Writing Workshops Los Angeles offers courses and one-on-one instruction to those interested in honing their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writing skills. 

We're really excited to have three talented writers joining us as guest instructors on our summer roster (which will go live on Wednesday!). Whether you write fiction, memoir, or nonfiction, these authors will inspire new writing and help develop your works in progress. Welcome Elizabeth L. Silver, Lilliam Rivera, and Zan Romanoff! 

What are you doing tomorrow afternoon? It's not too late to join Francesca Lia Block's seminar on Writing the Contemporary Fairy or Folk Tale! 

After the first westside mixed levels fiction workshop sold out, our guest instructor Francesca Lia Block stepped up to help us offer a second section that starts on April 17. We thought we'd ask Francesca a few questions so potential students can get a sense of her style and the substance of the workshop.

WWLA: Welcome! We're happy to have you with us this term! Many people obviously know you as a writer of over thirty books (!), but you are also an active and engaged teacher of fiction and memoir. What do you enjoy about being in the classroom?

FLB: Teaching is as important to me as writing. It’s deeply satisfying and inspiring to help people find their story and develop it into something that others will want to read. I spent many years of my life alone at a desk, writing. Now, through teaching, I have a wonderful community of writers to nurture, challenge, teach, and learn from every day. Writers are some of my favorite people because you can have conversations about the things in life that really matter!

WWLA: The students in the class will have the opportunity to read and discuss a number of stories as models. Could you tell us about a couple stories that you assign and why you enjoy them?

FLB: I chose stories that were either much anthologized classics and/or stories that I found riveting or haunting in some way.  For example, I love the stories of Joy Williams for their devastating stylistic power, so we’ll be reading “The Girls” for our “style” class.  We will also look at “For Esme with Love and Squalor” by J.D. Salinger as a way to study character. Other authors include Gabriel Garcia Marquez,  Flannery O’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston.

WWLA: What will a typical evening in the mixed levels fiction workshop look like?

FLB: We’ll meet in what my students call “The Fairy Cottage,” a little yellow house with a white picket fence in Culver City. There will be candles, a circle of chairs, and paintings on the walls. I always strive to create a supportive and stimulating atmosphere. For the first four weeks, we will discuss our writing and reading assignments and I will lecture on various elements of writing (plot, character, style, etc.). (I’ll be using my “12 Questions to Help Structure Your Story” that are featured in my upcoming memoir/writing guide The Thorn Necklace. I’ve seen them help thousands of writers over the years.) Then we’ll discuss and do in-class assignments. For the next four weeks, we will follow the same structure but we’ll also be workshopping a ten-page story by each student (two per night). We will revise the stories and share them aloud at the last class. Then we’ll celebrate with a potluck party!

The class starts Monday and there are only a few seats left! You can sign up here.

Francesca Lia Block is the Lifetime Achievement Award winning author of over thirty acclaimed and widely translated books of fiction, nonfiction, short stories, and poetry. She has also written a screenplay for Fox Searchlight and contributed essays, interviews, and reviews to many publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nylon and Spin. Francesca teaches at Antioch University, Los Angeles and UCLA Extension and is currently finishing her memoir/writing guide The Thorn Necklace: Turning Pain into Art coming in 2018 from Seal Press. www.francescaliablock.com.

Diana Wagman will be teaching a Young Adult Fiction workshop for WWLA starting this Sunday morning, and there are still a few spots left! The workshop runs for eight weeks, and it’s going to be awesome. If you’re interested in joining the class, please email us at enrollment@writingworkshopsla.com. Check out this excerpt from Diana’s YA debut out next week, Extraordinary October.

Writers! The fall schedule is here and we’ve got new classes (Young Adult Fiction, Memoir II, and Essay Writing!), a new location (Pasadena!), a new guest instructor (Natashia Deón!) and a brand new website. We also have classes from your favorite returning WWLA instructors: Neelanjana Banerjee, Bernard Cooper, Chris Daley, Christopher DeWan, Dawn Dorland, Seth Fischer, Elline Lipkin, Kate Maruyama, Darcy Vebber, Diana Wagman, Margaret Wappler, and Laura Warrell! Some classes do fill up quickly, so if you want to be cool and stay in / get back to school, sign up today. Feel free to share this post if you know of people who might be interested!

We asked our new westside instructor Laura Warrell some questions in anticipation of her first fiction workshop. Feel free to share her answers with your westside writer friends, so they can get in on this opportunity to start studying with Laura, or sign up yourself. There are still a few spots left! 

(If you’re interested, email us at enrollment@writingworkshopsla.com.)

Laura Warrell has worked as a writing instructor for several colleges in Boston and Los Angeles, including the Berklee College of Music and Northeastern University. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Salon, The Writer, Post Road Magazine, The Boston Globe and Racialicious, as well as Broadsheet in Madrid, Spain and other international publications.  She was a contributing writer to Numero Cinq Magazine and an assistant fiction editor at Upstreet Magazine. Laura is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has attended residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Tin House Writer’s Workshop.

So Laura, you're relatively new to Los Angeles. How do you like it so far?

I moved to Los Angeles from Boston, a city that has a reputation for being a sort of literary mecca because of the number of iconic writers who have lived there and its stellar academic standing. But to me, the writing community in Los Angeles is so much more exciting. East Coast writing communities tend to breed authors with fairly traditional writing styles, whereas in Los Angeles, anything goes! Authors who do more conventional work sit in the same workshops and literary events as more experimental authors. What’s also unique is how open Los Angeles writers are to this diversity of voices. No one here seems to believe there’s only one way to write, which makes everyone’s creativity thrive. 

What I also love about the LA writing community is how welcoming it is. After only a month in the city, I found both a writers group and a community of writers who were happy to bring me into the fold. I’ve also been invited to read at various events, which didn’t happen as often in Boston. In LA, success as a writer doesn’t depend on schooling or social connections or one’s list of publications. It’s about committing to the work, staying in touch with your creativity and being free to explore. Really, LA is such a dynamic, diverse city and I already feel at home here. My only complaint? The traffic, of course. It’s pretty scary to an East Coast gal used to the subway.

You also just got back from the Tin House Writer's Workshop. How was that?

The Tin House Summer Writers Workshop is one of the best in the nation so I was honored to be accepted. I made wonderful professional contacts and new friends there. Moreover, the experience confirmed my faith in the writing workshop. As writers, it’s lovely to be able to sit alone and come up with worlds, characters and ideas, to create something out of nothing, to work our magic. However, sometimes we miss the places in our work where we’re not quite matching our vision or we miss opportunities to take our work in directions we hadn’t considered. That’s where the workshop comes in. We sit with a group of smart, invested readers and writers who can see what we don’t see and help us reach our goals. The workshop is also one of the few places we writers get to collaborate and spend quality time with each other. I’ve always envied how actors and musicians get to do their art together. To me, writers’ workshops are a chance for authors to “jam” the way musicians do, lobbing ideas back and forth and really digging into the work.

What are you most excited to teach in your upcoming Westside Mixed Levels Fiction workshop?

What I love most about teaching is finding ways to help students discover and refine their voices. Certainly, it’s essential to have an understanding of the elements of fiction – plot, character, setting, etc. – and we’ll explore those elements in class. But writing truly comes alive when the prose is fresh, the ideas original and the sensibilities distinctive. Getting to one’s true voice can be as exciting as it is bewildering but the journey feels so much more meaningful when it’s done with likeminded souls. In workshop, I share activities and encourage discussions to help writers at all levels figure out what they want to say, what parts of the human experience they want to examine, what moments in their own lives they want to bring to the work. I’m as thrilled to discover who my students are as people as I am to discover their work.

You've published both fiction and nonfiction in a wide range of literary magazines and journals. You were also an editor at Upstreet. What advice would you give to WWLA students about submitting their work?

I’m both a pragmatist and an idealist when it comes to publishing. The idealist in me says, submit freely! Believe in yourself! Be fearless! The pragmatist in me wants writers to do these things but also wants them to make sure the work is as good as they can make it. This doesn’t mean a manuscript is flawless. It simply means I’ve written what I believe is a final draft, I’ve taken time away from it to let my ideas percolate and I’ve come back to revise until I don’t know how else to improve it. Next, I show it to people I trust to give me constructive feedback then revise again. After I’ve gone through these steps, I send out the work. I only send to a handful of journals for the first go round in case I get feedback from some of the editors that I may want to incorporate into another revision. Once I feel certain the manuscript is working, I continue to send the work out in batches until I find a place for the piece to land. Then the idealist takes over. Be fearless!

Q & A with Kate Maruyama

Kate Maruyama's novel Harrowgate was published by 47North. Her short work has appeared in Stoneboat, Arcadia Magazine, Controlled Burn, Salon, and The Rumpus, among other online journals, as well as in two anthologies. In addition to Writing Workshops Los Angeles, she teaches at Antioch University Los Angeles in their MFA and BA programs. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles, where she lives with her family.

Kate will be teaching Advanced Fiction, which combines Fiction II and Novel II in one workshop, starting July 25. Please email us at enrollment@writingworkshopsla.com to sign up!

WWLA: Our instructors often mention how much they continue to learn about a particular genre through teaching it. What are some of the most significant lessons you've learned about the craft of fiction in the classroom?

Kate: I have learned that everyone has a specific way of approaching the craft of writing, of slaying the beast. There is no prescription for the perfect novel, the perfect short story. I love to share the latest things I have learned about writing from my own work and from articles, books, talks, and conferences on writing. But my favorite part about workshop is that in each and every workshop, my students bring their own approaches and insight that only deepen my understanding of fiction as I go on.  

WWLA: This summer, you'll be teaching Advanced Fiction, which combines Fiction II and Novel II in one workshop. How would you describe the difference between these two classes beyond the fact Novel II probably has more novelists in it?

Kate: In Fiction II, we focus on the work at hand, which is often short fiction and sometimes flash. This class is open to whatever format the students are working in, and it is designed to strengthen what they are working on. We do exercises in class that can be applied either to work in progress or new work. We look at examples of tools of the trade in short fiction and, as class progresses, I tend to bring in work that speaks directly to the the variety of work the students are writing themselves. We sometimes get novelists in this class, but whatever genre, students always make progress. Students use the class as it suits them, sometimes to rework, sometimes to forge forward, but it is structured to ensure that real progress is made in their writing. We've had strong pieces come into class that leave the session ready for submission.

In Novel II, the work is longer form, and the class is designed around making real progress in one's novel. We talk more specifically about structure in longer form pieces. We talk about problems unique to advancing and sticking with the longer form, particularly that middle-of-the-novel muddle or shutdown that people tend to experience. Our in-class exercises and assignments are focused on deepening and broadening the novel in which our writers are immersed: clarifying scene, raising tension, deepening character, recognizing themes naturally emerging from the work and making them zing. My novel students tend to get as much out of workshopping their classmates' work as having theirs workshopped, and I'm always amazed by how the different pieces in workshop manage to speak to each other.

WWLA: Both of these classes are for more intermediate writers. How do workshops help writers that already have a project underway?

Kate: We usually get a good mix of levels in both classes and levels of progress in the writers' work. I have writers who come into both classes who want to use the course for intensive revision mixed in with writers who are simply trying to finish a piece or a novel or who are intermediate level but are trying something new. What's lovely is the workshop formula supports writers at any level of progress in their work.The issues that arise in workshop tend to lead to larger lessons for everyone.

WWLA: What are you working on right now?

Kate: I am always writing. I have a non-genre novel and a middle grade book making the rounds with editors, but I have learned that waiting is not a useful activity. I just sent a draft of my new horror novel to my beta readers and am working on a short story for an upcoming anthology. In the meantime, a new book is calling me. I keep setting whatever I'm working on aside to answer its call.

In anticipation of our summer schedule launch later this week, here is all the WWLA news that’s fit to print!

Neelanjana Banerjee appeared with Kate Tempest as part of the LA Public Library’s ALOUD series. You can listen to their conversation here.

Katie Barnes and Joyce Salter will both attend the Aspen Summer Words conference in June to work on memoir with Darin Strauss.

Sara Campbell’s essay “The Goblin King and Me” appears in the Barrelhouse anthology And The Stars Look Very Different Today: Writers Reflect on David Bowie.

Andrea Ciannavei began work as a staff writer for the television series The Path on Hulu. Also, as part of Mass Rhetoric: A New Works Festival, Andrea’s play The Winstons will be presented in a rehearsed staged reading format at Symphony Space NYC at the end of June.

WWLA alumna Claire Cronin recorded an album with Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, Came Down a Storm.

At this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April, Chris Daley moderated the panel “Fiction: Lives Unraveling,” Ivy Pochoda appeared on the panel “Fiction: Perspective & Perception,” Diana Wagman appeared on the panel “Fiction: The Art of the Real,” and Margaret Wappler appeared on the panel “Fiction: Lives Intertwined.”

Members of Chris Daley’s spring 2016 Memoir Writing workshop—Teri Carson, Marie Condron, Melissa Haley, DeLon Howell, Louisa Levine, Camille Lowry, and Jamie Wong—will read from their work at the Bar Covell Sidebar on Friday, June 17 at 7:30 pm.

Christopher DeWan’s book Hoopty Time Machines: Fairy Tales for Grown Ups will launch on September 21 at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, and it is currently available for preorder. Christopher also just re-joined the faculty at the California State Summer School for the Arts as its new Chair of Creative Writing. 

Terrance Flynn performed a version of his essay “Ambrosia” on the Moth Main Stage in Santa Barbara in April.

Amy Forstadt’s story “Tom Stayed, Tom Left” was published in Pif Magazine.

McSweeney’s ran Anita Gill’s essay “Introducing The White Savior Review” and her essay “Lesson Plans” was published by Hippocampus Magazine.

Chenel King will be joining the Otis College MFA program in the fall.

Karen Lentz will be attending the Northwestern University Master’s in Journalism program starting in the fall.

Edan Lepucki reviewed four children’s books for The New York Times Book Review.

In Edible Ojai & Ventura County, Miriam Mack’s article “Paving the Way” recalls her involvement in the first farmers’ market in the county.

Anthony J. Mohr has published two essays: “Midnight Auto” in Prick of the Spindle and “Super Summer Spectacular” in Compose. Jessica Ripka’s essay “Brother’s Keeper” will be published in the June 2016 issue of Six Hens.

Stephanie Ross was accepted to the Master Class in Playwriting with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Joshua Harmon at the 92nd St. Y in June.

Kate Martin Rowe will study creative nonfiction at the low residency Bennington College MFA program starting this summer.

Megan Stephan wrote about children’s books in her essay “Portable and Infinitely Useful” for Public Books.

Drunken Boat published Caroline Tracey’s essay “Reading the Drought on the Eastern Side.”

We’re so excited for Margaret Wappler’s debut novel Neon Green to be published next month by Unnamed Press! Both Neon Green and Christopher DeWan’s forthcoming collection Hoopty Time Machines appeared in Big Other’s list of the Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2016. Margaret also wrote about The Jungle Book and Kipling's colonialist background for PrimeMind.

Writing Workshops LA—alongside Tumblr, Catapult, Nouvella, and Unnamed Press—had a raucous party on March 31 (pictured above) off-site from the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference held this year in Los Angeles. During the conference, Seth Fischer read at the AWP LGBT Caucus Reading, Edan Lepucki moderated the panel “Build It and They Will Come: Creating a School and Community Outside Academia,” and Dawn Dorland Perry moderated the panel “Does America Still Dream?” Dawn also participated in the panel “Succeed Better: The Many Ways Our Words Can Bear Fruit.” Seth Fischer, Kate Maruyama, and WWLA alumnus Catie Disabato appeared on the panel “Through the Closet: Writing Human Complexity in Queer Characters in Fiction” and Catie also appeared with Edan on the panel “The Business of Publishing Your First Novel: Author and Publisher Perspectives.” Elline Lipkin participated in the panel “Once I was That Girl: Creative Writing Pedagogy for Tween and Teen Girls.” 

Nice work, everybody!

Writers! We’ll be launching our summer 2016 class schedule next week, but in the meantime, we wanted to share some faculty announcements about the lovely and talented people above (clockwise from top left).  

First, after a successful term teaching westside mixed levels fiction, Christopher DeWan will move up from guest to full instructor. Stay tuned for what he’ll be teaching this summer!

Christopher DeWan has published more than forty short stories in journals including A cappella Zoo, Bartleby Snopes, Necessary Fiction, Passages North, and wigleaf, and he has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. His collection of domestic fabulism, Hoopty Time Machines, is forthcoming from Atticus Books in September 2016. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the California Institute of the Arts and a degree in philosophy and theater from Cornell University, and he is the Acting Chair of Creative Writing at the California State Summer School for the Arts. Learn more at http://christopherdewan.com.

In other good news, Laura Warrell will also be joining us as a full instructor on the westside. Welcome, Laura!

Laura Warrell has worked as a writing instructor for several colleges in Boston and Los Angeles, including the Berklee College of Music and Northeastern University. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Salon, The Writer, Post Road Magazine, the Boston Globe and Racialicious, as well as Broadsheet in Madrid, Spain and other international publications.  She was a contributing writer to Numero Cinq Magazine and an assistant fiction editor at Upstreet Magazine. Laura is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and has attended residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Tin House Writer’s Workshop.

We are also excited to announce two new guest instructors for the summer: Bernard Cooper and Kim Young! On Wednesday, we will reveal the classes they'll be offering. Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know!

Bernard Cooper is the author of the memoir, My Avant-Garde  Education, recently published by W.W. Norton. He is also the author of The Bill From My Father, Maps To Anywhere, A  Year of Rhymes, Truth Serum, and a collection of short stories, Guess Again.  Cooper is the recipient of the PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, the O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim grant, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in  literature. His work has appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Essays of 1988, 1995, and 1997, 2002, and 2008. His work has also appeared in magazines and literary reviews including Granta, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, Story, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. He has contributed to National Public Radio's "This American Life" and for six years was the art critic for Los Angeles Magazine. http://www.bernardcooper.net

Kim Young is the author of Night Radio, winner of the 2011 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize (The University of Utah Press) and finalist for the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Divided Highway (Dancing Girl Press, 2008). She is the founding editor of Chaparral, an online journal featuring poetry from Southern California, and her poems and essays have appeared in Los Angeles Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hotel Amerika, Western Humanities Review, POOL and elsewhere. She teaches at California State University Northridge and holds an MFA from Bennington College, where she received a Jane Kenyon Scholarship in poetry.

We hope you can join us for summer schooling.

WWLA Spring 2016 News

Fiction instructor Neelanjana Banerjee is one of the judges for 1888.center's novella prize. She also will be in conversation with author Kate Tempest at the Los Angeles Public Library’s ALOUD series on May 10th. 

Former student Claire Cronin went on from WWLA to graduate with an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine in 2015 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at University of Georgia.

WWLA Director Chris Daley reviewed Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature for the Los Angeles Times. As part of the DUM DUM Zine series “Vox and Voices,” Chris read an excerpt from her novel-in-progress The Power at Stories Bookstore in Echo Park and her essay “How to Love Los Angeles” at The Hi Hat in Highland Park. Her photo “Figure Warehouse” will be published in the “Doubling” issue of Gesture Literary Journal, and her photo “Salvation Mountain” will appear in the next issue of Redivider. 

Sara Fowler and Annette Wong were both finalists for the 2016 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship.

Huff/Post50 published Staci Greason’s essay “Love, The Final Frontier.”

“Sculpting Identity: A History of the Nose Job” by Tiffany Hearsay was published in The Atlantic’s Object Lessons series. Tiffany’s essay “In Memoriam of the Corpse: Death Denial in Los Angeles” also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

WWLA Founder and Director of Special Projects Edan Lepucki wrote about the wonders of post-partum underwear for New York Magazine’s The Cut. She also reflected on “The Anxiety of Influence: Children’s Books and Their Grown-Up Counterparts” and “Flossing Your Teeth and Reading Dickens: Resolutions for the New Year” for The Millions.

Poetry instructor Elline Lipkin was named the new Poet Laureate of Altadena! Her appointment will run from May 2016–2018. Her poem "Florida" was published in February 2016 in the new edition of Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal at Washington College. Her poem "Among Mothers" is forthcoming in the spring volume of TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics.

Bill Olmstead’s story “Let’s Reconvene on Tuesday” was published in Café Irreal’s winter issue. Bill also appeared at Book Soup on March 4 to read from his story collection Narratives in Pill Form.

Zan Romanoff wrote an ode to Los Angeles—while also reviewing “City of Gold,” the documentary about food critic Jonathan Gold—for Lucky Peach.

Merna Skinner's chapbook A Brief History of Two Aprons was accepted by Finishing Line Press and will be published in April 2016.

Beth Ida Stern and her nonfiction instructor Dawn Dorland Perry are both reading as part of the June 12 Roar Shack reading series hosted in Echo Park by David Rocklin.

Sally Stevens’s story “Farmer’s Wife Turns Hubby Into Scarecrow” will appear on episode 40 of the No Extra Words podcast in March.

Fiction instructor Diana Wagman reviewed KooKooLand: A Memoir by Gloria Norris for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Annette Wong's poem "Reckoning" was published online by Silver Birch Press in March 2016.

Kim Young’s essay “Panic” was published in the Winter 2016 issue of Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal.

WWLA is living it up at AWP!  If you’re attending the conference, please stop by our pool party (sans pool) on Thursday evening, 3.31 (see poster above). We’d love to have a drink with you.

WWLA instructors will also be participating in the following readings and panels:

Wednesday, 3/31:

7 pm Avenue 50 Studio Seth Fischer will participate in the AWP LGBT Caucus Reading

Thursday, 3/31:

3:00 pm Room 503 Dawn Dorland Perry will be moderating the panel “Does America Still Dream? with Jennifer Haigh, Brando Skyhorse, Jodi Angel, and Teka Lark

4:30 pm Room 503 Edan Lepucki will be moderating the panel “Build It and They Will Come: Creating a School and Community Outside Academia” with Julia Fierro, Sonya Larsen, Michelle Wildgen, and Jason Koo.  

6:30 pm Little Easy (216 W. 5th St. Los Angeles 90013) Stephanie Ford will participate in the Four Way Books offsite reading. 7:00 pm Monty Bar LAWP PARTY!  Co-hosted with Nouvella, Unnamed Press, Catapult, and Tumblr!  

Friday, 4/1:

10:30 am Room 404AB Seth Fischer,  Kate Maruyama, and WWLA alumnus Catie Disabato will be on the panel “Through the Closet: Writing Human Complexity in Queer Characters in Fiction” with Marcos Martinez, and Jeanne Thorton.

10:30 am Room 505 Elline Lipkin will be on the panel “Once I was That Girl: Creative Writing Pedagogy for Tween and Teen Girls,” with Allison Deegan, Nancy Gruver, Margaret Stohl, and Marlys West. 1:30 pm Scott James Book Fair Stage Stephanie Ford will participate in “Four Way Books Reads"

4:00 pm Tables 612, 610 Stephanie Ford will be signing her debut poetry collection All Pilgrim.

Saturday:

9:00 am Room 407 Dawn Dorland Perry will participate in the panel “Succeed Better: The Many Ways Our Words Can Bear Fruit,” with David Ebenbach, Anna McCormally, Margaret Luongo, and Amy Gottlieb

12:00 pm Gold Salon 2 JW Marriott Edan Lepucki and WWLA alumnus Catie Disabato will be on the panel “The Business of Publishing Your First Novel: Author and Publisher Perspectives” with Dennis Johnson, Kirk Lynn, and Maxwell Neely-Cohen.                                                     

Back by popular demand for the third time! Seth Fischer’s Show & Tell seminar is coming up on Sunday, January 31, and there are a few spots left. We asked him some questions about the seminar, and you can see for yourself below that it’s going to rock. Email us at @enrollment@writingworkshopsla.com to enroll.

—We hear writers talk about showing and telling all the time. What do they usually mean?

This is precisely the problem at the heart of this seminar: I'm not sure if anyone really knows what "show don't tell" means. It means so many different things. Some seem to mean that showing is synonymous with specificity. Some seem to understand that you should write everything in scene. Some seem to mean that nothing should be explained and that everything should be inferred. Most of this advice is good in moderation; taken to its extreme, this advice will result in something very long and hard to read.

Imagine how bored we would be with a detailed account of Sherlock Holmes's nose hairs. Imagine Philip Marlowe if we had to go into the bathroom with him every time he brushed his teeth (which might, admittedly, have been rarely). Imagine Joan Didion recounting the loss of her husband without once "telling" us how he died. Summary and scene are more precise categories, providing us with a way of thinking about writing that we can actually use. One of the great challenges of writing is navigating time and detail with precision while not confusing anyone—thinking in terms of summary and scene is a great way to go about learning how to do that.

—Do you have an example of excellent scene? Masterful summary? A combination of both?

James Baldwin is really the master of this, and I'll give lots of examples in the seminar. In fact, I'll actually chart it out for you, so you can see it, and then we'll apply that to other pieces of writing, including your own.

But for the sake of this question, to give you a taste, let me start with the beginning of the classic short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor, because it does both so well.

"The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy."

All this is summary. Some might call it "telling." Should a creative writing teacher have reprimanded Flannery O'Connor for "telling?" Maybe, but better to think of it as summary. And good summary, at that. It's precise. It captures the voice. It gives us the information we need so that we can know where the tension is and who the characters are. Then it moves into scene:

"He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal."

Notice here we are in a specific time and place and direct action is happening, which means we are now in a scene. We live our lives in a specific time and place, so scenes help us feel immersed, just as if we are there. And because of the summary, we have tension in the place where we are immersed. We have a sense something bad is going to happen. Then it continues:

"'Now look here, Bailey,' she said, see here, read this, and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. 'Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed towards Florida ...'"

There. In just five and a half sentences, half of which are scene and half of which are summary, O'Connor has managed to set up the entire story. We know what's going to happen. Maybe not how, but we know what, and we want to read more to find out how. It's in the pacing of the summary and scene, of the way she deftly handles giving us information, allowing us to infer some things but to know others, and immersing us in a time and place. It's a trickier juggling act than you'd think.

—Is this seminar appropriate for both fiction and nonfiction writers?

YES.

Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, Zadie Smith, Paul Auster, Zora Neale Hurston—it's hard to find a master writer who doesn't write in both genres. That's because while there are different conventions in fiction and nonfiction, they take from the same toolkit. One of those tools is being able to write strong scene and summary. I'll use examples from both nonfiction and fiction, and you'll see that when it comes to scene and summary, nonfiction and fiction really aren't all that different. 

Seth Fischer is a current contributor and former editor at The Rumpus, and his work has also appeared in PANK, Guernica, Best Sex Writing, and other journals and anthologies. His essay “Notes from a Unicorn” was also selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2013, and he has attended residencies at Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, and elsewhere. He is also a professional developmental editor of novels and memoirs. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, where he also teaches.

Instructor News

Edan Lepucki welcomed a second child, a daughter, Ginger Dean Brown, on November 2, 2015. 

Kate Maruyama's short stories are appearing in two new anthologies: Winter Horror Stories, proceeds from which go to the Horror Writers Association hardship fund, and Phantasma: Stories. Leslie Parry was awarded a creative writing fellowship grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Dawn Dorland Perry received two residencies to support her novel-in-progress Econoline and her nonfiction work. In 2016, she'll spend five weeks at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center (NE) and 25 days at Ragdale (IL). She was recently named a Teaching Scholar for Grub Street's 2016 Muse & the Marketplace conference held annually in Boston. Locally in LA, she was featured at the RoarShack, Cirque Salon, and Tongue & Groove reading series last year. 

Diana Wagman sold her first YA novel, Extraordinary October, to Ig Publishing. It is due out in October 2016.

Student News

Sara Campbell reflected on Fred Schneider in the Georgia music issue of Oxford American, available now. You can find her new series of interviews with Angelenos, discussing how they balance making their creative work with making at living, at LACanvas.com. Teri Carson will be attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on full scholarship to complete her BFA in the fall. Catie Disabato wrote about her favorite books of 2015 for the annual Year in Reading series at The Millions. 

Jennifer Alise Drew and her husband Jake welcomed their second son, Theo Austin Drew, born May 21, 2015. 

Terrance Flynn’s essay “Having Faith” was listed as a Notable Essay in the 2015 edition of Best American Essays. His essay “Ambrosia” went live at The Normal School on December 10. 

Anita Gill will be attending the Pacific University low-residency MFA program starting in January. 

Zan Ramonoff revealed the cover of her debut novel, A Song to Take the World Apart, on her blog. The book will be published by Knopf in September. 

Two writers in our first submission support group have already had work accepted: Cynthia Romanowski’s story “Live Action Regret“ will appear on the No Extra Words podcast, and Sally Stevens’ poem “Prayer for Jon“ appears in the inaugural issue of MockingHeart Review. Hopefully, more to come soon!

Lauren Westerfield was promoted to Associate Essays Editor at The Rumpus.

Taking a fiction workshop for the first time can be a daunting prospect, but Kate Maruyama is here to demystify it for you. 

If I had never studied fiction before, what could I look forward to learning in your class? We're going to take a closer look at several specific tools of fiction, examining how they work in pieces that we read together in class. We will discuss, voice, character, point of view, plot/structure, scene and dialogue and do exercises designed to strengthen each of these skills. The exercises have a double advantage of opening up students' stories and characters in new ways, and several of my past students have found new inroads into their work in these exercises, even when they thought they were stuck. Students will come away with new material generated in class as well as the tools of fiction to take back to their other work. What is one of your favorite in-class or homework assignments? I love the exercises where we take characters out for a drive. We put our characters up on a soapbox and let them rant for a while. Sometimes we let them argue and say all the things they haven't been able to vocalize within their stories. Students take what they've learned in these exercises and their characters sometimes lead their stories in unexpected directions.

If you had to suggest one story or novel (or craft book) for a student to read before taking your workshop, what would it be and why? For a giant handbook writers will refer to at any stage in their writing life, I highly recommend Jeff Vandermeer's Wonderbook, which is chock full of tools, techniques, and exercises as well as definitions and examples. My favorite thing about it is that it's not bossy, it's simply useful. It's kind of the gift that keeps on giving.

Kate Maruyama is the author of Harrowgate, a new novel from 47North. Her short work has appeared in Stoneboat, Arcadia Magazine, and Controlled Burn as well as on Salon, The Rumpus, and The Citron Review. She co-founded AnnotationNation.com, a website that looks at fiction in terms of craft. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Seth Fischer is one of our most popular instructors, and his Nonfiction I workshop starts Tuesday! Click here to learn more. We asked him some questions about the class so that writers new to WWLA can get a sense of his style. Tell your friends who might be interested and/or sign up today! To enroll, email us at enrollment@writingworkshopsla.com.

If I were a student new to nonfiction, what could I look forward to learning in your class?

On my first day of class, one of the first things I say is "We’re here to tell true stories. You will not be required to write a single thesis statement." It's one of my favorite teaching moments, because students come alive when I say it. I can almost see a lifetime of painful writing assignments flashing before their eyes, and then, when they realize that this is not what the course will be made up of, they smile, their shoulders relax, and they finally grab some hummus or a glass of wine. I encourage these new writers to think about their nonfiction not in terms of talking points or argumentation, but in terms of character and scene and sometimes plot. And I teach that this can be a very powerful way of looking at life.  

Joan Didion writes: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Note that she does not write to prove what she already knows. If nothing else, I hope my students leave the class knowing that writing is more powerful as a tool of exploration than it is as a tool of persuasion.

What is one of your favorite in-class or homework assignments?

Writing nonfiction can be hard, because in most of it, at least, you need to learn to see yourself as a character. In one of the first classes, I have students split up into pairs and interview each other with a list of very specific and unexpected questions, like telling the story of a scar or describing the history of their middle names. (Obviously, students are not required to answer questions they don’t feel comfortable answering.) This works miracles in helping people see themselves from the outside, but more importantly, it somehow helps everyone become fast friends. If there is one non-writing related thing that I hope everyone gets out of this class, it’s a community. Sometimes, years after a class, I’ll hear that my students are still meeting up with each other to write, to read each other’s work, or just to get drinks. This makes me so so happy.

If you had to suggest one book for a student to read before taking your workshop, what would it be and why?

It wouldn't even be a whole book! It'd be a single essay: "The Love of My Life" by Cheryl Strayed. In terms of its content, it is so emotionally compelling, but I've read lots of essays from people with emotionally compelling stories that haven't led to the same sort of visceral reading experience. The question I ask my students to ask is: "Why is this working?" The short answer is that it has to do with the way she uses scene and summary and reflection, the way she paces these things beautifully, and the way she uses details to keep us reading and to make us feel like we’re there. For the long answer, you'll have to take the class ...

Seth Fischer is a current contributor and former editor at The Rumpus, and his work has also appeared in Best Sex Writing, Buzzfeed, PANK, Guernica, and other journals and anthologies. His essay “Notes from a Unicorn” was selected as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2O13, and he was a Jentel Artist Residency fellow. He is also a professional developmental editor of novels and memoirs that have received excellent reviews from Kirkus, ForeWord, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, where he also teaches.