements of craft necessary to sustain a book-length narrative, from structure to scene, character arcs to subplots. We will read excerpts from a range of published novels, pick them apart as writers, and apply these lessons to our own projects. The course will include substantial in-class writing time and an optional homework assignment every evening and will culminate in a one-on-one meeting with the instructor to discuss your opening chapter and outline. Writing a novel is a long, unpredictable journey, but you will end this course with a new set of tools to navigate your way.
- Instructor: Steven Lee Beeber
- Steven Lee Beeber is the author of The Heebie-jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press), the editor of AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press), and the associate editor of the literary journal Conduit. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Fiction, Bridge, Memorious, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and teaches creative writing and creative nonfiction at Lesley University.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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The Seven-Poem Poetry Intensive
Monday-Thursday, 10:30am-1:30pm from August 19th-22nd at Grub Street headquarters.
In this one-week intensive workshop, you will produce new written work as well as revise existing drafts of poems. Students will submit a packet of five poems before the start of the course to be workshopped by the group and to receive extensive written comments from the instructor. Students will also engage in in-class free-writing exercises and be expected to write two new poems based on a variety of prompts during the week for instructor feedback. At the end of the week, students will have received critical attention on seven poems. This course is open to all levels of poets, and is ideally suited to those who want to expand their growing portfolio. Students should have some workshop experience and be comfortable writing and analyzing poetry. This is an important course for a serious reader and writer of poetry, one that will give you a deeper mastery, pleasure, and knowledge of poetry/poetics.
- Instructor: Megan Fernandes
Megan Fernandes is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She is the poetry editor of the anthology Strangers in Paris (Tightrope Books) and is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Organ Speech (Corrupt Press) and Some Citrus Makes me Blue (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Memorious, Guernica, RATTLE, Redivider, Upstairs at Duroc, the California Journal of Poetics, and Media Fields: Science and Scale. Fernandes is the recent recipient of the "Writers Room of Boston" fellowship in poetry, the Dzanc Books Luso-Descent Writers Award, the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, and was commended by Don Paterson in the 2012 Edwin Morgan International Poetry Contest. She teaches poetry and drama at Boston University and Lesley University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Creative Writing Weeklong Camp for Teens: Section C
Monday-Friday, 10:30am-3:30pm from August 19th-23rd at Grub Street headquarters.
We'll have prompts, writing time, outdoor activities to get our sensory descriptions flowing, and workshop. By the end of the week, you'll have your toolbox full of ideas, beginnings, and some drafts to keep you going all fall. We will discuss the submission process/publication opportunities for teens, and end the week with a reading. Limited to students aged 13-18.SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES: Grub Street is happy to be able to offer a limited number of full scholarships for this course. You are eligible for one of these scholarships if you are in a household that receives benefits from Massachusetts SNAP or Massachusetts TANF, if you are a foster child, and/or if your household’s gross income is within the free limits on the Federal Income Guidelines.
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To apply for a scholarship, please complete and submit this online form describing why you want to take this class and stating that you meet the requirements above. The deadline to apply is 12:00pm on Friday, July 19th.
- Instructor: KL Pereira
- KL Pereira is a teaching artist who lives mostly in her head; she's interested in the creaky, creepy underbelly of life and whatever lies beyond. She holds a BA in Literature and Languages from Bard College, an MA in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Mythic Deliruim, Jabberwocky, The Medulla Review, Bitch Magazine, Clamor Magazine, and other fine magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, and journals. You can read her column: Slaying Genre: A Monthly Column on Horror, Noir, Fantasy, and the Other Red-Headed Step-Children of the Literary World here. Pereira publishes erotic horror under a different name and is currently working on a collection of flash fiction fairy tales, a mytho-punk noir, and some zombie apocalyptica. For more information, visit www.darknesslovescompany.com.
There are 9 seats remaining in this class.
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Freelance Writing Essentials
Friday, August 23rd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
You want to write feature stories for glossies like National Geographic Traveler or Glamour or for newspapers like the Boston Globe or Cambridge Tab; essays for Salon.com
- Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
- A journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com and Christian Science Monitor, and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today Washington Post and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, former bicycling culture columnist for the Boston Globe, and is the film columnist for Art New England. He is a core contributor to the blog "GeekDad" at wired.com and his blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com. He also writes for blogs at Boston.com's Globetrotting; Tor.com; ForcesofGeek.com, and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esme Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, Exquisite Corpse and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, Media Bistro and, for younger students, in schools and community centers. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Grub Street. Follow Ethan’s adventures at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Short Essays for Print and Radio
Friday, August 23rd, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
This workshop is designed for students who want to develop new work and explore the forms of memoir vignettes and short personal essays for the purpose of storytelling through print or radio and spoken-word performance. We will examine the structure of effective memoirs and essays in the short form (under 750 words), generate drafts based on a variety of writing prompts, and hone those drafts based on class feedback and personal reflection.
- Instructor: Judah Leblang
Judah Leblang is a Boston-based writer, teacher and storyteller. His radio essays have appeared on 160 NPR and ABC-network stations around the US, and on several college and community radio stations. His column, "Life in the Slow Lane," appears regularly in Bay Windows, a Boston-area newspaper. His memoir, "Finding My Place: One Man's Journey from Cleveland to Boston and Beyond," was published in December 2009.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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When Buffy Gets Spike: Fiction Inspired by Joss Whedon
Saturday, August 24th, 10:30am-1:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
If you’re a fan of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and/or Whedon’s other popular series) you’ll know how deeply he and his team have affected our culture, powerfully capturing the popular imagination with tales of heroism, erotic attraction, found family, and being ourselves. In this one-night seminar, we will use the TV programs and scripts of Joss Whedon to power originally imaginative scenes and/or stories. Together, we will explore and write scenes/short shorts that have a strong focus on characterization, dialogue, and group dynamic. Genre is less important here than a wish to explore connection and courage in a high-stakes world—but those of you with a love of fantasy are encouraged to draw on the genre, of course. You should expect to leave with at least one scene along with ideas for a longer piece.
- Instructor: Sue Williams
- Sue Williams is published in over thirty books and magazines, including Narrative, Night Train, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Smokelong Quarterly, Salamander, Gargoyle, and Hint Fiction: a Norton Anthology. She has garnered several literary awards, including first place in the 2009 Carolyn A. Clark Flash Fiction Prize and the Glimmer Train Best Start Award. She has worked as an Assistant Editor at Narrative Magazine and is a writing instructor at Grub Street in Boston. Sue can be found online at www.suewilliams.co.uk.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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3 Hours, 3 Essays
Thursday, August 29th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In a hurry to write some wonderful, surprising nonfiction? This course is for you. We’ll look at published short essays and use them as inspiration to write beginnings of our own over the course of a single night. You’ll also share your essays with the instructor and in small groups to get feedback that will help you decide where to take your essays next. Expect to leave class with three great essay starts, a plan for finishing them, and a reenergized feeling about your writing.
- Instructor: Calvin Hennick
- Calvin Hennick’s nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, Runner’s World, Eating Well, Budget Travel, and Teacher magazine, among other publications. He has taught writing at UMass – Boston and in New York City’s public schools.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Provoking Thought: Writing a Nonfiction Book of Ideas
Thursday, August 29th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Nonfiction books about science, medicine, parenting, psychology, architecture, culture, technology, and politics are all books of ideas and require a different approach than selling fiction or narrative nonfiction. Fortunately, there's a big market for these books. In this seminar, you'll learn everything you need to know to market your book of ideas to an agent or publisher. We'll pay special attention to the single most important factor in selling your book: the framing. You'll learn about the state of the nonfiction publishing industry, what editors are looking for, what readers are looking for, how to find the best agent for your project, how to craft a winning proposal, and how to come up with the most effective framing for your book. We'll analyze successful and failed books of ideas published in the past few years (especially science books), giving special attention to the different styles of Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers) and Steven Pinker (author of Blank Slate). In addition, we'll discuss how ebooks are changing the industry and opening new opportunities for unpublished nonfiction authors. The class will consist of lecture and highly interactive discussion with plenty of opportunities to ask questions during and after class. I'd be happy to look over student query letters or proposals after class or offline.
- Instructor: Ogi Ogas
- Dr. Ogi Ogas received his PhD in computational neuroscience from Boston University and was a Department of Homeland Security Fellow. His writing has been published in the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Wired, and Seed Magazine. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker called his first nonfiction book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, "a goldmine." His next book, A Billion Angry Brains, (Dutton, 2013) explores the misunderstood emotion of anger. He's presently collaborating with the president of the American Psychiatric Association on a popular book about contemporary psychiatry. He writes the Billion Wicked Thoughts blog for Psychology Today. He also used his knowledge of cognition to reach the million dollar question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and battle Ken Jennings in the finals of Grand Slam. For more information on Ogi, visit www.billionwickedthoughts.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing for Video Games
Thursday, August 29th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
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 course, 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 storyteller, part marketing guru and tech mogul—uses such vehicles as cinematics, in-game cut-scenes, and missions to not only create a rich story that acts as the framework and backdrop for the mechanics that define the interactivity of the products, but uses them to create a deeper and lasting gameplay experience. By the end of the class, students can expect to have a solid understanding of how creative writing is structured in video games, how it helps to propel emergence, and how it works hand-in-hand with game design to create a fully interactive experience.
- Instructor: Chris Zirpoli
- Chris Zirpoli has been a Producer, Marketing and PR Liaison, Lead Designer, Lead Writer, and Cinematic Director for independent video games studios and publishers alike. His titles span many genres and platforms, including Nightcaster (Action/Adventure - Xbox, PS2, GameCube), Sea Trader (Action/Adventure – GBA) Goblin Commander (RTS - Xbox, PS2, GameCube), and Auto Assault (PC - MMORPG). Chris has worked with the many studios at THQ, Inc., as well as Pixar and Walt Disney, doing design work for the cross-platform video game products to accompany film releases like Ratatouille and intellectual properties like De Blob. He has written and edited lectures for the Art Institute of America on writing and game design, and been a guest speaker for numerous classes, panels, and lectures at conventions and colleges all around the country.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Memoir Essentials: Which Story?
Friday, August 30th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
As many a memoirist has discovered, you don't write a memoir to tell what you know—you write a memoir to find out what you know. Often a writer begins thinking she's writing about x, but discovers along the way that she was really writing about y the whole time. In this discovery process lies the vitality of memoir. And that means that its narrative tension comes often from the conflict that obscures understanding, the part of y that is too "hot" for the memoirist to approach directly—until, all of a sudden, she breaks through and can. Join us as we examine the unanswerable questions at the hearts of several memoirs, looking for the moment at which the writer tips her hand as to what really drives her work. We'll read excerpts and then do exercises together, trying out different prompts until we find the one that unlocks a new layer of inquiry for each of us, revealing the y (or the "why"). Please come to class with a deep familiarity with your own material, having thought about what part of your life you wish to write about. You do not need to bring printed work to class, just a notebook, a pen, and a willingness to push beyond x. The first in a new series of one-day classes intended for memoirists in the beginning or advanced stages of their projects.
Part of the "Memoir Essentials" Series, which includes:
Memoir Essentials: Which Story?
Memoir Essentials: The Conflict, the Question
- Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
- Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and elsewhere, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. She teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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How to Talk About Your Book at a Cocktail Party
Wednesday, September 4th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Learning how to talk about your book in a succinct, compelling and comfortable way is among every writer's greatest challenge. It's also make or break. Within a matter of seconds, you've either captivated someone—whether an agent, editor, potential reader or the media—or you've turned them off. Yet over and over again we're asked to boil our work down: at cocktail parties, in queries, on panels, at writers conferences, in pitches and, eventually, on radio, TV and in print. In a crash course, learn how to do justice to the beautiful complexity of your novel, memoir, stories or nonfiction work while keeping it short and sweet. By doing exercises, practicing one-liners, getting expert feedback and hearing from your peers, you will learn to be confident and convincing when talking about your project. This class is for any level writer looking to actively engage with the public about a specific project, whether completed or in progress.
- Instructor: Katrin Schumann
- Katrin Schumann is the co-author of The Secret Power of Middle Children and Mothers Need Time-Outs, Too. She has been featured on the TODAY show, Talk of the Nation and in The Times, as well as other newspapers, magazines and radio, nationally and internationally. Schumann’s latest projects include a historical novel set in the Baltic, various non-fiction books in development, and on-going editorial work for editors, agents and writers. For the past ten years she has been teaching fiction and non-fiction, most recently at a local women’s prison, and running parenting focus groups and surveys. Before going freelance, she helped produce talk shows at NPR, where she won the Kogan Media Award. Schumann has been granted writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Norman Mailer Writer's Colony. Awarded scholarships to Oxford and Stanford Universities, she studied literature, language and journalism. Schumann was born in Freiburg, Germany, grew up in New York City and London, and now lives in Massachusetts.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Activate Your Characters
Wednesday, September 4th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Want to make your characters feel more "real"? Designed for playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, and short fiction writers, this interactive workshop will teach you how to use action to bring your characters to life. Using dynamic writing exercises, we will explore what your characters want and how to compel them to go after it. Concepts covered will include objectives, tactics, obstacles, given circumstances, and conflict. Please bring ideas for one or two characters you would like to explore, including one paragraph that either describes OR is in the voice of that character.
- Instructor: Nina Louise Morrison
- Nina Louise Morrison is a playwright, actor, director and dramaturg. Her plays include Mad Props, House Rules, The Red Plague, Constitution and Three Patriotic Acts. She is a Richard Rodgers Fellow, a Shubert Foundation grantee, and an affiliated artist with Free Hands Theatre Company, Boston Bohemia, Playwrights Commons' Freedom Art Retreat and Company One’s Playground. Before moving to Boston, Nina was the Senior Program Associate at the Philadelphia Theater Initiative. Training: MFA Columbia University, the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, the New Actors Workshop, and Oberlin College. More info at ninalouisemorrison.wordpress.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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The Next Step to Publication: Crowdfunding for Authors
Wednesday, September 4th, 6:30-9:30pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In a time when the publishing industry is constantly evolving, many authors are turning to alternative means of publication. Self-publishing is a rising trend but also a risky financial venture. Crowdfunding provides authors with a means of mitigating financial risk while developing their audience.
In this two-hour seminar, writers will learn about tools they can use to run a successful crowdfunding campaign. The first hour will consist of a lecture and Q&A, and the second half will be used to create marketing plans and mock Pubslush book profiles. Please bring a summary of your book and a paragraph identifying the audience for your book. This class is ideal for authors with a mostly completed manuscript who are looking to be published.
- Instructor: TBA
- We'll announce this person's name soon!
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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I Was a Teenage Beauty Pageant Judge: Immersion Journalism
Thursday, September 5th, 6:00-9:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Although we think of nonfiction writing as “objective,” many popular contemporary feature writers (David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace, Sarah Vowell, etc.) immerse themselves in their topics to produce provocative narratives. They become shopping mall Santas, go on cruises, or stay in the Chelsea Hotel, and their personal experiences allow them to explore their reactions to their subject. In this class you’ll learn strategies for approaching stories from a personal angle, studying examples of the genre and engaging in writing exercises to generate story ideas. The instructor has written dozens of stories of this kind, doing everything from judging a teenage beauty pageant to riding with a repo man the week before Christmas, and he has found that to tell someone’s story, you have to know their story. In this workshop you will not just write about others’ stories – you will experience them, leaving class with at least one story idea in which you can later “immerse” yourself.
- Instructor: Steven Lee Beeber
- Steven Lee Beeber is the author of The Heebie-jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago Review Press), the editor of AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press), and the associate editor of the literary journal Conduit. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Fiction, Bridge, Memorious, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and teaches creative writing and creative nonfiction at Lesley University.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Memoir: Making Smart Choices Behind the Scenes
Friday, September 6th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Capturing your story on paper requires dozens of choices, from the creative (Who are you as a character? How do you represent family & friends in a way that won't crush those relationships? How do you find the best narrative arc?) to the practical (What legal hurdles do you need to clear? How do you put together a winning proposal?) In this class we'll look at the "behind the scenes" aspects of writing memoir, and help you create a personalized strategy for for telling and selling your story. Class will include writing exercises, goal setting, and opportunities to share your work.
- Instructor: Trish Ryan
- Trish Ryan is the author of two memoirs, A Maze of Grace: A Memoir of Second Chances (Hachette 2010) and He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir of Finding Faith, Hope, and Happily Ever After (Hachette 2008). This fall she will be an Evelyn Danzig Haas ’39 Visiting Artist at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. Trish lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband Steve and their genetically improbable mixed-breed dog. You can visit Trish online at www.trishryanonline.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Revision Strategies for Screenwriters
Friday, September 6th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
A screenplay is not ready to submit to contests, agents, or producers until it has gone through a series of revisions, each focusing on different aspects of the form and bringing the various components of character, dialogue, action, and story arc to their peak performance levels.
In this one-day seminar, screenwriters who have completed a first draft of a screenplay will be introduced to a variety of strategies and techniques for revising their work and completing subsequent drafts. We will do quick in-class exercises that focus on adding subtext and realism to dialogue, replacing passive verbs with action verbs and finding precise nouns to create visual description, evaluating concept, structure, and character, reviewing individual scenes, refining formatting by adding white space, eliminating camera directions, and creating secondary scene headings, and working backward to test for cause-and-effect relationships between scenes.
Students should bring ten pages of a completed screenplay to class to share and use for writing exercises. Students will receive informal, constructive feedback from peers and the instructor on the pages and the screenplay concepts presented, as well as suggestions for further development.
This seminar is designed to provide practical revision tools for beginning screenwriters who have recently completed the first draft of a screenplay, as well as techniques for experienced screenwriters looking for fresh ways to approach the process of editing and rewriting. The suggested text for this seminar is Pilar Alessandra’s The Coffee Break Screenwriter.
- Instructor: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan
- Cheryl Eagan-Donovan is a writer and documentary filmmaker. She studied writing and literature at Goddard College, has a BS from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She has published poetry and articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She teaches screenwriting at BU’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts and at Northeastern University. Her new film, Nothing is Truer than Truth, is based on the book Shakespeare By Another Name. Cheryl is a lecturer at Shakespeare conferences around the country. Her new ten-minute play, Ve-Ri-Tas, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and was the 2012 Judge for the WIFVNE Annual Screenwriting Competition. She also served as a panelist for the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts 2012 Play/Screenwriting Fellowship. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Workshop Your Website or Blog
Saturday, September 7th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
Do you have a website and/or blog but want to learn ways to enhance the design and content? Looking to broaden your reach or boost your professional appeal? This class will offer a venue for receiving feedback on your online presence. Along the way, you’ll learn strategies for more effective design, navigation, usability, search engine optimization, and content. We’ll also do some writing exercises to help your work stand out. Note: this seminar is only for those who already have a designed website or active blog. Submit the URL(s) of your website and/or blog to lauren@grubstreet.org by noon on Wednesday, August 28th. If you have a blog, also submit two of your best posts that could be discussed in class. The instructor will prepare thorough critiques of each site before class so submitting URLs as early as possible is appreciated.
- Instructor: Kim Adrian
- Kim Adrian's short stories, essays, and memoir excerpts have appeared in Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Raritan, Crazyhorse, New England Review, /nor, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a P.E.N. New England Discovery Award, an Artist's Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Editor's Prize in Nonfiction from the New Ohio Review, as well as residencies at the Edward Albee Barn, Ragdale, and the VCCA. She teaches creative writing at Grub Street, reads nonfiction for Agni magazine, and serves on the admissions board for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her essay, "Questionnaire for My Grandfather" will appear in the upcoming anthology YOU: Essays in the Second Person (Welcome Table Press, 2012). Currently, she is at work on a book-length memoir. More at kimadrian.com.
Kim is the founder of Thumbtack, a website production company for authors.
There are 11 seats remaining in this class.
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Writing for Performance
Saturday, September 7th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
This class is designed for writers who want to practice taking their work off the page and making it live through spoken-word reading and performance. We will explore various ways to make your work come alive and discuss strategies for using your writing as a vehicle for connecting with and entertaining an audience.
Over the course of the day, we’ll examine the structure of effective short monologues and discuss how to effectively take a piece from page to stage. We’ll look at video clips of performers such as Spaulding Gray and John Leguizamo, and practice reading and embodying our own short pieces. We’ll also do some writing exercises to generate new work.
Bring a short written piece in progress (approximately 850 words or less) to the session—memorized if possible, though memorization isn't required. You'll have the chance to perform a five-minute piece and receive constructive feedback. By the end of the day, you’ll have gained practical tools/ideas for adapting your piece for performance and set several goals to continue developing your stories.
- Instructor: Judah Leblang
- Judah Leblang is a Boston-based writer, teacher and storyteller. His radio essays have appeared on 160 NPR and ABC-network stations around the US, and on several college and community radio stations. His column, "Life in the Slow Lane," appears regularly in Bay Windows, a Boston-area newspaper. His memoir, "Finding My Place: One Man's Journey from Cleveland to Boston and Beyond," was published in December 2009.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
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Memoir Essentials: The Conflict, the Question
Saturday, September 7th, 10:00am-5:00pm at Grub Street headquarters.
In Vivian Gornick’s classic craft book The Situation and the Story, she muses on a river trip she once took with her husband and a guide. All three wrote about the trip afterwards, she notes, and the facts of that trip went unchanged, yet each recounting came to mean something different because of the differing preoccupations of its writer. Out of the same situation, each had crafted a different story. This is the foundation of good memoir writing: the realization that it is not enough to say what happened, but that one must use differing levels of attention to give rise to thematic focus and thus a particular meaning. Out of what happened, *which* story will you choose to tell? In this class, we’ll look at how different writers built thematic meaning and story out of the raw material of situation, and—importantly—how the particular story they were telling governed choices they made as writers. Bring drafts of at least two chapters or essays to class, ideally sections of writing that are currently dominated by situation (what happened) rather than story. We will analyze how memoirists before us have crafted meaning and use those techniques to practice rewriting our drafts to evoke different thematic meanings. The second in a new series of one-day classes intended for memoirists in the beginning or advanced stages of their projects.
Part of the "Memoir Essentials" Series, which includes:
Memoir Essentials: Which Story?
Memoir Essentials: The Conflict, the Question
- Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
- Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and elsewhere, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. She teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
There are 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!