That cool, modern, laid-off-via-Twitter feeling
Like many novelists, teaching is my primary income source. Luckily, it’s work that I love to do. It feels like right livelihood, like I’m truly helping people. My goal in my fiction workshops is to create a warm, welcoming community where people feel safe and excited to share their writing and engage with their classmates’ writing; where they feel supported and empowered to explore and take chances.
For the past five years or so, my teaching has been almost exclusively through the writing programs at Catapult and Literary Arts. I teach one or two classes a week for Catapult and two classes a week for Literary Arts, September through June. The students are adults with full lives and full-time jobs, who take their writing seriously but sometimes struggle to find the time and permission to make it a priority. My classes help them to carve out that time and permission. It’s an honor to meet with them each week, and to read their manuscript pages, and see how wonderfully they show up for each other, engaging deeply and thoughtfully with each others’ novels. It’s a great job, if not a particularly lucrative one.
Well...
Last Tuesday, I opened Twitter in the morning (an ill-advised way to start the day, but we all have our vices) and saw a link to an article in Publishers Weekly, announcing that Catapult was shutting down their writing program and their online magazine. They gave no warning whatsoever to their instructors that this was coming. It’s a hell of a thing to log in to Twitter at seven in the morning and learn that one of your two jobs is disappearing.
The thing is...I’m not going to let that job disappear. I’m going to offer the classes that I’d planned to teach for Catapult, this spring and beyond, on my own, instead.
Writing workshops do not need to take place under the umbrella of a large organization to be successful. All you need is a meeting place (in the case of my classes, this is Zoom), a means of sharing documents (Google docs), and a means of communication outside of class (email). The most important factor in a successful workshop is the people—the community the instructor helps to foster, and the writers in it. The only thing that Catapult was adding to my workshops was their marketing power. Yes, this is a significant factor. It’s what kept me working with them for so long. Catapult attracted talented, motivated students who would scroll through the class offerings, and there my courses would be, and they would fill every time. It’s going to be difficult to recreate that on my own. Impossible, really. Instead, I’m going to have to rely on word of mouth.
That’s where you come in. Maybe you’re interested in taking one of these classes yourself. Maybe you know someone else who might be interested. Please do take a look:
12-Week Advanced Novel Workshop
This class is my answer to the near-impossibility of successfully workshopping a novel in the traditional model. In this class, limited to 6 students, writers will workshop their entire novel manuscript (up to 400 pages, turned in 200 pages at a time). One person workshops per week, to give each manuscript the deep attention it merits.
Revision Strategies One-Day Seminar
A three-hour seminar with lecture and exercises, where I lead students through my step-by-step revision process. This is suitable for fiction and creative nonfiction writers.
In the (near?) future, I’ll also offer my 8-Week Novel Revision workshop. Click the link for more information about the class, and how to sign up to be notified when I schedule it.
On my Classes pages, there’s also a link to the 9-Month Novel Intensive that I will continue to offer through Literary Arts. Let me know if you want to be notified when registration opens up for the 2023-24 session of that class, beginning in September.
Thanks for reading this far, and for indulging me in a bit of personal promotion. If you could help me spread the word about these classes, I would so appreciate it.
Take good care. I’ll be back in the next newsletter with significantly less self-promotion.