One night only: join Writing Co-Lab co-founders Brian Gresko (YOU MUST GO ON), Sara Lippmann (SMASHING THE TABLETS), and Amy Shearn (ANIMAL INSTINCT) at this free event as they discuss the paths to publication of their most recent (and past) books and answer any questions you have about writing, publishing, and the creative life.

We’re living in an age of wrath, one in which the impulse to make art is being shouted down by the desire to make war. In this freewheeling workshop, we’ll examine how writers such as Claire Messud and Herman Melville are able to harness their anger and use it to super-charge their stories. Then we'll use an in-class exercise to examine the sorrows that lurk beneath the armor of our anger.

Hooray! You’ve crossed the proverbial finish line of your creative project. But the end, of course, is just the beginning. In this lively 2 hour online session, we will share various strategies and approaches to the revision process — and discuss next steps toward publication. Bring all your questions for candid discussion.

Friendships form the most significant relationships in our lives. Sometimes they save us, and sometimes they can sink us. We’ll look at how literary luminaries such as Elena Ferrante, Margaret Atwood and Ann Patchett focus on friendship to drive their stories, then put what we’ve learned into practice.

A generative writing class for women (or anyone who identifies as female / nonbinary / gender-nonconforming) who feel like they miiiiiight be losing it. Instead of running away from home... try this class first? Whether you're overwhelmed or stretched thin; wound up or worn out; blocked, stuck, or just feel like making some time to write each week, this class is a way to reconnect with your creative core. You can write in any genre you like—nonfiction, fiction, poetry, stream-of-consciousness, journaling, fragments, rants, letters, lists—whatever feels right each day. This class is about process, creativity, and making some space for your own voice. It's just an hour, and there's no homework. Sneak it in on your lunch break (or while the kids are watching a movie; they'll live). It'll be encouraging, regenerative, nourishing, and fun.

Even though people think about sex all the time, and even have it occasionally, writers tend to shy away from the subject. Which is crazy. Because sex is the one experience that makes us all hopeful and horny and embarrassed and vulnerable (at least if we’re doing it right). In this freewheeling session, we’ll look at the work of Mary Gordon, Toni Morrison, and other literary rock stars in an effort to figure out how to infuse our own sex scenes with genuine emotion and ecstatic sensation, not evasions and porn clichés. Arrive ready to lay your characters bare.

In an ideal world, we would hold nothing back and tell each other the truth, and only the truth. But that's not how the real world works. Instead, we spend much of our time lying to others, and to ourselves. We also lie by omission, which is to say: we keep secrets. In this class, we'll examine how writers like Sally Rooney, Meg Wolitzer, and Nora Ephron confront these evasions, then confess to some of our own secrets and deceptions. 

In these four sessions, we will look at the folktales, fairy tales, ghost stories, and urban legends we may have learned as children. Why do these stories stick with us? How can we use the elements of folklore to tap into the childhood parts of our imaginations, move past self-doubt, and have fun with writing? In each session, we will have in-class writing story prompts based on the folktales we read that I invite you to complete at home. In addition to traditional folktales, we will look at contemporary authors who have used this material to reclaim their own stories and histories while introducing us to strange new worlds. We will read short stories and novel excerpts from authors like Toni Morrison, Carmen Maria Machado, and Maisy Card. There will also be time for discussion and opportunities to share our work in class.

Looking to blend your pop culture obsessions with gut punching or hilarious stories from your life? Learn to mix criticism and the memoir in this in-depth class. Elizabeth Teets, editor of the film anthology Isn’t She Great: Writers on Women Led Comedies from 9 to 5 to Booksmart, will help you blend the pop culture that consumes your thoughts with the deeply personal. This class will teach you to blend the art you can’t stop talking about with the experiences you can’t stop thinking about!

Now more than ever we need you to write and share the story of your body, history, identity, family, and experiences. We need you to put yourself on the page. In this five week course we will read and discuss published personal essays, drawing out specific techniques and approaches to writing as well as inspiration for the bravery it requires to get real with a reader. Each week, students will receive prompts to spark their own work and have the opportunity to write and share a short essay with their peers, which we’ll discuss during class.

Has your writing hit a plateau? Are you stuck in the murky middle? Or maybe you are sitting on perfectly competent stories that still feel like they're missing something? You’re getting complacent, or you know in your gut you've been holding back? Remove the safety net in this high level course for the dedicated fiction writer. This month-long workshop will explore strategies to increase the risk in our writing: destabilizing, unsettling, and pushing our work closer to the line in an effort to excavate its most honest, urgent, and vital pulse. This intimate, supportive live class on zoom will require active participation, with an accompanying asynchronous slack for prompts, craft materials and additional community discussion. Although there will be generative opportunities, the focus of this workshop is revision with an eye toward publication.

In this generative class, we will discuss how fairy tales can be sources of plot, symbols, and narrative shapes, outside of retelling. We will read short fairy tales and work inspired by fairy tales, spend time free-writing and generating ideas for new stories and novels. We will touch on the work of Kate Bernheimer, Michael Cunningham, Anne Sexton, among others. Students are asked to pick a favorite or new to them fairy tale to bring to class. The tale will be used to begin a new story. In the forest, we can encounter a stranger, or something left behind. Behind every tree is a story.

If you’ve ever felt like poetry is too hard for you—that it’s overcomplicated, inaccessible, or impossible to understand—then this class is for you. This 6-session workshop will cover the basics of poetry and craft: how lines work in poems, how to think about image and metaphor, how to read and write poems that avoid vagueness and abstractions, and more.

Journals are one of the most helpful tools a writer can have, and yet many writers feel that journals are too tedious, difficult, or dangerous to employ. A journal can help you make sense of the formless stuff of life. It can be a low-stakes place to play with ideas, a format for experimenting with voice, a way to clear out the mind (a la Julia Cameron’s famous “morning pages”). The latter is maybe the most important — for me, anyway, if there’s something that’s happened to me that I want to write about, first I have to journal about it in the most unfiltered, unedited, artless, raw way possible, before I can even get close to making something like art from it.

Perhaps you’ve been told at some point or another: “Writing is revising.” Well, it’s true. Writing is revising—but what exactly does this mean? Revising can be intimidating territory for all of us, but in this workshop we will take a different approach from that of the cruel taskmaster that lives in most of our brains. Instead, we will focus on re-imagining our poems from a place of possibility and cultivation, instead of punishment, fertile soil for possible regenerations of an original impulse or feeling.

To generate new work, sometimes we must defamiliarize and remember in a different way -- and that is where this course comes in! This is an 8-week generative course where we'll be using the concept of the four humours as a framework to shake us up, the focus is on process rather than product. That being said, you will have generated several pieces.

One of the central struggles in storytelling is that human beings are, in essence, time travelers. We live in the past of our memories and the future of our hopes. Thus, when we tell stories, we often shuttle around in time. This can be exciting, but more often it winds up confusing the reader, and (in my case) the writer. In this seminar, we’ll unravel the mysteries of chronology and help writers figure out how to tell their story in a way that thrills their readers.

You, dear memoirist, are the hero of your own story. No matter what the specific content may be, writing memoir is about taking the messiness of your lived experience and finding larger, universal truths. And because you are the lens for this truth, you must deeply implicate yourself. You are the character in which readers must recognize their own humanity. Through conversation, writing exercises, and looking at published examples, this class will deal with questions— How do I write about things I didn’t witness? Where does my story begin, and where does it end? What am I afraid to admit? —about writing yourself into memoir.

What is it about sex that allows it to be—if one so chooses—an ecstatic experience, fully embodied and beyond the physical body all at once? How can one even manage to articulate it on the page, or in song? It's a mystery older than poetry itself, and in this workshop the poets we'll be reading from reckon with eros and the sacred in a surprising variety of ways.

Many a short story, essay, 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 Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Alicia Erian and others in an effort to make sure your next narrator isn’t just strong, but irresistible. We’ll also try an in-class exercise to bring the lesson home.

Ever read (or write) a story where the hero or heroine just doesn’t seem to pop? I have. Like a thousand times. This intensive (but fun-filled!) seminar will investigate why some characters leap off the page, while others just sit there. We’ll look at the work of Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Lorrie Moore, Alicia Erian,  and others in an effort to examine all the untapped ways that authors can create layered, multi-dimensional characters. Then we’ll do an in-class exercise to bring the lesson home.

Writing’s all fun and games until the rejections start piling up. In this intensive (though informal) workshop, we’ll aim to make sure your stories or essays draw the reader in, rather than leaving them in the dark. We’ll take a second look at your opening pages, as well as the opening pages of works by Cheryl Strayed, Natasha Trethewey, Meg Wolitzer and others, in an effort to understand how they hook readers from word one.

Do you have an idea for a memoir, gift book, or essay collection, but you've been fearing the daunting prospect of putting together a book proposal? In this one-day seminar, writers will throw their worry to the wind, learn the nuts and bolts of a professional proposal, and finally defeat the blank page. In this viral age, you never know when a shorter piece can take off – and all of a sudden opportunities are coming your way that you need to act on! We’ll cover the sections of a standard book proposal, talk about creating/maintaining a platform, brainstorm your existing affiliations, find comparable titles to compare them to your own work, and create and refine the shorter pieces you will need for any proposal, such as author bios and an awareness of how to situate your writing and voice in the larger marketplace.

This competitive, semester-long class is your opportunity to finally finish your book-length collection of short stories! Whether you’re working on your first short story, or you’ve already drafted a dozen and are hoping to shape them into a collection, this class is for you. During this 4-month intensive, we will focus on all aspects of writing a collection, from drafting to revision, and finally publication.

I love great, sprawling New Yorker stuff and literary magnum opuses, but often I crave something shorter, something that hits my heart but doesn’t take itself too preciously, something fun. I seek similar when writing: to enter a state of childlike wonder and discovery, to resist accepted rules, to make mistakes, to say what I’ve never said before or even known I needed to say, to play. In this five week generative class we’ll make space for play in our writing process, and we’ll examine short-ish creative nonfiction that embraces the unconventional. Our focus will be on trying new styles and techniques, and writing with excitement, verve, and a sense of adventure.

It’s the New Year, and that hits us all differently! Whether it’s a spirited season for you or a gloomy one, the tumult of January can still be a space for you to turn inward, renew your writing goals, or start them over altogether—if you choose it. This open-genre workshop will offer you the opportunity to honor your own work with a group of like-minded writers. We’ll discuss why we write, what mentally and logistically keeps us from the page, and how we can work to abolish the judge in our heads.