Workshops & Events
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.
There are 2 seats remaining in this class.
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Go Deeper, Baby: Writing Meaningful Erotica
Thursday, May 30th, 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.
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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 10 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 6 seats remaining in this class.
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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 7 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.
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.
There are 3 seats remaining in this class.
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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 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!
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!
"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 7 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 9 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 14 seats remaining in this class.
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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 4 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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.
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 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.
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.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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 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!
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.
register as a member $50.00 register as a non-member $65.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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 8 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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.
register as a member $95.00 register as a non-member $115.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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!
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
Bio coming!
"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.
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.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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.
register as a member $430.00 register as a non-member $455.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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 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!
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.
There is 1 seat 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: 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.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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 Borders' first novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing's Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel and was published 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 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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 6 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 10 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!
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 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!
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.
"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.
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.
register as a member $280.00 register as a non-member $305.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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 11 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 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not 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 11 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 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.
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 12 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $95 register as a non-member $115Not 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.
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!
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!
"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.
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!
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!
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 11 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!
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!
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.
"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.
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!
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 11 seats remaining in this class.
register as a member $315.00 register as a non-member $340.00Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!
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.
register as a member $50 register as a non-member $65Not a member? Become a Grubbie today!