Writers & Books

From Chekov to Mamet, the one-act play remains a challenging and powerful way to tell a story. Learn how to structure your story using setting, characters, and internal/external dynamics. Using specific exercises and mining your own experience, you’ll apply classical principles to form an intense moment in time and space

What can photographs tell us about our lives today, the traditions of our past, and the world we want to create? Which stories, emotions, details, secrets, and meanings lie just outside frame of the photograph?

Mothering is complex: exhausting, exhilarating, lonely, hysterically funny, ambivalent, ripe with loss, maddening, bursting with love. Telling our stories is how we make sense of our lives, how we hold memories, how we celebrate, how we grieve, how we wrestle with what we don’t understand.

Have you ever been curious about illustration but don’t know where to start? Novelist and journalist Nicholson Baker thought the same thing until he started teaching himself the craft of drawing during the COVID-19 lockdown.

This master class will explore vastly different novels that operate through the shared uncommon structure of interlocking narratives and intersecting characters. Using these examples as mentor texts, we will examine how their shifting lenses open new perspectives for the reader and add complexity and depth to a story.

Take control of your writing life. Traditional publishing is in crisis. Corporate consolidation, tariffs that raise printing costs, the loss of many book review outlets, declining readership, the uncertainty of AI, and many other factors have made finding an agent, editor, and publisher difficult and potentially heartbreaking, even for the most wonderful books. Meanwhile, however, writers’ projects are thriving, and an alternate route to publication is available

This class provides a deep dive into the prep and layout of a manuscript for upload to Amazon, Ingram, and other distributors. Erin and Nancy will show you how to create beautiful interior designs without AI or a graphic design degree. We’ll prep a manuscript live so you can see how it’s done, review and demonstrate the research process for choosing a strong cover in your genre, and show you how to ready your project for the world.