Classes

Starts Thursday, June 13 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. EST/9:30 to 11 a.m. PT for 3 weeks. Explore how to write your personal narrative in a way that moves and connects with readers with Zibby's Writing Community Host Darcey Gohring. Each week, students will learn the fundamentals of how to enrich their writing in a workshop seminar setting. Together, students will examine selected excerpts of narrative writing techniques from books, memoirs, and personal essays to help understand structure, voice, and ways to keep the reader engaged. In a safe, collaborative space, writers will be encouraged to share excerpts from their current work and receive constructive feedback.

Sunday, June 9, 2024 from 1 to 3 p.m. (EST). In grief, we must speak with new mouths. In grief, we must find language for pain that lives in a dark, powerful land that leaves us feeling lost, feeling unable, feeling a need to form words where there is only the scream of loss. So how? How to say what grief is like when grief is so resistant to description? How to say in words what is so painfully felt? This generative course will consider several texts that grapple with these questions, texts that seek to put language to the experience of grief—which is unique to each person but universal to the human experience. By examining the different forms and voices in these texts we will consider how each person’s experience of grief informs the shape of their words, and of their story on the page. We will also discuss and name practices of care essential to the process of grief-and-loss writing. Texts may include excerpts of work by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Han Kang, Michael Ondaatje, Denise Riley, and Ocean Vuong. Guided by what we read, we will move through generative writing prompts for grief and loss: exercises in poetry or prose that are portals into the deep, lines to hold onto.

“There is something down there and you want it told.” - Gwendolyn MacEwen

Thursday, May 30, 2024 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. (EST). The query letter has one purpose, and one purpose only: to seduce the agent or editor into reading or requesting your work. The query letter is so much of a sales piece that it’s possible to write one without having written a word of the manuscript. All it requires is a firm grasp of the story premise—the most essential part of the query for a novelist or memoirist. This class will directly help you with the second issue, as well as offer methods of determining whether the first issue might be a problem. Jane has edited more than 5,000 query letters during her career and has literally seen it all. Her industry experience gives her exceptional insight into what agents and editors see all the time, and what will or will not be memorable.

What you’ll learn

• Why novel and memoir queries share the same secrets to success (and why you can learn from good and bad examples of both types)
• The key elements that every novel or memoir query letter needs, and what’s optional
• What a story premise should include and how to avoid getting overly detailed
• How to avoid the dreaded laundry-list quality in your story premise
• What strong comparable titles look like and what to do if you’re failing to find decent comps
• What to say in your bio note, especially if you’ve never published a thing to your name
• The appropriate length for a query letter
• How much you should discuss the target readership of your work
• How much you should get into marketing plans or platform-related information
• What self-published authors should do when querying for a new work or an existing, self-published book (but here’s the answer to the latter—it will save you money and time)
• Informed guidance on breaking the rules

Who should take this class

• Any novelist preparing to query agents or editors, especially those pitching for the first time
• Any memoirist preparing to query agents or editors—again, especially first-timers

This class will not cover: nonfiction (except for memoir), children's picture books, anything written in verse, and experimental works that aren't easily categorized