SUMMER 2025

CREATING THE HIGH-VALUE NEWSLETTER
June 14-17/Teachers of Fiction Writing: summit

There’s no better way to build an online business than to cultivate a thriving and engaged email subscriber base. The majority of your signups and sales will come from this audience, so how do you create a “newsletter” people want, and how do you turn those subscribers into loyal fans? In this presentation we’ll talk about transforming your email list (what could be a mere contact database) into a community of delighted readers who won’t just open your emails, but eagerly anticipate them.
[REGISTRATION PAGE]

ST. LOUIS OASIS: Writing About Place

We’ve all been touched by the power of place, and in this workshop we’ll learn about how place can function as an anchor for our essays and poems and provide narrative opportunities for our stories. We’ll read published pieces that focus on place and learn to write about setting in a way that enhances our work. Open to writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. We’ll be sharing our own short pieces for kind feedback. Note that reading and writing assignments will be completed outside of class.
*6 Sessions, Jun. 3, 17, Jul. 1, 15, 29, Aug. 12
*1:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m. Webster Groves, MO
CLASS FULL

**sample of past workshops and critique groups**—

WRITING THE SHORT SHORT STORY: Call it what you will—quick fiction, fast fiction, microfiction, furious fiction, sudden fiction, or flash fiction—after decades of dormancy, this short short form has undergone a revival. The growing number of online magazines and a renewed interest by traditional publishers have contributed to an expanding readership interested in this brief style. In this workshop we will closely study the work of masters of flash fiction, discuss how the form’s demands of economy and precision can be met in our own work, and share our completed drafts of no more than 500 words.

THE ART OF WRITING FLASH NONFICTION: What is it about miniatures that so captures our imagination? The tiny wingtips of a commuter reading a newspaper on a model train, the turning windmill on a charm bracelet, a working chandelier in a dollhouse…small-scale wonders that fit in our hand. Similarly, the compression and attention to detail in flash nonfiction contribute to the form’s capacity to evoke feeling. In this workshop we will read a variety of flash nonfiction pieces and discuss ways to use the factual and the personal to craft brief essays that, although seemingly small, through sharp focus and smart crafting, can become large.

PROSE WRITING MASTERMIND: This small and focused group will be comprised of eight writers getting together for five weeks for a 5,000 word mastermind intensive. We’re highly focused on first pages here and we’ll critique everyone’s first page and then the entire piece. We’ll discuss point of view, characterization, story structure, scene vs. summary, creating tension, etc. Open to writers working on short stories, creative nonfiction pieces, and first chapters of novels and memoirs.

PROSE POETRY: The prose poem has been described as planting “one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.” This may be a useful simile, but how do we figure out our footing? Without the line break, where does the boundary between poetry and prose run? This workshop invites prose writers and poets to explore how we might write in sentences and paragraphs to create poetry.

THE “HERMIT CRAB” FORM
In the imaginative “hermit crab” form, a writer co-ops the shell of another textual genre—a wedding announcement, a class syllabus, a restaurant menu—and uses that form to organize their short story, essay, or poem. In this class, we will study hermit crab pieces, attempt to write our own, and share our work with the group for friendly feedback.