Writing By Writers...

About The Class: Personal essays, short stories, and other short form prose can be every bit as vital, artistic, and transformative as book length work. Maybe you are just trying to break in to publishing short stories or essays—maybe you have a book manuscript and have realized not everything “belongs” in it but would like to reshape the bits on the cutting room floor into art of its own—maybe you want to publish a memoir or novel but have been told you that you need some kind of publishing track record first to get the attention of an agent. Whatever brings you here, this workshop will focus on helping you to finish, revise, and—yes!—submit one short piece (5,000 words or less) in a supportive cohort led by an instructor who has edited at numerous magazines focused on short fiction and essays, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, the Coachella Review, The Nervous Breakdown, and Other Voices magazine. Through close readings of both peer work and published stories and essays, we will look at various concerns such as determining your audience, sharpening your voice and sentences, determining the best length and form for your material, discovering other writers working with similar subject matter, and what YOU bring to the cultural conversation that feels fresh and can grab an editor’s attention and impact readers. Suitable for prose writers of all levels of experience. All work must be “self-contained” and not depend on a larger narrative (novel, memoir) in order to make sense. About The Faculty: Gina Frangello is the author of four books of fiction in addition to the memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint 2021). Her novel A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014) is currently under development by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah. Her most recent novel, Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint 2016) was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books’. Now the Creative Nonfiction Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, she has 20 years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and in many other magazines and anthologies. After two decades of teaching at many universities, including University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies, UCLA Extension, the University of California Riverside Palm Desert, Roosevelt University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and Lake Forest College, Gina is excited to be a student again at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Program for Writers, where she has returned to complete the PhD she left unfinished twenty years ago. Gina lives in the California desert with her family and three gluttonous cats.