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

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

Writing about place and home that has "main character syndrome."

Dorothy Allison once wrote that “Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.” Part of writing regionally means discovering the things that you thought you knew about your memory and perception are colored and distorted by the environment that shaped you. In regional writing, setting is key. How is home constructed in place narrative? Through application of all five senses? Does it require thinking of place as character? 
Attendees will spend time in this session discussing the craft of place and regional writing in narrative works, essays, and pop culture/media. This will be a collaborative process; one that allows us to consider (and reconsider) questions of “home” when it comes to creative work. Readers will generate work in-session and take home prompts when the workshop is complete.

This is the Place: Mapping Memory and Home in Regional Writing 

This 3-hour workshop asks that you write yourself—things you observe, feel, understand, and ways that you move through and experience the world. 

Here we aim to exalt the every day, to dissect the abounding, to say the things we might not otherwise say, to see where it takes us. This course is interested in the essayette, the cronica, the prose poem, or any other smallish iteration of the personal narrative. We hope to use these small vessels to take magnifying glasses to our memories, movements, and meditations. 

Writing the Self: Small Mirrors, Mouths, & Movements

In the midst of a constantly shifting media landscape, what are the best ways to connect with readers and share your work with the world? 

In this 1 hour craft chat, join Split/Lip Press Marketing Directors Gage Saylor and Abigail Oswald as they share a few tips and tricks for marketing a book without losing your mind!

Abigail Oswald 

Gage Saylor

Author Marketing FUNdamentals Craft Chat: Patience, Passion, and Perseverance

Hollywood is a multi-headed beast flashing teeth and manned by hard-to-access gatekeepers. TRUE. You are a genius capable of squeezing a winning, utterly unique screenplay out of your innately creative brain—ALSO TRUE! 

In this craft chat, Lauren will share her tips and tricks for how to access your singular voice and vision as a beginning screenwriter—even if you don't know the first thing about screenwriting! As a writer and coach, Lauren works frequently with writers who identify primarily as fiction writers, memoirists, or even journalists but are curious about tapping into the visual storytelling corner of their creative brain! OR, are interested in potentially adapting their original work for the screen. 

In this conversation/Q&A, Lauren is excited to help you: 
1). understand what makes your specific writerly brain wonderful, weird, idiosyncratically and messily human, and 
2). discover how you can translate that P.O.V. into remarkable, complicated characters for the big (or little) screen. I don't teach "one size fits all" assembly line screenwriting. 

Lauren teaches from the heart (hers but also yours!) and through your unique gifts and instincts as a storyteller.

Lauren Veloski 

ANYONE CAN WRITE A SCREENPLAY!: 10 Tips & Tricks for Finding Your Screenwriting Mojo

Let your wounded characters heal and transform you as the writer in the process. The sacred process of story writing is an act of creation that facilitates radical healing. 

As your characters heal their wounds within the scaffolding of structure, you can learn to listen to their whisperings to better understand yourself and why. 

In this generative workshop experience, you will learn to understand narrative structure and how creating characters who have the capacity to change determines plot. We will take a deep dive into narrative structure by way of the wounded character. You will learn the sacred process of structuring a story by writing wounded characters that can act as containers for our own traumas and pain. In learning how they transform, you will open new pathways to healing while allowing them to bear some weight of pain. 

Fiction Writer's Workshop for Healing 

A good copyedit is more than just a spell-check—it’s sensitive to author voice and intent and makes the text more accessible for the reader.


In this class, you’ll learn the basics of good copyediting and implement those basics over a number of sample texts. We’ll start with becoming familiar with The Chicago Manual Style and Merriam Webster, then move on to the different things copy editors should always be looking for when approaching a text.

 Editing for Style: A Hands-On Lesson in Copyediting

Let's use our queer imaginations to break open new worlds on the page. 

This genrefluid and generative workshop is about making work that's queer beyond the surface level content.

We'll experiment with form, language, and narrative devices and structures that are in and of themselves queer, going beyond normative modes of storytelling. How can we use things like POV, line breaks, nonlinear storytelling, etc to tell queer stories in queer ways? How can we disrupt our own writing processes to unlearn "rules" we've been taught and work toward a queer understanding of craft?

This generative workshop is geared toward making queer work that might be messy and maybe even — GASP! — "unmarketable," because fuck that! We're here, we're queer, and we're gonna write work that's first and foremost for ourselves. 

Queer Imagination

Join us for a day of writing during our monthly virtual retreat! You will have the opportunity to write alongside other writers in real time and learn from authors in the industry. This will be a time of encouragement and a chance to make real progress!  

Whether you’re just thinking about an idea, just starting a project or are deep into revisions, this is for you. 

This retreat also includes an hour-long craft chat and Q&A with Lauren Kay who will answer the question: is traditional publishing with it? 
She will discuss the many pros and cons of traditional vs. self-publishing, including the details of her 6-figure 2-book deal, that required her to do a lot of her own social media marketing.  

Wherever you are in your process, we welcome you with open arms. You don’t have to write alone. Your art matters. Time to deepen your love for your own work and set it into motion. 

Let’s write together.

Lauren Kay

Kailey Brennan DelloRusso 

Tamar Mekredijian

The Write Together Retreat featuring Lauren Kay

Run to the airport with the fervor of a feminist in sensible shoes!  

This 5-week course is equal parts source text study and wild writing: unbraiding commercial rom-com scenes, then rewriting them per our experience as actual human women! Our approach allows for the genre's dependable joys, but finds all-new writerly freedom in subverting its tropes and reimaging its comedy front to back—with laughs based in truth and fearless play. 

We'll scrutinize a delightfully problematic genre—the popcorn-worthy AND curse-worthy "Rom-Com"—then embark on our own original/subversive rom-com scripts. We’ll also investigate the few brave outliers that tried to stretch the genre (queer love anyone? women who are unflappable?). 

(Additional info below)


Writing the Subversive Rom-Com

You got the book deal! With a small press! And, though it's no surprise, they do not have a marketing department! Now what? This course will walk you through what it takes to do your own heavy lifting with publicity and how to make the most of your publication.  

Your book is your baby, that cliche of all cliches. But it is. You worked hard on it. You want it to reach readers, however that may be. This workshop will teach you the basics of what it means to do your own marketing and PR, how to build press lists, how to pitch yourself, and how to balance what YOU do as an author versus what the publisher can do for you. 

In this workshop, we will spend time crafting a one page "press kit" for our books, begin to build a press list that is specifically catered to your book's themes, brainstorm ideas around your book's themes that you can pitch as features or essays, and learn how to elevator pitch yourself for book events, festivals, podcasts and more.

Ideal for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for publication of their first novel or just wanting to cut their teeth on DIY book publicity when you know you've got to do it for yourself.

Marketing Your Small Press Book

Taylor Swift describes the Tortured Poets Department as a government entity that studies the behavior and minds of poets. Let’s become members of the department and explore Swift’s approach to creativity and the writing process. 

In this 3-hour workshop, we will discuss how Taylor Swift mines and organizes her ideas and takes them on a journey from singular line to full-blown song.  

We will also discuss how we can use this organizational process in our own work so our ideas are always accessible and ready to use. 
Additionally, we’ll look at her thoughts on creativity and discuss using her work as our muse. 

There will be both fiction and non-fiction prompts as well as other exercises. You will walk away feeling creatively energized, ready to organize your ideas and fragments, and start thinking of your work as a body in conversation rather than individual pieces that don’t speak to each other.

You are NOT on your own, kid, when you’re writing with fellow Taylor Swift fans.

Write (Fiction) Like Taylor Swift: Inside the Creative Process of a Tortured Poet

Two essay drafts on the page in two hours? Is that even possible? YES!

Are you stuck? In a writing rut? Want to try something new, explore ideas you’ve tiptoed around in the past, or just get some words on the page again? 

In this class, we’ll read and write, using prompts to help you generate two new nonfiction pieces: one flash work of memoir and one personal essay! You’ll leave with two new drafts and a guided plan for revisions!

2 Essays in 2 Hours! 

Ever wanted an excuse to fuse your love of Britney, Whitney and Mariah into your creative writing? Here’s your chance.

Using the lyrics, lives, and lovers of beloved popstars, we’ll write using inspiration from singers like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Christina Aguilera and more. This class is designed to be fun, boost creativity, and generate pages. All genres and levels are welcome. 
Whether you're writing-curious or a published author, in this live 2-hour workshop, you'll walk away with the start to a piece or two. Optional chance to share an excerpt or line of your fresh work. Let's liven up your creativity with somebody who loves you.

Popstar Prompts!

This course is for anyone hoping to strengthen their web-writing skills for online publications.

In this asynchronous course held on Wet Ink, we will look at different online writing forms and explore best practices for writing compelling and important work.

Each week, we will discuss a different form, such as the review, the "listicle," the op-ed, the open letter, the interview, and more. We will talk about how to structure pieces so they grab and hold readers' attention, what attributes can help pieces go viral, and how to generate ideas for maximum flow and productivity. Students will read examples of published work, write new material, and receive feedback each week. 
This is a work-heavy course, designed to get writers comfortable with producing content quickly. Participants will respond to a new prompt each week while also giving and receiving constructive feedback. 

Writing Great Content for Your Substack or Other Online Spaces

Playwright-turned-Screenwriter Celine Song’s “PAST LIVES” (2023) is a piece of art that invites every single one of us in—asking politely if it can break our hearts, then doing exactly that, but with far more pluck than most “hit” Hollywood films. 

In this 2-hour seminar, we’ll parse this film’s fascinating entanglement with (and nervy subversion of!) our long rom-com “love triangle” lineage, and explore Song’s revolutionary treatment of her heroine Nora Moon as an unapologetically self-possessed woman seeking wholeness—and believing she deserves it. (What radical act of characterization is this?!) 

This is emphatically NOT a “film” class and you don't have to be a cinephile or screenwriter to join! —anyone who loved “PAST LIVES," and writers of all modes/genres are invited! 

This is a town hall on truth and tenderness, open to everyone. Perhaps a thousand layers of In-Yun are bringing us together!

“PAST LIVES”: Personhood, Pluck, & the New Love Triangle

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. 


Workshops