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.

About The Class: In this two hour generative writing workshop, we will read short excerpts from contemporary queer authors including Melissa Febos, Justin Torres, Emme Lund, Saeed Jones, and K.Iver and use creative prompts developed from their writing as inspiration for generating our own timely, new work. Open to writers of all genres. About The Faculty: Charlie J. Stephens is a queer, non-binary, mixed-race writer from the Pacific Northwest. Born and raised in Salem, Oregon, Charlie has lived all over the U.S. as a bike messenger, wilderness guide, high school English teacher, and seasonal shark diver (for educational purposes only.) They earned an M.A. from San Francisco State University in 2009. Resident of Port Orford on the southern Oregon coast, they are the owner of Sea Wolf Books & Community Writing Center. Charlie’s short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Best Small Fictions Anthology, New World Writing, Original Plumbing/Feminist Press, and elsewhere. Their debut novel, “A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” was published by Torrey House Press in April 2024. It was longlisted for The Center For Fiction’s 2024 First Novel Prize in July. More at charliejstephenswriting.com and on Instagram @charliejstephenswriting.

About The Class: The best plots aren’t controlled by the author. They spring from the characters themselves. The writer masterminds all things, yes, but the more we as writers realize that our characters are sovereign beings with independent consciousnesses, the better prepared we are to create stories that are poignant, complicated, and emotionally volatile. In this generative workshop, we will ponder characters’ decision making, the causality between plot points, and how to keep a reader flipping pages. We’ll delve into specific tactics for constructing present action and folding in backstory. All of these various craft elements speak to the greatest goal we have as storytellers: imbuing our characters with the dignity of complexity. About The Faculty: Joshua Mohr is the author of several books, including Damascus, which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” He’s also written Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s 10 Terrific reads of 2009, and he’s won the Northern California Book Award twice. Termite Parade was an editors’ choice on the New York Times Best Seller List. His latest project is a trilogy of novels all to be published in one calendar year, starting with SAINT THE TERRIFYING in fall ‘24. In his Hollywood life, he’s sold projects to AMC, ITV, and Amblin Entertainment.

About The Class: People can be scary, especially lately, and many many of us are finding solace these days in the more than human world. In our dogs and horses, osprey and antelope, in mountains and meadows, sky and the snowflakes, maybe in some deep druidic faith in the Earth. My relationships with the more than human world are more than just a theme I turn to again and again in my work; they also comprise something like my deep spiritual center. Something I might call my soul. And yet at least in the years that I have been making my living as a writer, writing about animals, or writing in which a mountain, for example, might have a point of view, or a plot might turn on the shifting course of a river, have been few and far between among the vast numbers of stories and novels about humans working their shit out in coffee shops. Not that there is anything wrong with those. Not that I don’t love (need) coffee. In this workshop, however, we will focus on writing about animals, domesticated and wild; trees, individuals and entire forests, oceans, mountains, clouds, weather. They will become more than landscape, more than easy emotion. They will become characters, we will let them be, if they want to be, the reason the story exists at all. And if we dare we might even explore an underworld, a future world, or another world all together Workshop is open to writers in all genres. It will be mostly generative in nature, but we will share what we are working on from time to time during class. Join me in honoring the non-human beings that keep us whole. There will be a non required but recommended reading list that will accompany the course and will be given a few weeks in advance if people want to get inspired. About The Faculty: Pam Houston is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, as well as a book of essay between Pam and environmental activist Amy Irvine, called Airmail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place. Her stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Centuryamong other anthologies. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards. She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. Pam’s passions include Icelandic Horses (especially the ones who live in Iceland, where she goes as often as possible,) Irish Wolfhounds, travel, mentoring and teaching, particularly teaching writing about the more than human world. She lives on a homestead at 9,000 feet near the headwaters of the Rio Grande in Colorado with her husband Mike and two dogs, a quarter horse, a miniature donkey, four Icelandic ewes, four hens and a rooster. Her forthcoming book, Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom, will be published in September 2024.