All writing is care work, and all writers need someone to care for them. 

In this one-month mentorship, mentees will feel nurtured and supported as they recover their creativity or dive deeper into their practice, get feedback on their writing or advice on fledgling ideas, and finish an essay or make progress on a book.
Scheduling will be decided by Amanda and the mentee, according to the mentee's goals and personal schedule.
Each month of mentoring will include:
-20-minute introductory meeting on Zoom to outline the mentee's goals and how we will work together
-30-minute coaching meeting on Zoom either on the mentee's writing life or on a specific essay or memoir project
-Two more 30-minute meetings of coaching spread over two weeks OR one hour-long session discussing developmental edits on up to 10 pages of writing
-Weekly assignments and reading suggestions tailored to the student's goals
-Final email with publication/pitching/writing life suggestions

For writers working on book-length projects, a two-month minimum mentorship is suggested.

Care for Writers: One Month Mentorship

In this month-to-month mentorship with Chloe Caldwell, writers will receive edits, advice, and encouragement on their nonfiction pieces or projects. 

Mentees can choose the official start date with Chloe. From there, mentees will receive:
Two 30 min. phone calls with Chloe
Line edits and editor letter on 10 pages of your work
Monday email check-in personally tailored to you with writing exercises and readings (Note: check-ins with exercises can be tailored to each student and your schedule)

One Month Mentorship: Edits, Advice, + Encouragement

The most helpful thing that can happen to your text, aside from being written to completion, is having a pair of careful, sharp, and critical eyes look at it. 

With this mentorship, you will be able to have your texts and ideas evaluated by author and educator Katya Kazbek, who uses her experience teaching at Columbia University's MFA program and working in various publishing outposts (New Directions publishing house, Union Literary agency and A Public Space magazine) to deliver holistic and detailed feedback. Katya will be using her 7 Elements of Storytelling technique to evaluate the texts, and will make sure that your intentions for the story and the way it functions are in accord. She will also happily assist in all sorts of literary quests from better conceptualizing the project to making hard editorial decisions. 

Make Your Writing Work: One Month Mentorship 

In this month to month mentorship with Joanna Cantor, writers will receive edits, inspiration and accountability on their fiction piece or project. 

Mentee receives:
-Two 30-minute phone calls or Zooms with Joanna
-Written feedback on up to 20 pages of fiction
-Weekly check-in email with writing prompts and recommended readings (this will be completely tailed to the individual mentee). 

One Month Mentorship: Edits, Inspiration & Accountability 

Work one-on-one with Amy, award-winning author and essayist, on getting that personal essay as good as you can get it. Have you written a book in another genre, and now your agent or editor wants you to have a perfect essay to place? Or maybe you've just always wanted to write an essay but have never gotten past the notes stage. We'll go from rough draft to finished essay, and we'll probably even have fun doing it. 

Mentee receives:
- Two 1-hour phone calls or Zooms with Amy
- Two rounds of notes on your essay draft (up to 6000 words)
- Weekly email check-in with writing exercises and readings 

One Essay, One Month Mentorship

"Writing is a relationship," Sheila Heti wrote in MOTHERHOOD. And like all relationships, sometimes this one can feel very, very lonely. 

The real work of writing is about being and being with. In a true creative practice, all of your life counts, both the time spent with the page and the time spent washing dishes, staring out the window, or waiting in line at the post office. What benefits the work and the writer? This is the writing practice we’re here to create, nurture, and sustain.
With the approach that the writing itself can and should be a joy, we’ll tend to both your writing practice and the project at hand to help each come alive. Together we create a generative space with plenty of room for possibility. We fortify not only your work but your relationship with your work, and that’s what makes all the difference. 

One Month Mentorship: Writing Is a Relationship

What is "queer horror"? Whether you already write horror or are newer to it, we're going to learn together by way of actively writing into some of the most classic horror tropes. 

The class is broken into four chapters: CURSES, HAUNTED HOUSES, GHOSTS, and MONSTERS. For each chapter, there will be thematically relevant short readings accompanied by generative prompts. How can we use these horror classics to explore identity, relationships, societal norms, queerness, gender, positions of otherness in fiction, and more? The workshop will be generative and provide ample time to write, so students will hopefully leave feeling creatively invigorated and have had a chance to explore various horror themes during the workshop. All reading and writing will take place during the workshop; there is no prep work required. 


Gays & Ghouls: A Generative Queer Horror Workshop

Courtney Kocak will help you build a platform through newsletters, podcasts, social media, and more. And no, you don’t need to start your own podcast!

The word "platform" as a noun necessary to have a writing career used to send me into a spiral. I wanted to be a writer, not an influencer, but book deals are often BYOP—Bring Your Own Platform. I resented the idea of having to be both as a prerequisite for success. It seemed like an insurmountable roadblock. I was jealous of famous writers who didn't have to bother trotting out whimsical Instagram flat lays of their favorite books or trying to make their lunch a hilariously poetic moment on Twitter. I still have a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with social media, but in writing my recent book proposals and landing a dream agent, I realized I'd managed to build a decent platform in spite of myself.

How to Build a “Platform” for Writers Who Shudder at the Thought

Flash—stories less than 1,000 words—is hot! Learn why and how short prose, fiction and nonfiction, is changing the way we tell stories. 

This class will provide you with deep introduction to this fun form with stories from 6-words to 100, 400, more. We’ll read and analyze a wide range of shorts, stories and essays, and see how to engage readers in a small space by eliminating the excess and keeping what’s most essential. We’ll explore how urgency, conflict and a twist are keys to the form. And we'll see how voice, language, point-of-view, and structure contribute too. You will leave ready to write your own short pieces with ideas for where to submit them too. 

Short and Sweet: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and Nonfiction 

Originate complex protagonists whose arcs speak to the compelling and intersectional experiences of women, people of color, and/or the LGBTQ+ community. For writers of all identities.

A well-formed character wound creates a hard-to-correct misbehavior. Why do we watch TV? Because TV characters don’t heal, and great wounds stand directly in the way of the character achieving his/her/their goal.
Using this unique approach to the craft of screenwriting, Jenny Kleiman uses characters' misbehaviors and trauma (yes, in comedy too!) to develop rich and layered story arcs. These workshops are designed to hone the inner narratives, experiences, and tribulations of minority leads in an effort to combat and destroy familiar tropes previously reserved for women, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC characters in cinema. 

Working the Wound Weekend Screenwriting Intensive

Learn the fundamentals of character and plot structure, and lay the groundwork for completing a successful first draft.

You have an idea for a novel, but you don’t know where to start—or maybe you’ve started a novel, but stalled out after a chapter or two. What drives a great work of fiction? How do you create a story strong enough to sustain a novel? And how do you write 70, 80, or 90,000 words?This three-hour intensive class tackles the fundamentals of character and conflict; the elements of a satisfying narrative arc; and practical strategies for completing that first draft. Students of all levels are welcome to participate, though this class is best-suited for folks who have their first novel idea but aren't sure where to go next. Our time together will include presentations, guided writing, and discussion. In the end, you’ll leave with fresh ideas and concrete plans for your novel, as well as three worksheets to apply to this and future writing projects. 

Get Ready to Write Your Novel

Nothing is more important to your story than the first line. In this class, we will break down first lines from a diverse array of genres and styles, and workshop one of yours, going deep, word-by-word, showing how much power you can concisely pack into an opening line.

“First sentences are doors to worlds,” wrote Ursula Le Guin, and the best lodge themselves indelibly in our minds. Think of the multitudes contained in the opening of 100 Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." An entire world indeed. Here we will learn the art of building doorways.

Nothing is more important to your story than the first line. It must set the stage, grab the reader, and not let go. While also establishing the style, setting, and content of the piece. Particularly for emerging writers, it’s often what determines whether an editor keeps reading or puts the story down and moves on to the next.

Hooking Readers with the First Line

Do you feel lost when it comes to writing incisive, memorable dialogue that elevates your fiction rather than dragging it down? 

In this three-hour intensive, we'll explore what makes dialogue effective and exciting in fiction. We'll discuss direct, indirect, and summarized dialogue; some ground rules for writing dialogue (though, of course, rules are made to be broken!); study dialogue in several published short stories; and use writing exercises to experiment. 

Along the way, we will also discuss the interconnected relationship between character and plot and the balance between dramatization ("showing") and exposition ("telling") in our work.  

Crafting Conversations: Elevating Your Fiction Through Dialogue 

Flash—stories less than 1,000 words—is hot! Learn why and how short prose, fiction and nonfiction, is changing the way we tell stories.

In this four-week class, you will get a detailed overview of the genre and opportunities to write and share your flash fiction and CNF too. We’ll read and analyze a wide range of shorts, stories and essays, and see how to engage readers in a small space by eliminating the excess and keeping what’s most essential. We’ll explore how voice, language, point-of-view, and structure contribute, as well the often-present, fun twist found in flash. Through in-class freewrites, take-home prompts, and two workshops (on weeks 3 and 4) you will develop new writing and editing skills and learn how to tell your stories in a different way. Several journals and anthologies now feature flash writing, and we’ll look at places where you can submit your shorts too. 

In a Flash: A Workshop for Crafting Short Fiction and Nonfiction

In this 3 hour workshop, we will experiment with new techniques to explore sex and motherhood in our own writing.

Sexuality and maternity are subjects most of us have been taught to keep separate. In this class, we will assume that these two embodied, heightened states of being—sex and caregiving—do indeed share borders and inform one another, even though writing about sex and motherhood together may feel dangerous. 

In this workshop, we’ll read short excerpts across genre and discuss what we learn from these texts about craft, ideology, identity, and form. We will then write alongside one another, responding to a number of prompts inspired by the readings. 


Prompts will be inspired by fiction, nonfiction, poetry, theory, and visual work by artists and writers such as Maggie Nelson, Melissa Febos, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and others.

There will be time for a brief Q&A at the end of the workshop. 

Exploring Sexuality & Motherhood in Writing

The writer who celebrates the legend they once were, is a writer at the height of their powers! While you were drooling in braces, eating friendless lunches, and cutting your own bangs: guess what? Teenage you was a fucking STAR. She just never knew it.

Bring your fumbles and humiliations, your ukulele songs and band camp tears! The best comedy comes from utter vulnerability, so we’re quantum leaping back to YOUR TEENAGE SELF. In this 4-part screenwriting intensive, we’ll revisit who we were in high school, roll around in the cringey nostalgia (turns out it’s delicious!), do an archeological dig in our moms' basements, dust off any old shame, fall in love with our V1 prototypes, and from this tender and hilarious place craft an idiosyncratic, achingly specific high school heroine for the ages. Not “you”—but gorgeous pieces of you, folded into an exquisitely awesome new character. This course is equal parts catharsis and wild creativity. We're smashing our shadow selves wide open (in a cuddly, loving way) to find full freedom on the page—and finding community in the process. 

Your Teenage Self Was a F***ing Star

Social media — specifically Twitter and Instagram — can often be our biggest detriment as writers. It eagerly sucks up writing periods like a starved animal, turning one five minute break between chapters into lost hours. 

But what if we could reimagine what social media means to the creative nonfiction writing process? 

In this class, we’ll explore how to use Instagram and social media  as a tool to support memory by hunting through old posts and crafting stories around the information we find.  In-class writing exercises and discussions will focus on how we decipher which details are most important to include and which will muddy the text. Later, we will debate what is gained or lost by bringing social media into our creative endeavors.At the end of the two hours, your feed will become one big digital memory box. As writers, we can use this to our advantage with our current projects by mapping out details through photographic time stamps.

Utilizing Social Media as a Memory Making Tool

Learn from award-winning poet, author, and educator Kelly Grace Thomas how to mine and create metaphors full of surprise, punch, and power! 

Kelly, winner of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, will teach new craft approaches and generative exercises to transform your writing. We will read and discuss work from contemporary poets such as Patricia Smith, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, Franny Choi, Stevie Edwards, Warsan Shire, and more. 

The Magic and Mining Of Metaphor

In this 3 hour workshop, we will demystify the psychology behind writer's block and arm you with actionable tools and strategies to initiate, sustain, and conclude your writing endeavors with a profound sense of fulfillment. 

This workshop centers around three pivotal queries: 
•  How does one ignite the spark to start writing? 
•  How can one maintain the momentum? 
•  And how does one conclude a session with a sense of accomplishment? 

With conversation and hands-on exercises, students will craft a writing practice in real-time.

Whether facing a blank page, navigating the middle of a project, or crafting long-form works such as prose, plays, or films, this workshop is for you. 

Write Without Restraint: Defeating Writer's Block, Distraction, and Procrastination

Lilith Noah's Poetry Workshop goes into the second round! 

Lilith Noah's Poetry Workshop goes into the second round! This time, the workshop participants will use creative exercises to delve deeper into a specific emotion that had not been assigned in the first installment of the workshop, which they can explore in their poetry. The poems written in class will again appear in an exclusive workshop zine that you will build together with Lilith Noah, like the one you can see <a href="https://www.chillsubs.com/writeordie/materials/in-my-feelings" target="_blank">here</a>. 


Let's Make a Zine (again): A Collaborative Poetry Workshop 

This one-day craft seminar will explore techniques for writing vivid descriptions and sensory details in fiction writing. 

We’ll look at sample excerpts from short stories and novels across a range of literary styles and discuss how each writer effectively captures sensory experience to convey emotion. We'll explore the basics of “show, don’t tell,” the relationship between character emotion and description, the way description helps create vivid and atmospheric settings, and the nature of sentence rhythm in crafting lyrical and effective prose. Students will also practice their own writing through an in-class craft exercise.

Mastering Sensory Detail and Description in Fiction: A Craft Seminar 

Legit: take this class and become, like, a dialogue KWEEEEN. Learn to write flawlessly halting, fumblingly REAL dialogue! Dialogue mastery is an essential, oft-overlooked skill—arguably THE most important tool in the writer’s toolbox—and you can MASTER it.

This workshop is a fun, collaborative, observation-based 2 weeks where you will learn to identify convincingly real ways “real humans really talk” (read: fumbling, dumb, inarticulate, subtexy, halting, exquisitely imperfect stuff!). 

Whether you're a fiction writer, screenwriter, or playwright (aspiring or otherwise), the most dependable “weak link” in any piece of middling writing is always: BAD DIALOGUE! 

Mushy and sentimental, robot stiff, hyper-articulate, or full of cloying narrative exposition, dialogue that hasn’t been trained on actual human conversational rhythm is a liability. When we nail authentic conversational voice, we DEEPEN investment in the world we’ve built, its humans’ emotional inner lives and endearing foibles. But, when we miss the conversational mark, an otherwise enthralled viewer/reader is rudely shoved from the speeding revelry of your brilliant fictional work … SMACK onto the ugly sidewalk. 

How Real Humans Talk!: Dialogue Writing Essentials 

You have an essay, short story, poem, or hybrid piece polished and ready to share with the world. But where? And how?

Getting published in a literary journal isn’t like entering a lottery. It’s not a matter of chance or luck. Getting published is a process. Whether you are an experienced writer who wants to publish more, new to submitting and getting ready to send out your first piece or looking for new outlets for writing that is stalled, it’s the same process.

In this two-hour presentation, taught by Andrea A. Firth, you will learn the steps to follow and the tools and resources to use to submit and be accepted in literary magazines. Plus, you will gain the motivation and encouragement to get started, unstuck, and publish more. Rejection is part of the process, and we'll talk about how to avoid it, manage it, and use it to your advantage. We will create a clear and manageable plan for you to follow and introduce you to a range of potential literary outlets for your writing. And there will be ample opportunity to ask questions.

The World of Lit Mags and How to Get Published

For 5-weeks, SCREENPLAYS BY BADASS WOMEN offers a supportive, uproariously fun, and explorative kaleidoscope of screenwriting study AND practice!  

We will deep-dive several of the most groundbreaking screenplays by women, engage in conversation about what exactly these cinematic worlds offer that’s brilliantly off-kilter and essential, as well as WRITE diligently into our own screenplays. Weekly sessions will toggle between these three elements—study, community exploration, writing—connecting the dots between our lived experiences on Planet Patriarchy, the historically marginalized “female gaze,” astute screenwriting craft, direct feedback from Lauren, and a fresh rubric to bring your screenplay into its full, gobsmacking potential. 

workshop

Gays & Ghouls: A Generative Queer Horror Workshop

By Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya

October 7 • 1:00 PM (EST) - 4:00 PM (EST)

US$ 75

workshop

How to Build a “Platform” for Writers Who Shudder at the Thought

By Courtney Kocak

October 14 • 1:00 PM (EST) - 3:30 PM (EST)

US$ 65

Great News!

Workshop

Short and Sweet: A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and Nonfiction

By Andrea A. Firth

October 14 • 1:00 PM (EST) - 3:00 PM (EST)

US$ 65

workshop

Working the Wound Weekend Screenwriting Intensive

By Jenny Kleiman

October 14 - October 15 • 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM (EST)

US$ 100

Workshop

Get Ready to Write Your Novel

By Stephanie Feldman

October 15 • 11:00 AM (EST) - 2:00 PM (EST)

US$ 75

workshop

Hooking Readers with the First Line

By Maxim Loskutoff

October 22 • 2:00 PM (EST) - 6:00 PM (EST)

US$ 90

workshop

Crafting Conversations: Elevating Your Fiction Through Dialogue

By Joanna Cantor

October 24 • 6:00 PM (EST) - 9:00 PM (EST)

US$ 75

workshop

In a Flash: A Workshop for Crafting Short Fiction and Nonfiction

By Andrea A. Firth

October 26 - November 16 • 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM (EST)

US$ 280

workshop

Exploring Sexuality & Motherhood in Writing

By Amanda Montei

October 29 • 1:00 PM (EST) - 4:00 PM (EST)

US$ 75

workshop

Your Teenage Self Was a F***ing Star

By Lauren Veloski

November 5 - December 3 • 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (EST)

US$ 275

workshop

Utilizing Social Media as a Memory Making Tool

By Jessica L. Pavia

November 11 • 11:00 AM (EST) - 1:00 PM (EST)

US$ 75

workshop

The Magic and Mining Of Metaphor

By Kelly Grace Thomas

November 11 • 1:00 PM (EST) - 4:00 PM (EST)

US$ 75

workshop

Write Without Restraint: Defeating Writer's Block, Distraction, and Procrastination

By Brandon Rumaker

November 14 • 6:30 PM (EST) - 9:30 PM (EST)

US$ 75

workshop

Let's Make a Zine (again): A Collaborative Poetry Workshop

By Lilith Noah

November 18 • 10:00 AM (EST) - 1:00 PM (EST)

US$ 50

workshop

Mastering Sensory Detail and Description in Fiction: A Craft Seminar

By Aatif Rashid

November 19 • 3:00 PM (EST) - 6:00 PM (EST)

US$ 75

workshop

How Real Humans Talk!: Dialogue Writing Essentials

By Lauren Veloski

December 2 - December 9 • 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM (EST)