$150
3 Sessions
Out of stock
Friday - Sunday 7:00 pm EDT - 9:00 pm EDT September 24 to September 26, 2021
Online via Zoom
This workshop has reached its capacity. Please click here to join the waitlist.
Whether a writer is in the early stages of a novel and wondering how they will make it to the end of a draft, or they have been working on a project for a long time and are waiting for things to finally click into place, writing a novel can be a lonely business. In the process of writing a long project, there is no shortage of ways to feel stuck, but there is also no shortage of ways to become unstuck. This course will de-mystify crafting and revising a novel by examining not only participants’ own work on the page, but by also looking within to identify and remove any emotional blocks writers might have that are holding them back from achieving their goals.
This workshop will cover both matters of craft and mindset. Participants will talk about how to make those important first pages really sing, how to dynamically structure a novel, and examine elements like point-of-view and voice, but they will also embark on the deep work of looking at their own core beliefs about themselves as writers that may be unconsciously holding them back. Fear—of being able to pull off the story they are trying to tell, of rejection, of success—is often something writers need to overcome. In this class, participants will look at practical and actionable ways they can begin to dismantle what no longer serves them and implement what does, both on the page and in themselves.
All Levels
Capacity: 20
Led by
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Chelsea Bieker
Chelsea Bieker
Chelsea Bieker is the author of the novel Godshot which was longlisted for The Center For Fiction First Novel Prize and named an NPR Best Book of the Year. Her story collection, Heartbroke, will be published in April 2022. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Granta, the Cut, McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and others. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Originally from California’s Central Valley, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children.
By Chelsea Bieker
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Godshot
By Chelsea Bieker
Published by Catapult
Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for.
Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.
Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.
About this series
Writing Workshops
We strive to make our classes the most inviting and rewarding available, offering an intimate environment to study with award-winning, world-class writers. Each class is specially designed by the instructor, so whether you’re a fledgling writer or an MFA graduate polishing your novel, you’ll find a perfect fit here.