The Work Room
Online Workshops, Craft Seminars, + Manuscript Consultations
A program of The Shipman Agency
Please note: For questions regarding Work Room classes, please contact Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com
Faculty: John Manuel Arias, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Fatima Bhutto, Sumita Chakraborty, Kavita Das, Jaquira Díaz, Edgar Gomez, Garth Greenwell, Maria Dahvana Headley, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Patricia Spears Jones, Joseph Keckler, Porochista Khakpour, Stephen Kuusisto, Dorothea Lasky, Greg Mania, Megan Milks, An Xiao (Ana) Mina, Jamie Quatro, Khadijah Queen, Danniel Schoonebeek, David Shields, Javier Sinay, Rob Spillman, Meredith Talusan, David L. Ulin, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Jen Winston
The Work Room was created in response to the pandemic. It has been so successful it is now a permanent feature of The Shipman Agency’s offerings. Here you will find opportunities to deepen your craft or get your manuscript in shape while studying with some of the world’s leading authors, many of whom offer classes exclusively through The Work Room. Students receive a graduate level experience that will challenge their assumptions and broaden the scope of what their work can do.
All workshops and seminars will be hosted on The Shipman Agency’s Zoom account. For manuscript consultations, you’ll communicate directly with the author. Craft Seminars + Master Classes generally have open enrollment. Workshops have capped enrollment.
Information on how to access classes will be sent 2 days prior to the start date. All classes are recorded. If you want to attend but the time zone doesn’t work for you, register for the class and email Kate Mabus, kate@theshipmanagency.com to let her know you’ll need the recording. She’ll send you a password protected link that will be good for one week. Recordings will be viewable for 4 weeks after the class date.
A portion of all Work Room proceeds will be donated to ACLU Drag Defense Fund
Books by Work Room faculty, and new and forthcoming books from our clients, are available on our affiliate page at Bookshop.org.
ALL GENRES
6 Sessions: Tuesdays, February 18, 25 and March 4, 11, 18, 25
7:00-9:00pm ET
Ryan Berg
12 students
This 6-week writing workshop is taught by award-winning writer Ryan Berg, author of No House to Call My Home: Love, Family and Other Transgressions.
This course invites students of all levels to confront the stories they’ve been avoiding, exploring how personal narrative blends experience, reflection, and imagination. Through readings, discussions, and workshops, we’ll investigate how authors transform difficult truths into art, using structure, pacing, dialogue, and other narrative techniques.
We’ll engage with works by writers such as Melissa Febos, Carmen Maria Machado, Joan Wickersham, Alexander Chee, Esme Weijun Wang, Kiese Laymon, and Cathy Park Hong, whose stories push boundaries by combining traditional and contemporary styles. Students will practice methods for entering their own narratives, creating original pieces, and giving thoughtful feedback to one another. Each participant will have the opportunity to workshop a piece of writing, gaining insight into how subjective experience can resonate within the broader context of the world.
Workshop Highlights:
Instructor and peer feedback
Generative writing exercises
One full scholarship and two partial scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Sunday, February 9.
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, March 22 + 23
2:00-4:00pm ET
Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour is the author of five critically acclaimed books (three novels, a memoir, and an essay collection), all from major publishers (Grove, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Knopf Doubleday). She's taught creative writing and literature since 2003, moving mainly to online teaching since 2019. Her essays, criticism, investigative features, and profiles can be found in newspapers and magazines all over the world, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, BOMB, Poets & Writers, and more. She's had fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Civitella Ranieri, and more. Born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles suburbs, she currently lives in New York City. She explains her inspiration for this craft seminar:
I’d argue that the most important practice for prose writers to cultivate is a poetry habit.
I’ve been considered a “lyrical prose writer” since I first published in 2007, but I credit my obsession with poetry in how I got there. I studied poetry in undergrad and grad schools (Sarah Lawrence College BA, Johns Hopkins MA), but my love of poetry goes way beyond academic interest. In Iranian culture, poetry is the prime mode of literary expression. In so many of our spiritual practices, poetry is at the heart of all the wisdom. No matter what culture you come from, it’s my belief that poetry is the key to finding your way back to language. I recommend poetry to students who are experience writer’s block; I bring poems to prose writers who need to get back to the fundamentals of strong sentences; I share poems with any human being whose psyche needs that essential nourishment. Poetry’s lessons go way beyond simply inspiring—poetry can get artists to explore the tension between confession and revelation. We will look at a wide range of poems that can be used as everything from prompts to templates to roadmaps for the kind of critical self-examination that makes great prose possible.
Workshop Highlights:
Introduction and refresher for how to read poems as prose writers
Packet with poems that we will go over in class
Exercises to try in class and beyond
Two full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by March 14.
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, June 7 + 8
12:00-2:00pm ET
Jenny Johnson
Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, BOMB Magazine, and The New York Times. Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship, and a NEA Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.
What are your strategies for conveying what you see, picture, or imagine through language? What do you notice? How long do you hold the gaze? What might happen if you held it longer, if you kept looking, if you refused to turn away from your subject? Furthermore, how is the work of a writer like that of a filmmaker? In this class, we will consider how cinematic techniques can be applied to poem making and descriptive prose. You’ll be asked to consider the types of camerawork you already employ when describing and the angles of observation that you tend to overlook. Come prepared to experiment with close-ups, aerial views, jump cuts, interior and exterior shots, etc. We’ll be taking cues mostly from poets, Chen Chen, Geffrey Davis, Jean Garrigue, Kamilah Aisha Moon, and K. Iver, to name a few, but writers of all genres interested in strengthening their imagery are welcome.
Workshop Highlights:
Observe camera work in model poems and discuss its effects
Reflect upon your patterns of observation and set new intentions for seeing
Generate new work that integrates a variety of camera shots
This class has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 30.
Fiction
1 Session: Sunday, March 2
2:00-5:00pm ET
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
20 students
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller and the recipient of a HONOLULU Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Joyland, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and is an Affiliate Faculty in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles and a Lecturer in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
For writers working with inherited or ancestral stories, the material can feel like both an incredible gift and an overwhelming burden. How does one honor the past while making space for contemporary concerns and interests? How do we write into those blurred lines, embracing the mythology, folklore, superstitions, and cultural histories we’ve inherited, while affording our passions and obsessions space on the page? I take both pride and pleasure in considering ancestral stories in conversation with contemporary ones, and this craft intensive will explore exactly that, as we discuss the responsibility of carrying forth these tales while inviting into the conversation both imagination as well as our own writerly obsessions. Through close examination of fiction by writers who are also working with ancestral tales, we will study their craft choices surrounding plot, point of view, character, and details, and we will take comfort in the company of artmakers communing with voices of the past.
This craft intensive will include close readings, small group discussions, and generative writing exercises participants can use to produce new work or engage with (and maybe re-see) their existing works in progress. Together, we will learn to write our way into existing mythologies, driven by the ideas, interests, and characters we simply can’t shake.
Workshop Highlights:
Writers will have the opportunity to get honest about the challenges of committing ancestral stories to the page while receiving comfort and support in the communal nature of ancestral art-making.
Writers will study fiction and nonfiction grounded in ancestral storytelling with close attention paid to character, point of view, detail, and plot.
Writers will engage in generative writing exercises designed to support existing works in progress and/or spark new work, with the opportunity to share writing with the class.
One full and one partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, February 22.
1 Session: Thursday, March 6
6:00-8:00pm ET
Michael Zapata
This one-part seminar is taught by award winning novelist and editor Michael Zapata, author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, among others, and founding editor of Make Literary Magazine. He is the recent recipient of the Meier Foundation Artist Achievement Award. In Axios, Michael Zapata’s work was called an important “part of the growing Latino-futurism movement.”
“The walls are the publishers of the poor.” - Eduardo Galeano
From the Mexican Revolution to student and indigenous led protests in Ecuador, to national teacher strikes, to the feminist Combahee River Collective, every movement for social change starts with both the inequitable conditions that created it and also a narrative of how the past and future collide with the present. Literature, with all its vast interiority and mind-bending possibility, is vital to resistance and revolution.
Through selected readings and discussions of multi-genre writers such as Eduardo Galeano, Roberto Bolaño, China Miéville, Audre Lorde, and Emily Raboteau, this class will explore the indispensable relationship between revolution, resistance, and writing. This class will include a short lecture on writers from various social movements in history, craft discussions on multi-genre works (poetry, CNF, fiction, and hybrid forms), and a writing exercise.
Workshop Highlights:
A fun and joyful study of revolutionary writers.
A deeper understanding of how writers who confront a social or political order can impact our own work.
The seminar will also include a Q&A.
Two full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Wednesday, February 26.
1 Session: Sunday, March 23
2:00-5:00pm ET
Tiphanie Yanique
Tiphanie Yanique is an award winning teacher and writer. In this craft class she will focus on ending fiction stories using decolonial theory and emotional engagement. Students should have a piece of fiction they are already working on, and be prepared to learn immediately actionable skills.
Knowing how and when to end a piece of fiction is one of the hardest craft elements for any writer—even masterful writers. Yet, the end is what the reader is left with, and thus has a huge impact on how a reader perceives the whole work.
This is a 3 hour craft class which will include a lecture, group work, reading, dynamic class conversation, writing practice and feedback. We will be studying the art of great endings in fiction, and also writing great fictional endings. We will consider the political and social aspects of endings, and stretch towards endings that serve our creative, intellectual emotional and social hopes.
Workshop Highlights:
You will learn what endings are for in fiction
You will devise your own sophisticated concepts on what makes a good ending
You will implement these ideas into drafting an ending for your story
Two full scholarships are available, in addition to partial scholarships. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, March 14.
25 Sessions: every other Monday
March 24, 2025-February 23, 2026
6:00-8:30pm ET
Isle McElroy
12 students
Payment plans available, please contact Kate Mabus, Kate@theshipmanagency.com
Isle McElroy is the author of the novels The Atmospherians and People Collide, which was named a book of 2023 by Vogue, NPR, Vulture, and the New York Times Critics. Abbi Jacobson is currently adapting the novel for Television. Their writing has appeared in the Esquire, GQ, The New York Times, The Cut, and elsewhere. This is their third year teaching the year-long first novel generator.
Novels are written alone. But they don’t have to be revised and encouraged alone. And a supportive community of writers can make a huge difference between a few opening chapters tossed in the trash and a full manuscript emailed to agents.
The goal of this course is to write and revise a full novel manuscript over twelve months. The difficult part of the class will be maintaining a consistent writing routine—but I hope the support of a writing workshop will make the process if not easier, at least a little less lonely. The first section of the course will consist of craft lectures and readings of first novels by writers like Toni Morrison, Justin Torres, Raven Leilani, Alexander Chee, and others. This section will focus on how established writers launched their careers as novelists. Throughout this section, writers will also complete craft exercises intended to aid in their writing process. Writers will have an opportunity to share new passages–should they wish–every time the class meets. During the workshop phase, each student will receive peer workshops of their manuscript and will meet with the instructor individually four times to discuss their work-in-progress. The final month of the course will be devoted to professionalization. Agents, editors, and published authors will join the class to talk about their experiences in the literary world. This will be an opportunity for writers to speak openly about their expectations and aims for their careers with established literary professionals.
Workshop Highlights:
Learn to draft and revise a novel
Learn professional strategies for selling a novel
Read the first novels of established authors to understand the arc of a literary career
One full scholarship is available. To apply, please provide a brief one-paragraph statement of financial need that indicates, yes or no, whether your participation is contingent on a scholarship. Please also attach a 5-10 page writing sample, which does not need to be from your novel-in-progress. All applications materials should be sent to kate@theshipmanagency.com by Saturday, March 1st.
3 Sessions: Sundays, April 6, 13, 20
2:00-4:00pm ET
Ayşegül Savaş
Ayşegül Savaş is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, as well as a work of non-fiction,The Wilderness, which will be published in October, 2025. Her short story collection, Long Distance, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker and have also been published in The Paris Review, Granta, The Yale Review, among others. She has taught creative writing at the Sorbonne, and lives in Paris.
Are you daunted by the idea of plot? Do you feel stuck once you have set up the landscape and characters of your fictional world? Plot, for some writers, can be the most challenging pat of finishing a short story or novel, but this difficulty may be alleviated by shifting the focus of the narrative drive. In this seminar, we will consider plot as a time structure rather than a series of events we must invent to keep the story going. In each session, we will examine the plot structures of several fictional works and discuss how their internal clocks create a sense of momentum. We will also look at different types of time structures (linear, looping, repeating...) Most importantly, we will discuss how these different forms can organically dictate the content of a fictional work.
Workshop Highlights:
Gain confidence in your ability to create plot
Gain familiarity with analyzing a work's structure
Think about time structures in your own writing.
One full and one partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, March 28.
1 Session: Saturday, April 19
1:00-4:00pm ET
Sunil Yapa
Learn three-act structure with a best-selling novelist and UCLA-trained screenwriter Sunil Yapa. He is the author of the best-selling novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, called “fast-paced and unflinching” by the New Yorker, a “genuine tour-de-force,” by the Seattle Times, and was a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award. Sunil is an experienced teacher, having taught at The University of Nevada Lake Tahoe, The Center for Fiction, and with Pam Houston’s Writing by Writers. He holds a MFA in fiction from the CUNY Hunter MFA in NYC where he worked with Colum McCann and Peter Carey. He also holds a tv writing certificate from UCLA TV & FILM and has written extensively in fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays.
Using clips from Toy Story, The Godfather, The Great Gatsby, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, My Brilliant Friend, Palm Springs, and more, we will break down and highlight the ten crucial scenes in every successful drama. In this introductory one-day craft seminar we will learn the ups and downs of three act structure: from the inciting incident to the moment of despair, from the character’s ghost to their moment of revelation. You’ll leave with a deeper understand of how movies and shows work their magic under the surface—to use in your own work or just to wow your friends with your sparkling insights about this year’s Oscar winners.
Workshop Highlights:
Study with a best selling novelist and screenwriter
Learn the ten key scenes in every drama
Follow along as we break down clips of your favorite movies and shows
This class has 2 full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, April 11.
4 Sessions: Sundays, May 4, 11, 18, 25
11:00am-1:30pm ET
Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of eleven books, which have been translated into twenty-four languages. Many of her students have gone on to publish books of their own.
This class is for students who have completed a draft of a novel or a novella and would like to continue to work on it in the context of conversation, workshops, guidance, and mutual support. Each of the four sessions will focus on a different aspect of the art of revision, including character, structure, pacing, the beginning and ending, voice, and surprise.
Students will be put into smaller groups for more individual and closer readings of their work. The aim is to have a much better manuscript at the end of the month, clean and vital and unique and expressive of the writer.
Workshop Highlights:
Students are required to have a completed (or near-completed) draft of a novel that they intend to work on during this class.
There will be lots of time in class for dramatic revision and rethinking of the book, and time as well for elegant, smaller edits, in the context of conversation with others, and instructor-led exercises.
We will be working together in a non-competitive, supportive, warm, encouraging atmosphere.
This course has 2 scholarships available at a reduced fee of $200. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, April 25.
4 Sessions: Thursdays, May 8, 15, 22, 29
8:00-9:30pm ET
Sunil Yapa
Sunil is the author of the best-selling novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, called “fast-paced and unflinching” by the New Yorker, a “genuine tour-de-force,” by the Seattle Times, and was a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award. Sunil is an experienced teacher, having taught at The University of Nevada Lake Tahoe, The Center for Fiction, and with Pam Houston’s Writing by Writers. He holds a MFA in fiction from the CUNY Hunter MFA in NYC where he worked with Colum McCann and Peter Carey. He also holds a tv writing certificate from UCLA TV & FILM and has written extensively in fiction, non-fiction, and screenplays.
Often novelists and memoirists we get stuck between our high brow ambitions and the low brow demands of the market—poignant character studies without movement, or, a series of random plot moments that feels like empty fluff. The crux of this 4-week master class is how can we cross the divide; how can we use both character and plot to create a story that is as emotionally satisfying as it is gripping?
Using films, tv series, and novels—from Finding Nemo to Ferrante, Breaking Bad
to Moonlight—we will break down techniques to tell a story whose heart is a character’s deepest needs, contradictions, vulnerabilities, and secrets. I am a working novelist and screenwriter; my goal is to give you the screenwriting techniques I use everyday but adapted for novels and memoirs so that you can break through on your own project. Class includes watching two movies per week, one seminar meeting a week; a manuscript in progress is encouraged but not required.
Topics:
Week 1: You Can’t Always Get What You Want….
Week 2: Contradiction, Vulnerability, Secrets
Week 3: Every Story is a Love Story
Week 4: Hitchcock’s Ticking Bomb
Workshop Highlights:
Learn screenwriting tools from a novelist
Watch and breakdown 8 key films and shows
Masterclass to help you find an organic storytelling strategy that fits your needs
This class has 2 partial scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 2.
1 Session: Monday, June 9
7:00-9:00pm ET
Maurice Carlos Ruffin
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University and has optioned work to Hollywood. His most recent book is the novel is The American Daughters (One World, 2024). Other books include the story collection, The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You (One World, 2021), a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the Story Prize, and We Cast a Shadow (One World, 2019), which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize.
There's only one chance to leave a first impression. It's important for an author to know how to talk about their work to agents, editors, and producers. This class will offer generative exercises and pointed examples all designed to provide these tools. This class is for writers at the intermediate and advanced level who have already done considerable work on a book project.
Workshop Highlights:
Learn how to make an effective elevator pitch.
Learn how to draft a written proposal.
Gain insight into editor and agent expectations.
This course has 1 full scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 30.
2 Sessions: Wednesdays, June 11 + 18
7:00-9:00pm ET
Jess Row
Jess Row is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer who's published three collections of short stories: The Train to Lo Wu, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, and Storyknife (forthcoming from Ecco in 2026). His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Granta, Ploughshares, n+1, Conjunctions, Tin House, and three times in the Best American Short Stories. His other books include the novels Your Face in Mine and The New Earth, and the essay collection White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination.
How do you fit a complete story, a human drama, a beginning-middle-and-end, into a text that might be 2000 or 5000 words long? What makes a great short story feel so much longer, fuller, and richer than its length would imply? In this class I'll introduce a simple technique I've been teaching students for 25 years: a way to find the right point of entry into your story and exit out of it. I think it's the key to understanding how stories create meaningful drama in tiny spaces, or as Grace Paley put it, "enormous changes at the last minute."
In the first class we'll start off by reading some very short stories (no advance reading necessary) and talk about the principle of fulcrum and how to find it. Then we'll do some preliminary exercises and I'll give you a homework assignment. In the second class we'll listen to one another's stories and I'll give tips on how to build your story-writing skills with more reading and writing.
Workshop Highlights:
For beginners: this is your introduction to the technique that makes a short story happen.
For practicing writers: the fulcrum is a skill you can adapt to any kind of short story, conventional, genre, or wildly avant-garde.
For anyone who loves short stories: appreciating the fulcrum will give you new insight into how great story writers do what they do.
This class has 2 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Wednesday, June 4.
2 Sessions: Sundays, June 15 + 22
1:00-3:00pm ET
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Called a “twisted, twisty genius” by Vulture and “ferociously intelligent” by The New York Times, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a PEN Faulkner and Radcliffe award winning author of three novels. This two-part class is open to writers with any level of experience.
Confronting taboo is a fundamental aspect of powerful storytelling and an invitation to write our bravest, most honest work; but doing so requires us to engage those parts of ourselves and our characters that make us uneasy, restless, and fearful. In this two-part craft seminar, you will be guided through readings, exercises, and small group discussions designed to help you navigate the discomfort that taboo elicits when you are sitting before the page. The goal of the seminar is to expand the limits of your thinking and your craft and to develop the courage to ask: Who am I? And, What do I truly want to say? PDFs of readings will be provided in advance.
Workshop Highlights:
Learn to identify emotional obstacles that are blocking the work
Learn strategies for working with fear
Develop characters with complex psyches
Develop strategies for engaging with place, space, and landscape to deepen character interiority
1 Session: Wednesday, June 25
6:00-8:00pm ET
Michael Zapata
This master class is taught by award winning novelist and editor Michael Zapata, author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, Best Book of the Year for NPR, the A.V. Club, Los Angeles Public Library, among others, and founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recent recipient of the Meier Foundation Artist Achievement Award. In Axios, Michael Zapata’s work was called an important “part of the growing Latino-futurism movement.”
As the musician, actor, painter, and all-around artistic vagabond John Lurie once said about making art: “See what it gives you.” In this class, we’ll go through and discuss the process of revision for publication. We’ll cover and discuss wholeness, cohesiveness, exactitude, clarity, excavating material, and, perhaps most importantly, staying true to your artistic visions and the possibilities they may still contain. Additionally, we’ll consider and discuss what various editors have to say about the endlessly exciting, if occasionally sticky, matter of putting your work out into the world. The class will also include a Q&A.
Workshop Highlights:
A deeper understanding of revision and publication with your artistic vision in mind
Learn to revise both conceptually and materially
This master class includes a Q&A
This class has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, June 13.
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, June 28 + 29
12:00-2:00pm ET
Maaza Mengiste
Maaza Mengiste is the author of two books of historical fiction. The Shadow King (2019) was finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize, and Beneath the Lion's Gaze (2010) was named one of the top ten contemporary African books by the Guardian. She has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Scholars Program, as well as a Creative Capital Award, and an Edgar Award for Best Short Story, among others.
This is a class for those who might have a manuscript and are struggling with the balance of history and fiction. This is also a class for those who are just beginning. Come with a project in mind and be ready to write in class based on prompts.
Saint Augustine says that the dead are invisible but they are not absent. In this historical fiction seminar, we will imagine these restless dead who make a claim on our present lives. Guided by personal and collective memories, as well as myths, archival research, and family lore, this class will begin to name the shape of the absence that the dead leave behind. We will learn how to use research - in archives, in memory, and in family stories - to develop a story. In the hours we have together, I will help you learn how to look at that invisible terrain of the past and see it teeming with life. And how to write it. We will discuss how to balance fact with fiction, and learn the most efficient and effective ways to research. This will be a course helping you move towards a written scene as a way to gain the skills to develop your historical fiction project.
Workshop Highlights:
Understanding how fictional representations of history can provide insight about the present
How to research when the world seems filled with information
Learning to balance between research and writing
To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, June 20.
NonFiction
1 Session: Sunday, March 2
2:00-5:00pm ET
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
20 students
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Japanese and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller and the recipient of a HONOLULU Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Joyland, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and is an Affiliate Faculty in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles and a Lecturer in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
For writers working with inherited or ancestral stories, the material can feel like both an incredible gift and an overwhelming burden. How does one honor the past while making space for contemporary concerns and interests? How do we write into those blurred lines, embracing the mythology, folklore, superstitions, and cultural histories we’ve inherited, while affording our passions and obsessions space on the page? I take both pride and pleasure in considering ancestral stories in conversation with contemporary ones, and this craft intensive will explore exactly that, as we discuss the responsibility of carrying forth these tales while inviting into the conversation both imagination as well as our own writerly obsessions. Through close examination of fiction by writers who are also working with ancestral tales, we will study their craft choices surrounding plot, point of view, character, and details, and we will take comfort in the company of artmakers communing with voices of the past.
This craft intensive will include close readings, small group discussions, and generative writing exercises participants can use to produce new work or engage with (and maybe re-see) their existing works in progress. Together, we will learn to write our way into existing mythologies, driven by the ideas, interests, and characters we simply can’t shake.
Workshop Highlights:
Writers will have the opportunity to get honest about the challenges of committing ancestral stories to the page while receiving comfort and support in the communal nature of ancestral art-making.
Writers will study fiction and nonfiction grounded in ancestral storytelling with close attention paid to character, point of view, detail, and plot.
Writers will engage in generative writing exercises designed to support existing works in progress and/or spark new work, with the opportunity to share writing with the class.
One full and one partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, February 22.
8 Sessions: Tuesdays, April 1 - May 20
7:00-9:00pm ET
Greg Mania
This generator is taught by Greg Mania, author of the memoir, Born to Be Public, which has been named a best book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, and was a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Humor. He is currently working on his debut novel.
So, you have an idea for a book. Maybe you even already wrote it! Either way, you are ready for the next step. Does the thought of writing a book proposal for your nonfiction project make you want to light no fewer than 14 lavender-scented candles and lie in the dark for three days straight? You’re not alone! But after having written three book proposals, I promise you it’s not as daunting as it seems.
In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator. Beginning with an overview of the anatomy of the book proposal by looking at several different examples, this generator will be broken up into eight weekly sessions. Each week, we will be discussing and going over one element of the book proposal in detail. At the end of each session, students will be assigned to complete a draft of the section discussed, which is to be handed in the following Friday, no later than 8 p.m. Students will receive peer and instructor feedback in class the following day, after which the next section of the book proposal will discussed and assigned to complete for the following week. By the final session, each student will have a complete book proposal, and will be ready to take the next step on the path to publication.
Workshop Highlights:
Students will receive several different examples of proposals that have successfully sold to use as reference when working on their own.
Students will receive extensive individual feedback on their own proposals from course instructor that will be emailed to them each week.
Each student will leave this course with a complete book proposal, ready to take the next step on the path to publication.
This workshop has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, March 21.
8 Sessions: Saturdays, April 12 - May 31
12:00-2:00pm ET
Greg Mania
This generator is taught by Greg Mania, author of the memoir, Born to Be Public, which has been named a best book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, and was a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Humor. He is currently working on his debut novel.
So, you have an idea for a book. Maybe you even already wrote it! Either way, you are ready for the next step. Does the thought of writing a book proposal for your nonfiction project make you want to light no fewer than 14 lavender-scented candles and lie in the dark for three days straight? You’re not alone! But after having written three book proposals, I promise you it’s not as daunting as it seems.
In order to demystify this seemingly overwhelming task, I’m thrilled to offer the Book Proposal Generator. Beginning with an overview of the anatomy of the book proposal by looking at several different examples, this generator will be broken up into eight weekly sessions. Each week, we will be discussing and going over one element of the book proposal in detail. At the end of each session, students will be assigned to complete a draft of the section discussed, which is to be handed in the following Friday, no later than 8 p.m. Students will receive peer and instructor feedback in class the following day, after which the next section of the book proposal will discussed and assigned to complete for the following week. By the final session, each student will have a complete book proposal, and will be ready to take the next step on the path to publication.
Workshop Highlights:
Students will receive several different examples of proposals that have successfully sold to use as reference when working on their own.
Students will receive extensive individual feedback on their own proposals from course instructor that will be emailed to them each week.
Each student will leave this course with a complete book proposal, ready to take the next step on the path to publication.
This workshop has 1 full and 1 partial scholarship available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, April 4.
1 Session: Sunday, April 27
3:00-5:30pm ET
Eula Biss and Saeed Jones
Collaborators Saeed Jones and Eula Biss dreamed up this craft class while co-teaching a writing workshop that invited some lively exchanges about the decision-making process in nonfiction writing. Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives and the poetry collections Prelude to Bruise and Alive at the End of the World. He co-hosts the podcast Vibe Check with Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford. Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had and On Immunity: An Inoculation. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world.
“Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance,” Melissa Febos observes. “But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions.” How might thinking of writing as a problem-solving activity reorient you to your work? Could this mindset stave off performance anxiety and help keep your head in the game? We’ll discuss how we approach decisions in our own writing and offer strategies for handling difficult decisions at various stages of the process. Ample time will be reserved for your questions, and you’ll be invited to bring the decision-making problems raised by your own writing to this session.
Workshop Highlights:
Practical strategies
Prompts for new writing and revision
Your questions answered
This class has 5 full and 5 partial scholarships available. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Sunday, April 20.
Note: All class sessions will be recorded and this course can be taken asynchronously.
4 Sessions: Thursdays, May 1, 8, 22, 29
8:00-10:00pm ET
Eula Biss
Eula Biss is the author of four books, most recently Having and Being Had. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been recognized by a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New America Fellowship, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library.
Back by popular demand! A new version of the close reading course offered last fall, with a fresh selection of essays. This four-part course is inspired by the pleasures and rewards of carefully tracking a writer’s decisions across an entire work. Each week, I will guide us through a close study of two essays--an older essay from the 20th century and a newer essay from the 21st century. Line-by-line, I’ll describe what I see these writers doing on the page and how they’re responding to the pressures and problems presented by their work. The intent here is not to admire other writers from afar, but to directly inform our own writing. This is essentially a course on the internal mechanics of the essay. We’ll take apart some engines to see how other writers power their vehicles, all in service to developing a better understanding of our own artistry. Each class session will include time for questions, open discussion, and prompts for generating new writing.
Session 1
“A Small Place,” Jamaica Kincaid & “If You Knew Then What I Know Now,” Ryan Van Meter
Session 2
“Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag & “Joy,” Zadie Smith
Session 3
“Aces and Eights,” Annie Dillard & “Michael,” John Jeremiah Sullivan
Session 4
“Notes of a Native Son,” James Baldwin & “One Small Step,” Angela Morales
This class has 5 full and 5 partial scholarships available. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Sunday, April 20.
Note: All class sessions will be recorded and this course can be taken asynchronously.
2 Sessions: Saturdays, May 3 + 10
11:00am-1:00pm ET
David McLoghlin
David McLoghlin is a prize-winning poet, and a writer of memoir and personal essay. His third book, Crash Centre, was published in May 2024 and hailed by senior Irish poet Thomas McCarthy as "a work unquestionably triumphant with poetic victories." His poems have been broadcast on WNYC’s Radioloab and anthologized on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably in Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). He has taught memoir at The Center for Fiction and the Hudson Valley Writers Center and The Irish Writers Centre.
We have an instinctive sense that time slows in scenes, giving us immersive sensory detail, conflict and dialogue, but what about exposition (also known as reflection, “glide,” or summary)? In fact, exposition is just as important as scenes, as it’s where the writer explains, and comments on scenes. Here is where the writer provides essential, non-immersive information that moves the story forward and links scenes together. Scenes are where we “show,” whereas in exposition, we “tell.” Both are essential. Learning how to identify your principal story points (or scenes) will help you to structure your story. As you develop your scenes and improve them, you will also develop a better sense of what they mean for you, and how to link them together. This knowledge in turn will help you to develop and improve your narrative voice, which is what well-employed exposition does. Scenes often tell the core story of the past, whereas exposition is in the voice of the adult narrator located in the “narrative present,” reflecting on the past.
This masterclass is structured around reading short extracts from memoir and personal essay for examples of how many writers write scenes and exposition; practical tips for how to execute scenes and exposition in our own work; and, in-class prompts and writing exercises to improve our own learning around these important elements of craft. Students can expect to come away with a greater understanding of important craft elements in creative nonfiction, having had ample opportunity to practice what they are learning. This class is for all levels. While attendees may be at the beginning or end of a project, all that is required is an interest in writing memoir or personal essay.
Workshop Highlights:
You’ll learn to identify scenes and exposition as you read the work of others as well as your own writing
You’ll learn how to write better scenes and exposition
As a result you will get a better sense of the story you are trying to tell, which will help you improve your narrative voice as a whole.
This class has 1 full scholarship and 3 partial scholarships available. To apply for a scholarship, please fill out this form by Friday, April 25.
3 Sessions: Saturdays, May 10, 17, 24
2:00-4:00pm ET
Nicole Treska
Nicole Treska is the author of the debut memoir Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard and Breaking Even (Simon & Schuster, 2024). She taught at The City College of New York for over fifteen years, teaching a broad range of creative writing courses and workshops, including prose, drama, intro-advanced creative writing, and advanced grammar. She now teaches private classes. Gordon Lish praised Wonderland as "Straight Talk!", and Isaac Fitzgerald called Treska, "a swaggering storyteller of the highest degree." The Wall Street Journal claimed, "If Ms. Treska preaches half as well as she practices, her students are lucky. She has a talent for a sweet turn of phrase.”
Her short fiction has recently appeared in The End, Forever Magazine, and Archway Editions, as well as New York Tyrant magazine, Epiphany literary journal, and Egress: New Openings in Literary Art. Her interviews and reviews are up at Electric Literature, Guernica, The Millions, BOMB, The Rumpus, and others.
Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction (and auto-fiction, for that matter) involve a special alchemy of writing well and deeply about oneself while simultaneously wrangling the tricks of time, memory, and fact into the shape of a story. CNF is no small feat. But it’s also a genre of growing interest to many— both readers and writers—and in this class, I’d like to pass along What I Learned Writing a Memoir (and from Whom), to anyone who's interested and falls into either of these categories. Stuff like how to create a linear structure out of a circular life; how to infuse thematic resonance into our personal narratives, research, and memories; how to identify THE story that will carry all our stories—the Ur story, I suppose, and much, much more. My experience in the classroom, writing across genres, and love of the 3 S’s (storytelling, style, and syntax), will help writers of all backgrounds/experience improve their work and tell their story.
Each 2-hour class will include…
Ask Me Anything (15 min.)
Reading and Discussion (30 min.)
Craft discussion/lecture based on the reading (30 min.)
Author visit! (30 min.)
Ask Author Anything (15 min.)
Students will walk away with a better sense of…
How to Say It: prompts and conversations to help mine, draft, and shape your story
The Shape of Things: how to think about structure and plot in non-fiction
What to Cut: practical editing skills at the macro and micro level
This course has 3 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 2.
2 Sessions: Monday + Wednesday, May 12 + 14
5:30-7:30pm ET
Nicole Treska
Nicole Treska is the author of the debut memoir Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard and Breaking Even (Simon & Schuster, 2024). She taught at The City College of New York for over fifteen years, teaching a broad range of creative writing courses and workshops, including prose, drama, intro-advanced creative writing, and advanced grammar. She now teaches private classes. Gordon Lish praised Wonderland as "Straight Talk!", and Isaac Fitzgerald called Treska, "a swaggering storyteller of the highest degree." The Wall Street Journal claimed, "If Ms. Treska preaches half as well as she practices, her students are lucky. She has a talent for a sweet turn of phrase.”
Her short fiction has recently appeared in The End, Forever Magazine, and Archway Editions, as well as New York Tyrant magazine, Epiphany literary journal, and Egress: New Openings in Literary Art. Her interviews and reviews are up at Electric Literature, Guernica, The Millions, BOMB, The Rumpus, and others.
In this two-session class we will cover the basics of American grammar and usage, as well as the effects of sentence structure on meaning and clarity. Students should come to class with an interest in grammar, close editing, structure, and craft. Additionally, it is encouraged but not required to bring one short story/section/draft in progress.
We'll do in-depth grammar refreshers, lessons on line editing (every word and piece of punctuation is on trial for its life), verb choice (including a healthy but not freakish wariness of adverbs), special effects and punctuation marks (the Em Dash, and why everyone is using it wrong), and more. The end result? A clearer sentence that equals a clearer thought, and that equals a better thought! Let's clean up those drafts, kill those darlings, and slash those prepositional phrases!
Workshop Highlights:
a refresher on grammar and usage
new thinking on how to construct the best sentences
new habits for close reading and line-editing
This course has 3 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 2.
1 Session: Thursday, June 5
7:00-9:00pm ET
Kavita Das
Kavita Das, the author of Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Issues, who worked in social change for fifteen years before writing about social issues for a range of literary and journalistic outlets will teach Objectivity, Truth, and the Spaces In Between, a one day nonfiction craft seminar.
In this fraught moment when disinformation and hot takes have reached a fever pitch, notions of objectivity and the search for truth have taken on even more importance and meaning. But, does true objectivity exist given that all writers (and readers) have their own set of biases? If truth is a singular destination, what does it mean when a writer says they’re telling “their truth?” Through lectures, readings, writing exercises, and discussion, we’ll examine the concepts of objectivity, truth, and the spaces that exist in between in writing.
Workshop Highlights:
We’ll parse the notion of objectivity and how it is impacted by un-diverse newsrooms and publishing platforms.
We’ll examine the concept of truth even as we explore how it is impacted by the lens of the narrator (“whose truth”).
We’ll consider where our own writing fits in this spectrum of veracity and what questions to ask of ourselves as responsible chroniclers and narrators.
This class has 2 full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, May 30.
1 Session: Saturday, June 21
1:00-2:30pm ET
Matthew Gavin Frank
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author, most recently, of the nonfiction book, SUBMERSED: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines, which has been described as "An exquisite, lyrical foray into the world of deep-sea divers, the obsession and madness that oceans inspire in us, and the story of submarine inventor Peter Madsen’s murder of journalist Kim Wall—a captivating blend of literary prose, science writing, and true crime." Frank is also the author of the nonfiction books Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast, Preparing the Ghost, Pot Farm, and Barolo, as well as the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop. His work has appeared in Harper's, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Guernica, The New Republic, Iowa Review, Salon, Conjunctions, The Believer, and the Best Travel Writing and Best Food Writing anthologies. He’s a professor of creative writing in the Masters of Fine Arts Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is also the Nonfiction/Hybrids Editor of the literary magazine, Passages North.
“In my forthcoming book, Submersed, I did not plan to write about a real-life murder. I wanted to engage the eccentric micro-community of DIY submersible enthusiasts, and to scratch at their obsessions and their actions for some kind of larger—if elusive or illusory—meaning; some kind of sly microcosmic comment on the human condition and on human longing. But, in my research, I kept bumping up against violence, misogyny, and murder. I couldn’t help but confront and interrogate the inflection points at which a sense of wonder sours into something more malign. When and why and how does the compulsion to sink to depth uncannily begin to dovetail with darker, more threatening traits? What is it with my own malign and fraught compulsion to sink to these depths, the ethics of inquiring into and interacting with—in book form and other art forms—real-life atrocity? This lecture will engage with my experience in navigating such questions while crafting Submersed, as well as with the voices of various writers and critics on the fraught nature of the “true crime” sub-genre of creative nonfiction. Q&A to follow.”
Workshop Highlights:
A frank discussion of the interaction between research and speculation in creative nonfiction, and the "true crime" sub-genre.
A behind-the-scenes breakdown of the author's research process.
An opportunity to ask the author anything about the lecture's themes, and/or about the writing and publishing process.
Poetry
2 Sessions: Saturday + Sunday, March 22 + 23
2:00-4:00pm ET
Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour is the author of five critically acclaimed books (three novels, a memoir, and an essay collection), all from major publishers (Grove, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Knopf Doubleday). She's taught creative writing and literature since 2003, moving mainly to online teaching since 2019. Her essays, criticism, investigative features, and profiles can be found in newspapers and magazines all over the world, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, BOMB, Poets & Writers, and more. She's had fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Civitella Ranieri, and more. Born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles suburbs, she currently lives in New York City. She explains her inspiration for this craft seminar:
I’d argue that the most important practice for prose writers to cultivate is a poetry habit.
I’ve been considered a “lyrical prose writer” since I first published in 2007, but I credit my obsession with poetry in how I got there. I studied poetry in undergrad and grad schools (Sarah Lawrence College BA, Johns Hopkins MA), but my love of poetry goes way beyond academic interest. In Iranian culture, poetry is the prime mode of literary expression. In so many of our spiritual practices, poetry is at the heart of all the wisdom. No matter what culture you come from, it’s my belief that poetry is the key to finding your way back to language. I recommend poetry to students who are experience writer’s block; I bring poems to prose writers who need to get back to the fundamentals of strong sentences; I share poems with any human being whose psyche needs that essential nourishment. Poetry’s lessons go way beyond simply inspiring—poetry can get artists to explore the tension between confession and revelation. We will look at a wide range of poems that can be used as everything from prompts to templates to roadmaps for the kind of critical self-examination that makes great prose possible.
Workshop Highlights:
Introduction and refresher for how to read poems as prose writers
Packet with poems that we will go over in class
Exercises to try in class and beyond
Two full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by March 14.
1 Session: Wednesday, April 19
6:30-8:00pm ET
Samiya Bashir
Samiya Bashir (she:her:’nem) is a poet, writer, librettist, performer, and multi-media poetry maker whose work, both solo and collaborative, has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome and across the United States. Sometimes she makes poems of dirt. Sometimes zeros and ones. Sometimes variously rendered text. Sometimes light. Bashir is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her latest, I Hope This Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Her honors include the Rome Prize in Literature and the Pushcart Prize, and grants and residencies from the New York State Council on the Arts, MacDowell, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and more. In addition to her books, Bashir has served as editor to national magazines and anthologies of literature and artwork. Her multimedia poetries burst the boundaries of video, installation, photography, collage, and environmental art, and has most recently been shown at Michigan State University, and in Portland, Oregon, and New York City.
This Master Class is one of inquiry and discovery through the practice of multimedia poetries, including audio, visual, digital, textural, hand-made, machine-made, and more. We examine the recent landscape of multimedia poetry to understand how it works, how and where it succeeds (and fails), and how the work being made might move us to push through traditional boundaries of form and genre and foster experimentation in our own poetry.
Participants will learn practical methods for integrating visual, audio, and digital elements into their poetry, expanding their creative toolkit for future projects. By discussing the work of poets and artists in the expanded field, participants will gain insights into how collaboration and interdisciplinary approaches can enrich their poetry. Participants will leave with hands-on exercises and prompts designed to fuel ongoing exploration of multimedia poetries, encouraging them to continue experimenting beyond the workshop.
Workshop Highlights:
Expanded Understanding of Poetic Forms – Participants will explore how poetry can take on new life across various media, from audio and digital formats to handmade and machine-made works, broadening their concept of what poetry can be.
Critical Analysis Skills – By examining the successes and limitations of contemporary multimedia poetries, participants will develop a critical lens to assess how different approaches enhance or challenge traditional poetic forms.
Inspiration for Creative Experimentation – The class will encourage participants to push past conventional boundaries, inspiring them to experiment with blending mediums and genres to create their own innovative works.
Note: This class is priced on a sliding scale from $100 to $250 based on what you’re able to afford. If you are registering at an amount below the upper bound, please pay through our payment portal and forward your confirmation email to kate@theshipmanagency.com with a note that you are registering for this class.
Two full scholarship available for BIPOC writers, as well as two partial scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Monday, April 7.
5 Sessions: Sundays, April 20-May 18
12:00-2:00pm ET
Dorothea Lasky
This 5-week generative writing workshop is taught by poet and writer Dorothea Lasky. She is the author of six full-length collections of poetry including The Shining, Milk, Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all out from Wave Books, as well as Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton). She is also the author of the essay collections, Animal (Wave Books) and the forthcoming MEMORY (Semiotext(e)). Currently, she's an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University School of the Arts.
the winter wind
is green.
–Joseph Ceravolo, “Spring”
In this class, we will explore the power, pressures, and mysterious magic of the color green, especially through the lens of poetry. Green expands, flutters, hides, infuses, and purifies a poem with its cool demeanor and momentum. Part of a set of classes that explore a particular color in poetry, this generative workshop will engage in immersive poetry exercises aided by the color green and visual art. We will workshop class members’ poems three times throughout the class. We will also examine the great mystery of green by reading poems by Joseph Ceravolo, D.H. Lawrence, Raina J. León, Federico García Lorca, Anne Carson, Natalie Diaz, William Blake, Angelina Weld Grimké, and H.D. Students will leave the course with feedback on their work and a group of poems inspired by green.
Workshop Highlights:
Instructor and peer feedback
Generative writing exercises
Manuscript Consultations & Private Mentorships
Please note: If you’re interested in a manuscript consultation, please be sure to click through for complete pricing information. The price you see has variants. Not all prices for consultations are flat rates; some are registration fees that will go toward a final fee based upon work done. Please read individual writers’ descriptions for how they charge for their services.
With over a decade of experience as a poet, educator, book and magazine editor, and manuscript coach, I have guided writers from early drafts through extensive revisions and into publication. As faculty at Columbia University, Reed College, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and numerous literary and arts residencies, I have led workshops and coached students through poetry and prose projects, and helped writers develop their voice and craft across a variety of genres.
I have spent 25 years as a book, magazine, and anthology editor, working with authors on poetry manuscripts, nonfiction manuscripts (creative as well as informative), short form pieces such as articles, stories, and essays, and more. I combine creative coaching with editorial rigor, helping writers transform their poetic voice while paying attention to both the line and larger structure.
As the author of Field Theories (2017), Gospel (2009), and the forthcoming I Hope This Helps (2025), I bring a deep understanding of creative process, structure, and revision, complemented by my experience editing and shaping full-length manuscripts.
This consultation includes:
Initial Intake: A one-hour session to discuss your manuscript’s themes, goals, and challenges. We’ll explore your vision, identify key areas for growth, and discuss the direction you want your work to take.
Detailed manuscript feedback and editing: I will provide a close, comprehensive reading of your manuscript with holistic feedback. For poetry, this includes line edits, radical revision suggestions, and organizational recommendations for manuscripts of 40–90 pages. For prose (up to 100k words), this includes structural feedback, character development insights, plot coherence, and stylistic recommendations. My approach focuses on both the fine details and the broader arc, helping you refine your work at every level.
Follow-up consultation: A second meeting to discuss my editorial feedback and revisions. We will also cover publication strategies, potential next steps for your work, and methods for generating new creative material moving forward.
POETRY
Full-length Manuscript
40–90 pages: $1,000
Chapbook Special!
15-30 pages: $350
A Poem!
1-5 pages: $75
PROSE
Book Manuscript (< 100,000 words): $2,500
Creative Nonfiction and Nonfiction
Short Form Manuscript (Essays, Stories, Articles): starting at $250 (hourly rate)
I look forward to helping you craft your best work and explore new creative possibilities!
COACHING
I love working with authors to bring their books to life from wherever they are to where they need to go!
I am available to work with you at any stage of your writing process — from idea to proposal and submission — and engage a variety of methods to help you get your work done and put your best foot forward on the page.
I have limited availability from season to season to take on just a few individual coaching clients. What you gain in me is a thought partner, a writing partner, and a sounding board.
What we’ll do together:
Brainstorm: Helping you to dream up and actualize ideas for your book.
Drafting: Helping you to develop your first draft and then further develop that draft into a finished manuscript.
Encouragement: Providing support and accountability to help you overcome obstacles and achieve your goals.
Proposals: Working with you, once your manuscript is ready, to develop a comprehensive book proposal.
Pricing: Begins at $750 per week (ideal project commitment is 12 weeks)
“I chose to work with Lillian-Yvonne on my second manuscript because they're a true innovator in the field of poetics, leveraging technology and other modes of inquiry to push the limits of language, to push the poem itself beyond what we might conventionally think it can say or do. Lillian-Yvonne’s critiques are always astute, and challenging, and simultaneously uplifting, somehow, while always respecting what the poem itself is trying to accomplish. Ultimately Lillian-Yvonne helped me shape my manuscript into something more than I myself imagined it could be. And that’s a gift.” - Jubi Arriola-Headley
$250/hr
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram will provide a holistic reading of the manuscript and comment on the overall book concept, ideas, and major themes. This option also includes comments on poem ordering and arrangement, with extensive line edits and comments on individual poems. Manuscript length 48-64 pages. Additional fee to be negotiated for manuscripts between 64-80 pages.
I teach in English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where I’m in the core MFA faculty. I’ve previously taught at Emory University, the University of Michigan, and North Carolina State University, and I’ve also been in the core MFA faculty at the latter two. Many manuscripts on which I have consulted have become award-winning collections with leading presses. Working one-on-one with writers is one of my favorite responsibilities. I have a particular love for questions regarding sequencing and for offering generative feedback, although I enjoy every aspect of manuscript critique, including offering practical recommendations and tips for publication and promotion (if desired).
My experience as a poet lends itself to helping writers re-envision what they have created; my experience as a scholar of poetry lends itself to offering nuanced readings of the text as it is as well as identifying areas it may wish to further explore. I also have a substantial editorial background: I’ve been poetry editor of AGNI (where my time on the editorial staff totaled thirteen years), art editor of At Length, a guest editor for the Academy’s Poem-a-Day, served on the Alice James Books Editorial Board, and served as a reader or contest judge for several book prizes, among other commitments.
I am the author of Arrow (Alice James Books (U.S.)/Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020), which received coverage in the New York Times, NPR, the Guardian, and other venues, and received the GLCA New Writers Award, the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize (U.K.), and other honors. Poems from my second in-progress collection, The B-Sides of the Golden Record, have been published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Kenyon Review, The Offing, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Split This Rock’s The Quarry, LARB Quarterly, and elsewhere. I’m also currently writing a scholarly book titled Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, which is under advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press, and my peer-reviewed critical articles have appeared in Cultural Critique, Modernism/modernity, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and elsewhere. I’ve received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and Kundiman, and I’ve been shortlisted for the U.K.’s Forward Prize.
Figuring out what makes books tick is one of my favorite things to do, and I look forward to working with you.
Manuscript review: This manuscript consultation includes 60 minutes of Zoom time to be used however you and I decide would be most beneficial to you (recommended: a 30-minute initial conversation about your book, your goals for it, and your sense of where it stands and what it needs, followed by a 30-minute post-read conversation). Next, I will provide a holistic reading of the manuscript and comment on the overall book concept, ideas, and major themes, including on sequencing and arrangement. You can also select up to 15 pages on which to receive extensive line edits, questions, and analyses. You will also receive resources to aid in revision of individual poems as well as the full collection. We’ll discuss a timeframe for our work together in our first meeting (or over email, if you elect not to use any Zoom time on an initial meeting). Manuscript length up to 80 pages. Additional fee to be negotiated for longer manuscripts. $350
Manuscript review + revision: At this level, I will also read the revised manuscript with the same level of response. You’ll also receive up to 60 additional minutes of Zoom time, with the schedule determined collaboratively (e.g. 30 minutes after first-read feedback and a 30-minute post-second read conversation, or the full 60 after the second read). The goal of the additional Zoom minutes is so that we can discuss my feedback, any additional questions you may have, and other associated topics that may be on your mind, such as publication. We’ll discuss a timeframe for our work together in our first meeting. $550
I am a poet with three published poetry collections and have been working one-on-one with writers for over five years, including consulting as faculty on collections from students at Randolph College, the Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics, UC Riverside, and NYU. My accolades include a Pulitzer nomination, the 2017 National Poetry Series, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation, and more. I have an MFA from the University of Arizona as well as an MA in English Literature from UC Irvine and currently teach poetry as part of Randolph College’s Low-Residency MFA program
I believe in providing in-depth generative feedback. In our manuscript consultation, I will work to give a sense of how I’m reading the manuscript, what excites me, but above all what I believe could be emphasized, expanded, focused in on, and written through. This will include a combination of suggested edits, expansions, generative prompts, reordering, and/or reading recommendations.
This will typically take the form of an email exchange followed by a close-reading. Depending on manuscript length, reading will take between two to four hours. I will write and provide detailed notes throughout this process. In addition to the notes, we’ll meet virtually for a discussion of the work, preferably two hours. As I charge by the hour, however, this process is quite flexible, and I am willing to work with what works best for you.
I model my manuscript consultation approach after radical empathy and radical listening. This manuscript consultation aims to be supportive, inclusive and collaborative, with an eye towards helping your novel become the best possible version of itself through a detailed and deep understanding of the craft of fiction. What’s included:
A one hour introductory phone call to understand what your needs are, what you are struggling with and what you hope to achieve.
An extensive editorial letter beginning with the manuscript’s summary and strengths, followed by dedicated sections on: worldbuilding, characterization, character relationships, story arc/narrative structure, pacing/timeline, emotional effect, language and dialogue, in addition to anything specific to your manuscript that a) you want to address or b) that comes to my attention while reading.* The editorial letter will conclude with suggestions and ideas for how the overall manuscript might be improved.
*Examples: setting, interiorization, stakes, internal vs. external journey, braiding multiple storylines, logical inconsistencies/plausibility, narrative POV, narrative subversion (“twists”), reader investment, tone and atmosphere, scaffolding, beginnings and endings, compression and expansion, thematic question(s), authorial vs. character knowledge, missed opportunities, sensitivity remarks and more.
A one hour follow-up phone call after you have processed the editorial letter, have any questions and/or would like to discuss your revision plan. During this call, I can also answer any questions about the querying and publishing process.
Note: Line edits are not included.
All genres of fiction are welcome, including speculative fiction.
Please submit the first 20 pages of your novel to see if we are a good fit.
Max word count: 100,000 words.
Flat Fee $2,500
True stories, well told, matter! I will give line-by-line editing and a letter with detailed editorial notes on your nonfiction manuscripts. That includes book chapters, essays, artist statements, book proposals, articles, work samples, or any other form of nonfiction prose.
Price: $200 flat fee for the first 20 pages (12 pt. Times New Roman, double-spaced, minimum of 1-inch margins) and $4 for every page after that.
A la carte option: For a manuscript consultation that includes a letter with detailed editorial feedback, but no line-by-line edits, the flat fee is $150 for the first 20 pages (12 pt. Times New Roman, double-spaced, minimum of 1-inch margins) and $3 for every page after that.
Note: payment is for initial flat fee; additional page fees to be determined and invoiced separately.
“I am a poet turned first-time memoirist, and Kavita was the perfect reader for my manuscript. Her attention to narrative structure, flow and focus, and sensory detail helped sharpen my scenes and chapters. For an Asian American coming-of-age narrative set in the turbulent ‘60s, Kavita’s experience and craft recommendations on weaving together social issues with the personal were particularly valuable." - Jeffrey Thomas Leong, student
My manuscript consultation is based on an examination of how a work balances the craft of writing with the substance of conscience, the personal and the political. These guiding principles are ones that I've culled through my fifteen years working for social change and ten years writing about it, including in my recent book Craft and Conscience: How to Write About Social Change. As the creator of the Writing with Conscience class which I've offered through The Shipman Agency, I'm inspired by helping more writers to be writers of conscience.I offer two types of manuscript consultations:
1) Stand Alone Manuscripts - Essays, Articles, Op Eds, Stories. Sliding scale starting at $150 based on length/word count. This includes substantive summary feedback about what is working well and suggestions for improvement as well as line edits.
2) Book Manuscripts - Draft manuscripts for book length works. Sliding scale starting at $500 depending on the length of work. I will provide summary feedback on how the manuscript hangs together as a cohesive whole, respond to the narrative flow and narrative elements, whether the desired themes are coming through, and whether there is a balance between personal and political themes. This also includes a 20 minute post feedback consultation via phone/zoom to discuss any questions.
Do you have ideas or writing you’d like to turn into a creative non-fiction book? Over the past twenty years, I’ve published five award-winning nonfiction books and two edited collections, have edited dozens of books as an editor/publisher and have served as a judge for the National Book Awards in Non-Fiction. I think in books! Meet with me on zoom for up to 2 hours to talk through your book concept. We can discuss how to develop your idea into a book-length project, how to organize and structure it, find research and reporting opportunities, and publishing strategies, upon request. $500
Need feedback to turn your book-in-progress into a polished manuscript ready for submission? Send me your pages. I’ll provide a 3-4 page written response on structure, organization, clarity, originality, and publishing strategies and meet with you on zoom to discuss. $2000
I have taught poetry workshops and advised poetry thesis manuscripts for the past decade at Princeton University, as well as in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia, along with guest workshops in graduate and community programs around the country. I have seen manuscripts through from rough drafts, extensive revision, and into publication. I have published four of my own books of poems including Days & Days (Knopf, 2019) and the forthcoming Pacific Power & Light (Knopf, 2024). Many of my poems have appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere.
This consultation includes an initial hour-long meeting and conversation about what you imagine your book to be, where it comes from and where you would like it to go. What are your concerns about the work, and what are you most excited about. With these things in mind I will closely read the book and provide both holistic notes as well as suggesting line edits and possible developments and alternatives, including ordering of the manuscript and “writing into the corners” of the book. I will send you these edits and ideas and then we will meet a second time to discuss them, as well as publication possibilities, and strategies for creating new work in the future.
I look forward to working with you!
Short stories, Personal Essays, Memoir
You: Are not mainstream in your outlook. Your vision is wide, and you are moved to write a work that has deep resonance for your community, your environment, your country, your world. Your story could be intimate and personal or complex and global or all these things. You are a literary writer who has worked on your project using all the tools at your disposal. You want a discerning reader who can evaluate your work using a fresh lens based not only on what you have already created but where you might take it. I have taught for decades in the US and abroad and published collections of stories, and essays, and novels. I have also published poetry and worked as a freelance journalist. I meet writers where they are, with regard for who they are as people, what has moved them to write, and with a view to helping them go further. I help writers to lean into the emotional truths that underlie their writing, to draw on their strengths, and to develop under-utilized aspects of their repertoire.
I begin by talking with you about your project in an initial meeting to assess what you are trying to do, and what would be most useful to you as a writer. Following that, we would work out a series of meetings that would suit your project. Because of the intensely personal nature of creative writing, I choose to work with students whose project/ethics resonate with my own and whom I know I can help in the long term. Please submit a work sample of ten pages to cheyenne@theshipmanagency.com in advance so I can determine fit. If it is a go but your circumstances make the fee prohibitive, let’s talk and see if there is a way to negotiate a compromise that is mutually respectful.
Manuscript Feedback/Fiction & Memoir: If you have a completed manuscript where the structure is fairly straightforward, and you want feedback on the project, send me the first 50 pages double spaced in 12 pt font, and a synopsis. I will review your work and return it with a comprehensive assessment of the project. This process, including an initial conversation via phone or zoom, and a follow-up call, will take 6 hours. You also have the option of requesting an entire manuscript review up to 200 pages, which would be a 20 hour engagement including the initial call and two one hour follow up calls.
Coaching: This is for those of you who want to excerpt stand-alone sections from a manuscript to send to journals and seek guidance on both the piece and the submissions, and for those who have a handful of stories or essays but need help shaping a manuscript. We will read your work aloud over zoom once a week, pausing along the way for comments regarding language and craft. We can get through a minimum of ten pages an hour. The process is best utilized with a longer time commitment over several months. The work we do together provides you with built-in deadlines, and the format gives you a cumulative benefit as you shape your project.
Please note: upfront payment is for first hour; number of hours and final cost to be discussed after registration.
All Genres
Maria is a New York Times-bestselling, Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning novelist, translator, poet, and dramatist whose work unearths hidden meanings, characters, and possibilities in stories we think we know. She's the author of eight books, most recently Beowulf: A New Translation (2020) and The Mere Wife (2018). In 2023, she delivered the Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Oxford, and released a reimagining of Virgil's Aeneid into a full-cast musical for Audible. Her version of the literary world is one in which all the genres merge, all the storytellers are equally thrilling, and there are definitely dragons. Her work on Beowulf was described in The New Yorker as "storming the dusty halls of the library, upending the crowded shelf of Beowulf translations to make room for something completely new."
Maria has most recently taught writing at Sarah Lawrence and Bennington, and she regularly teaches workshops at universities around the world. For the Shipman Agency Workroom, she's taught sessions on creating the fantastical, finding your voice, adapting the classics into contemporary work, and editing yourself, among many others.
Her consultations will help you find the tools to go deeper in your work, to finish and submit your newly revised novel, or even to totally reinvent yourself as a writer, diving into the project you've been too afraid to start. She's also happy to consult with writers who don't have manuscripts yet, as long as they have an idea and a work sample.
To begin, please submit a short description of your project, and of your consultation goals, which Maria will review to make sure it's a good fit. If approved, the next step is registering and paying the initial $300 for one hour of work. You'll submit the first 15 pages of your manuscript, as well as a synopsis of the overall project and a bio. Maria will provide written notes on the first 15 pages, along with an estimate for the full job.
If you don't have a manuscript yet, the consultation series will begin with the above - short description and consultation goals, review, initial payment - and then you'll begin with an hourlong Zoom session to make a plan of attack.
The consultations will include Zoom or phone sessions with questions, research suggestions, creative brainstorming, and live feedback. Together, you'll make a plan that suits your project. Maria's style is both empathetic and pragmatic - she'll help you achieve your writing goals, and offer a great deal of feedback and ideas along the way.
The payment is for one hour of work, plus preparation of an estimate for the full project. Additional hours will be invoiced and paid after registration.
Her rate is $300/hour, and her minimum is $1200.
Poetry
I’ve taught in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia and have guided MFA poetry collections of a great variety of poetic schools and backgrounds. My eclectic taste for whatever is surprising, insightful, and urgent is evident, I hope, in the many brief reviews I’ve written for the Academy of American Poets, at poets.org. For $1,250 I can give a manuscript a close read with notes throughout, a written response of 1-2 pages, and two online meetings. For $1,500 I will read the revised manuscript as well, with the same level of response, both on the page and in a brief report, and in another online meeting.
Nonfiction
I have worked with authors on works of memoir, journalism, creative nonfiction, and academic manuscripts. For $1,250 I read the manuscript and write up a 1-2 page response, provide selected pages with detailed line edits, and have two online meetings to discuss. Depending on the readiness of the manuscript this may be mostly about overall structure and the development of your book’s best feature, or about line edits for style and power. I’ll also advise on steps toward publication. At the $1,500 rate my response is 4-5 pages and I return the whole manuscript with notes throughout.
I will provide feedback about your poetry manuscript, including line edits, radical revision suggestions, and organizational recommendations. This feedback will come in the form of notes and conversation. The cost is $500 for a 2-hour consultation, including written notes, for manuscripts between 40 to 70 pages.
Rickey Laurentiis is offering tutorials and consultantships in the poem, the manuscript & the syllabus.
Rickey Laurentiis is a poet who was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to study light. Their debut book, Boy with Thorn, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. As a curator and art writer, they have work with a number of institutions including The Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, John Hopkins Archaeological Museum, and the the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Their next book is Death of the First Idea, coming froom Knopf in 2025. Literary honors include fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Friends call her Riis.
In private consultantships, I will work one-one-one in periods of an hour or more in three subjects: individual tutorials concerning packets of poems (no more than 15 pages of work) & full consultantships on the poetry manuscript (no more than 60 pages of work) and writing syllabi (including poetry, fiction and nonfiction courses). In my tutorials and consultantships, I aim to listen carefully; to hear what lives under the ask towards what’s best for the piece of writing at hand or the course being developed. I want the tutor or client to leave feeling restored to their assignment as writer, and with specific tactics to apply to their writing in its general improvement, and specific strategies to apply in the classroom.
Tutorials, 1 hour, $150
Consultantships 1.5hr or more, starting at $500
Fiction, Nonfiction
Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her books are frequently described as crossing, blurring, or reinventing genres.
She has taught creative writing for more than twenty years, both privately and at various institutions of higher learning, and she would welcome the opportunity to work with you on a manuscript of fiction or nonfiction.
To receive an estimate, please register and pay the initial $250 for one hour of work. Sarah will provide notes and line edits on the first few pages of your manuscript, along with an estimate for the full job.
Her rate is $250/hr, and her minimum fee is $1250.
Sarah’s fee includes detailed line edits and notes on all aspects of the work, which will be provided via Track Changes. Sarah will then be available for a discussion via phone or Zoom.
Please note that upfront payment is for one hour of work plus preparation of an estimate for the full project. Additional hours will be invoiced and paid after registration.
AX (Ana) Mina
As a nonfiction writer, you have great ideas. How do you get the word out and build a platform? I offer coaching as a tool to help you refine your ideas, communicate them effectively and find the right people to support your work.
You have great thoughts to share — how do you communicate them crisply and precisely for public consumption? Think of thought leadership as a layer that supercharges your communications efforts. Building from my experience developing communications strategy, we’ll develop a custom strategy for getting the word out there about your work and your best ideas.
Every writing client has different needs, and we’ll work on a toolkit that will help you take action on bringing your ikigai, or life’s purpose, into fruition through guided exercises on a tool called Quenza and ongoing coaching sessions. Here’s an example of some of the tools we can explore together:
Brainstorming and ideation sessions — start with your idea, no matter how rough, and let’s refine it through active feedback and idea generation
Working through creative blocks, using creative strategy and ideation, meditation, yoga, tarot and somatic wellness practices (I’m a certified trauma-informed yoga teacher with training in secular mindfulness)
Getting the word out: Public speaking skills, and telling the story of yourself and your work
Leadership and management skills, whether for those leading creative communities and mission-driven organizations or those running their own business.
Clarifying your core values and mission as a writer (i.e., your ikigai)
Coaching is a partnership, and I’m happy to take a first 30 minute call for free to determine two things: (1) how we vibe together as people and creative and (2) whether there’s a fit with what you’re looking for and where I can help. If we mutually agree to move forward, we’ll develop a coaching package that works for you — whether that’s finding your ikigai, developing your platform or something more custom. We can also do ad hoc, ongoing coaching to help you work through creative blocks.
Sessions are a sliding scale of $125-200 for up to 75 minutes (with a suggested rate of $150), and a 5 pack is available for $500 - 800 (20% discount).
Graphic novels, memoirs, and book-length comics comprise one of the fastest growing book markets world wide, but commercial publishing houses don’t always offer rigorous editing the way they might with books of more traditional prose. I will offer detailed editorial notes on drafts of graphic novel, memoir, essay, and comics projects ranging from short, stand-alone pieces to book-length projects. As a comics editor, I examine the effectiveness of the text—the strength of the language, voice, details, and dialogue—as well as the image—pacing, framing, perspective, and technique. I also critique the relationship between the two, and offer suggestions as to how text and image can function together most effectively to communicate a story, argument, or idea.
$600 for a manuscript up to 20-pages;
$800 for a manuscript up to 50-pages;
$1200 for a manuscript up to 120 pages;
$2000 for a manuscript up to 250 pages
Please note: If your graphic manuscript is particularly prose-heavy, fee structure can be discussed separately.
Spring Consultation Offer (April 20-June 1)
Novel/YA Novel
I will provide editorial coaching, revision notes, and feedback in the form of an editorial letter and one virtual meeting (1 hour). $400
Poetry Manuscript
I will provide editorial coaching, revision, comprehensive notes, and individual line edits in the form of an editorial letter and one virtual meeting (1 hour). $300
This manuscript consultation is intended to find the essential strengths of your project—the places where the writing comes alive—and identify the aspects of your novel-in-progress that give you joy. From here, we will discuss ways to complete the book, bring out its inherent qualities, and to follow your own voice in the process.
After an initial one-hour conversation, where we discuss your vision and the areas you would like to tackle, I will read the manuscript and offer a detailed editorial letter, notes throughout the manuscript, and 5-10 pages of in-depth line edits. In my letter, I will focus on plot elements, character development, structure, and voice. We will meet again for an hour-long call to discuss my notes and come up with a revision plan that feels manageable and right for the book.
I will also offer guidance about querying agents, and the editorial process.
I have led novel writing workshops as well as individual consultations for the past five years and love to collaborate with writers to find the unique qualities of their projects and help them finish their books with enthusiasm (and patience!)
Writers work alone and in the dark. The process of crafting a piece of writing that generates meaning and emotion, a work capable of nothing less than dreaming the reader into a world entirely of the writer’s making, is a daunting task. For as vast and mysterious as the levers of the writer’s imagination may be, the only tools at the writer’s disposal are paltry. Something to write with and something to write on. The only other thing the writer requires is a reader. Someone to witness the work and offer feedback. Inevitably, regardless of the quality of that feedback, the writer is dissatisfied. The writer suspects and rightly so, that there are issues. There are always issues, and the writer, regardless of how skilled they may be, cannot see them. They know this, and it’s maddening. Sometimes the issues are related to craft. The structure isn’t helping the story tell itself. The pacing is out of whack. The point of view is fuzzy. Other times the problem isn’t on the page but in the writer themselves. They don’t what the story is or why they’re telling it. They can’t recognize what is most alive in their work. If you find yourself in such a place, I offer my help. For years I have been helping writers in just this way. Helping them to locate the beating heart in their stories and strategize solutions for revision that work in the direction of their strengths.
You have several options.
Option1.
You receive notes on the text: (queries, comments and suggested edits) an editorial letter and an hour-long conference via Zoom/FaceTime/telephone to discuss the work’s strengths and weaknesses, big picture issues and avenues to pursue in revision. $450
Option 2.
You receive an editorial letter, and an hour-long conference via Zoom/FaceTime/telephone to discuss the work’s strengths and weaknesses, big picture issues and avenues to pursue in revision. $350
Option 3.
Your manuscript is returned to you with margin notes and an editorial letter addressing matters of craft. $250.
Option 4.
An hour-long conference via Zoom/FaceTime/telephone to discuss the work’s strengths and weaknesses, big picture issues and avenues to pursue in revision. $250
My rates are based on twenty, double-spaced, twelve-point type pages, or $250 an hour for longer works.
Poetry
I’ll work closely with authors on every aspect of the editorial process, including line edits, ordering, and revision, as well as comprehensive notes and feedback via email and Zoom, if desired. Poetry manuscripts up to 75 pages are charged at a flat fee of $650, though I’m happy to consider sliding scale offers as needed, and especially during global pandemics. Poetry manuscripts above 75 pages are subject to a no-fee consultation to gauge the scope of the project and the general state of the manuscript, with a quote provided afterward.
Prose
I’ll work closely with novelists and nonfiction writers on every aspect of the editorial process, including line edits, through-lines, plot mechanics, dialogue, and revision, as well as comprehensive notes and feedback via email and Zoom, if desired. Prose manuscripts are charged at $0.20 per word, though I’m happy to consider sliding scale offers as needed, and especially during global pandemics. I’m also available to provide a no-fee consultation to gauge the scope of the project and the general state of the manuscript prior to beginning work.
Note: payment is for initial down payment fee; additional fees to be determined and invoiced separately.
David Shields specializes in literary nonfiction/creative nonfiction, autobiography, memoir, personal essay, the curated diary, literary collage, literary collaboration, oral history, dialogic books, one-act plays, remix/repurposing/“appropriation,” “found documents”/fraudulent artifacts, documentary film, the essay film, screenwriting, the photo essay, the elegy, brevity, the prose-poem, the short-short, flash fiction, “autofiction,” and other kinds of boundary-jumping work.
He’d welcome the opportunity to consult with you on your work, whether it’s a sequence of brief essays, a long collage, a screenplay, a book-length work-in-progress, or anything in between.
$250/hour for a one-to-one consultation, which involves a writer sending a manuscript electronically. It will be marked up using Track Changes, and followed by a phone conversation about the notes.
For private consults, the fee is $250/hour, or a negotiated flat fee for a longer manuscript. Detailed edits, line edits, and big-picture structure will be provided.
Please note: upfront payment is for one hour; additional hours to be discussed and invoiced after registration.
$250/hour
Writers have less editorial time with their in-house editors than ever. Many agents are great with the deal but simply aren't editors. Where is a writer to turn?
For thirty years I've worked with literary writers in various capacities but my great love has been the deep dive into a manuscript with them. While I always keep an eye toward what a reader might think, I maintain deep respect for the integrity of work that is formally challenging, based in vernacular, or otherwise considered non-traditional. I will work with literary writers in both fiction and non-fiction.
We'd begin, ideally, with the review of a complete manuscript though writers "in process" are welcome to set up other arrangements. You'll receive notes with a focus on how the draft as a whole works rather than the nitty gritty of a line edit. We'll then set a schedule for the rewrite and can review in sections or as a whole. The second draft may be the place we agree to do a line edit. Ideally, the response to that draft allows us to look at ahead at publishing possibilities.
Having worked "inside" the industry, I will provide counsel on next steps when we're done i.e. referrals can be made to agents; we can work together on an excerpt for a magazine or journal. Ongoing coaching and career consultation can be provided whether you're an editorial client or not. Non-editorial clients must commit to a minimum number of hours to be determined.
Fees are $250 per hour for both editorial and career consultation services. Writers must commit to a minimum number of hours, to be determined. Accommodations made for monthly retainer clients.
Please note: upfront payment is for first hour; number of hours and final cost to be discussed after registration.
Short story and essay consultations. Micro- and macro-suggestions on the manuscript, followed by a one-hour phone consultation. Up to 25 pages, 7,000 word count maximum. Critique will be based on 20 years of editing writers for Tin House, including pieces that have been included in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, O’Henry Prize Stories, and have been included in collections that have garnered National Book Award nominations, MacArthur Genius Grants, the LA times Fiction Prize, among many other accolades. $300-$400 depending on length.
I accept students on an ongoing basis for private editorial and writing career consultations. As someone with a fiction MFA degree from Cornell and who has published memoir, personal essay, and criticism, and is currently working on a novel, I am uniquely qualified to address a range of prose writing concerns that are specific to the individual writer. I was also the founding executive editor of them., Condé Nast's LGBTQ+ platform, and have an extensive network of contacts across the media and publishing industries. I am always happy to connect former students to industry professionals when I feel that their projects are ready, and have successfully done so for a number of former students.
I only work with people who I feel I can substantially help, so please provide a work sample of up to 15 pages for review. The fee for a complete manuscript review and 2 hour-long editorial feedback sessions is $1,200 for projects up to 60k words and $1,500 for those up to 90k words.
I am deeply committed to giving people from historically marginalized groups more access to writing and publishing channels. If you are from a marginalized community and can't afford my fee, I would charge on a sliding scale of $750-$1,200 depending on the length of the project and the financial status of the student.
Please note: initial payment isn’t final fee; final fees will be discussed after registration. The balance will be invoiced separately.
Please note: The cost is $250/hour, or an agreed upon flat fee. initial fee is not final; final fee to be discussed after registration and balance will be invoiced separately.
I am offering top-to-bottom manuscript consultations, which include comprehensive notes and feedback, in the form of both individual line edits and big-picture notes on frame, structure, and areas for revision, as well as narrative development. Consultations will include a phone conversation about the notes, with suggestions on next steps. I am comfortable working in fiction or nonfiction, short or book-length, up to 300 pages.
Beginning after April 23.
Please note:
Manuscript Critique
This is a big-picture edit focused on story structure, character development, pacing, narrative choices, intention, and theme, as well as general comments on style and voice. After a close read of your manuscript I will write you a detailed editorial memo, focused on the above at a big-picture level and ending with specific advice. I will also include detailed marginal comments highlighting examples, and possible places to strengthen the manuscript. Rate is a flat fee of $0.05/word. A one-time follow up is also included. Phone, FaceTime, or email.
Comprehensive Edit
This is the nitty-gritty edit, focused on writing compelling scenes, great dialogue, unique and powerful prose. This includes a focused line edit, an editorial memo on the prose, drama, and dialogue, as well as marginal comments. Can be a short story, a sample chapter, or an entire manuscript. Rate is a flat fee of $0.10/word. A one-time follow up is also included. Phone, FaceTime, or email.
“Greg’s approach to teaching and mentorship is representative of who he is as a whole: thoughtful, compassionate, insightful, honest, and humorous. I’ve benefited from one-on-one sessions with him and have also taken part in a seminar that he led. In each setting, Greg excelled at providing his students with the individualized counsel that an aspiring writer can only hope for. He provides equal parts praise, guidance, and compassionate critique in a way that encourages his students to harness and unleash their own creative prowess."
- Clay Klaus-Wade
"Greg is a fantastic teacher. He is encouraging, specific in his teachings and an effective communicator. He clearly loves to teach and to share his knowledge. He always involves the student and simultaneously emboldens the student to craft their own style. He creates a safe space for each student to ask questions, to test their own theories and assumptions."
- Buffy Shutt
Hi! Thanks for your interest in learning with me. A little bit about myself: I am the author of the memoir, Born to Be Public, which has been named a best book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, and was a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Humor. I am currently working on my next memoir, Not a Wonderland: Dispatches From a Body That's Trying to Kill Me, and Save Our Serotonin: An Illustrated Guide for the Modern and Mentally Ill.
My teaching philosophy is pretty simple: If you care about your story, someone else will, too. My job—and joy—is to help my students hone their craft by looking inward. Because only by looking inward can you learn to write about the way you move through the world. I'm not here to teach as much as I am to hold up a mirror and help you mine your reflection for the things you might not have noticed before or hadn't thought to consider in one way or another—all of the things that make up the fabric of your being, the things that should be radically honored both on and off the page.
This consultation will begin with an initial hour-long meeting and conversation about your work-in-progress. I want to hear about why you started writing your project, and where you imagine it going. I want to know why your project matters to you. We will also discuss any concerns or challenges you face, as well as what you want to achieve by the time you finish your final draft.
Following our conversation, I will then give line-by-line edits, along with detailed editorial notes on your work-in-progress. This can include a nonfiction manuscript, book proposal, book chapters, query letter, essay(s), article(s), work samples, or any other form of nonfiction prose.
Price breakdown: $200 flat fee for the first 20 pages (12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, and one-inch margins), and $3 for every page after that.
A la carte option: For a manuscript consultation that includes a letter with detailed editorial feedback, but no line-by-line edits, the flat fee is $175 for the first 20 pages (12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, and one-inch margins), and $3 for every page after that.
Please note: Payment is for the initial flat fee. Additional page fees to be determined and invoiced separately.
I look forward to working—and learning—with you!
1 Session: Sunday, February 9
1:00-4:00pm ET
Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour is the author of five critically acclaimed books (three novels, a memoir, and an essay collection), all from major publishers (Grove, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Knopf Doubleday). She's taught creative writing and literature since 2003, moving mainly to online teaching since 2019. Her essays, criticism, investigative features, and profiles can be found in newspapers and magazines all over the world, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, BOMB, Poets & Writers, and more. She's had fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Civitella Ranieri, and more. Born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles suburbs, she currently lives in New York City.
Money-talk can be a nightmare in the arts, but I’d argue it can be at least somewhat empowering to understand some basic economics in our messy industry. Whether you like it or not, somewhere someone is calculating your worth with crude numbers game analytics. This seminar will look at everything from how to build a life doing what you live to the recent history of author advances to perspectives on harm-mitigation when dealing with the ugly realities of capitalism in the arts. How do we survive as artists in this world? How can we afford to live our dreams? How is everyone else making it look so easy? Why do some book sell for a few thousand dollars while others sell for a million dollars? Have the authors who prefer lower advances lost their minds? How do royalties factor into all this? Can certain agents get us certain advances? Is there a way to hack our way into riches? How do we stop worrying about this so we can start doing what we love again? Perhaps at the core of all these questions is the most fundamental one: can I afford to be an author in 2024? We will look at a variety of issues entangled in this expansive topic. While I will share my own stories after having published five books, I will also include stories and feedback from other authors, agents, editors, and other industry experts. I will also make sure to answer any and all questions.
Workshop Highlights:
A business-of-writing shop-talk to hopefully empower in this time of general economic instability
A community of people who share your practical concerns without having to think about craft for once
The opportunity to ask the "embarrassing"/taboo questions without judgment
Two full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, January 31st.