Festival Saturday Pass for WRITERS (MasterClasses)

Mastering the Submission Process

 Have you written and polished your short story and now it's ready for submission? Does the submission process seem daunting or mysterious to you? Are you confused about where to send your story and how? Or perhaps you have submitted a few times, been disappointed by the result, and are reluctant to try again. Writer, you are not alone! 

Jann Everard has made hundreds of submissions of short and flash fiction, as well as short creative nonfiction. She's also read hundreds of submissions as a reader for literary journals such as The Fiddlehead. She'll walk you through Seven Simple Steps that will help you get your hard work out in the world and under consideration for publication. Practical and action-oriented, Jann will answer your questions about how and where to submit, how to track your submissions, what happens to your story after you've submitted, and how to manage the strong emotions that come with sharing your work.

Place as Character: Crafting Dynamic Settings for Your Stories

In this workshop, participants will explore the craft of creating vivid & authentic settings, transforming places into characters that enrich their stories. Through practical exercises & discussions, writers will learn how to infuse their settings with life, making them integral to their storytelling.

Tell the Truth but Tell it Spec: Using the Genre Conventions of Horror and Science Fiction to Tell Stories that Matter

Sometimes our most important stories are our most painful ones; stories like these can be particularly difficult to tell about not only because of the subject matter, which readers may want to distance themselves from, but because the language around these stories becomes clichéd.  In this workshop, participants will explore how certain conventions of genre fiction, particularly those of both horror and science fiction, can lend themselves to new, innovative ways to tell hard stories in ways readers want to engage with. This workshop will discuss how to use genre fiction conventions as metaphor, the importance of asking “what if” when writing speculative fiction, and how these borrowed genre fiction conventions can give us outlines for our own most important short stories. After discussing example stories, participants will write their own opening for a speculative short story.