Event Help Wanted, Celebrate Pride Month with Us, and a New Workshop on Writing the Self
Write or Die Weekly #32
Help Wanted: Looking for an Assistant Event Facilitator
We are looking for someone to help facilitate and coordinate virtual events! Meet and mingle with industry professionals, moderate our craft chats, and help us build our events calendar.
Click the button to apply!
End Pride Month with a brand new workshop!
June 30 from1:00 PM- 3:00 PM (EST)
Queer Imagination with Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Let's use our queer imaginations to break open new worlds on the page.
This genrefluid and generative workshop is about making work that's queer beyond the surface level content, with a focus on writing in a speculative space for both fiction and nonfiction.
We'll experiment with form, language, and narrative devices and structures that are in and of themselves queer, going beyond normative modes of storytelling. How can we use things like POV, line breaks, nonlinear storytelling, etc to tell queer stories in queer ways?
This generative workshop is geared toward making queer work that might be messy and maybe even — GASP! — "unmarketable," because fuck that! We're here, we're queer, it's the end of Pride month, and we're gonna write work that's first and foremost for ourselves.
*This workshop will be recorded if you can’t attend live!
Free Q&A Events!
Fever Dreams: Sexy & Surreal Short Form Writing with Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor
Date: Thursday, June 27
Time: 7:30 - 8:30 PM (Eastern time)
Join the editors of
, and , for a special craft chat and Q&A session!Love is weird. The world is crazy. And writers – we’re strange people hell-bent on writing about it all somehow. In this craft chat, we’ll dish on the secrets to writing and publishing sexy and surreal short form writing. Flash fiction continues to get more and more popular. Is it just easier to write? More practical with all our writerly economic realities? Or is there also something inherently magical and alluring about trying to capture in quick spasms the utterly uncontainable experience of life? Who the fuck knows!
Well, let’s try to find out together (even though we won’t come to any conclusions, we can still have fun along the way, reading and decoding some sexy poetry, surreal flash, and getting into some good ole’ literary hot goss). You know you want to.
*This event will be recorded and sent out to participants who have registered!
Exposure, Not Exposed: DIY Book Publicity with
Date: Tuesday, July 23rd
Time: 7:00 - 8:00 PM (Eastern time)
Join us for a virtual event with Cassie Mannes Murray, founder and director of
and former lit agent!In this craft chat and Q&A session, Cassie will brief writers on publishing milestones and publicity! She will untangle how to create an inventory of ideas (and contacts!) for their book's publicity journey and reveal ways to think more about audience than self-promotion.
Bring your questions and come hang out!
*This event will be recorded and sent out to participants who have registered!
Summer Workshops
*Scholarships are available for Write or Die workshops. Click here for more details.
July 10 - July 24 from 7:00 - 9:00 PM (EST)
Editing for Style: A Hands-On Lesson in Copyediting with Jordan Koluch
Back by popular demand! In this 3 week class, you’ll learn the basics of good copyediting and implement those basics over a number of sample texts. We’ll start with becoming familiar with The Chicago Manual Style and Merriam Webster, then move on to the different things copy editors should always be looking for when approaching a text. Students will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience in class, as well as feedback from the instructor and peers on their work. We’ll also discuss tips for how to get freelance copyediting jobs.
July 28 from 1:00 - 4:00 PM (EST)
This is the Place: Mapping Memory and Home in Regional Writing with Kristen Arnett
Writing about place and home that has "main character syndrome."
Work with bestselling author, Kristen Arnett and discuss the craft of place and regional writing in narrative works, essays, and pop culture/media. This will be a collaborative process; one that allows us to consider (and reconsider) questions of “home” when it comes to creative work. Readers will generate work in-session and take home prompts when the workshop is complete.
*This workshop will be recorded if you can’t attend live!
August 17 from 1:00 - 4:00 PM (Eastern time)
Writing the Self: Small Mirrors, Mouths, & Movements with Shaina Phenix
This 3-hour workshop asks that you write yourself—things you observe, feel, understand, and ways that you move through and experience the world.
Here we aim to exalt the every day, to dissect the abounding, to say the things we might not otherwise say, to see where it takes us. This course is interested in the essayette, the cronica, the prose poem, or any other smallish iteration of the personal narrative. We hope to use these small vessels to take magnifying glasses to our memories, movements, and meditations.
*This workshop will be recorded if you can’t attend live!
August 31 & September 7th from 1:00 - 4:00 PM (EST) —[[NEW DATES AND PRICE!!]]
Fiction Writer's Workshop for Healing with Emily Jon Tobias
Let your wounded characters heal and transform you as the writer in the process. The sacred process of story writing is an act of creation that facilitates radical healing.
In this 2 week workshop, students will learn the foundations of story structure including character roles and how they function (protagonist, antagonist, catalyst, etc.); how to determine a character's emotional wound; how to use these wounds to understand characters' feelings and how to use emotion to develop a character's narrative timeline; how to ask characters "why", and how to use those answers to better understand and care for the writer within; and, how to become inspired by what our characters teach us.
*This workshop will be recorded if you can’t attend live!