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Off Campus Writers' Workshop - OCWW


PLEASE NOTE: Workshops are in Central time. All sessions are recorded and available to view for the week following the session; links to the recordings are e-mailed to all registrants. It's not necessary to notify us if you wish to change your  attendance to either REMOTE or ONSITE; all registrants receive both the link to the session and the link to the recording.


Upcoming events

    • August 21, 2025
    • 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
    • REMOTE
    Register

    Roxane Gay’s short story North Country, a 2012 Best American Short Stories selection, focuses on Kate a young African- American academic grappling with the loss of her stillborn child. The North Country’s wintry backdrop at once represents the natural setting and her state of mind; it is an apt metaphor for disconnection, isolation, and the loneliness of grief. Gay effectively employs other craft elements such as scene and summary, theme, character, and plot to evoke emotion and insight in the reader. Finally, Gay’s dry humor and raw honesty make this story poignant and unforgettable. 

    Roxane Gay is an American essayist, fiction writer, editor and cultural critic known for her witty and empathetic style. Her writing is concerned with the themes of feminism, race, gender identity, sexual violence and body image. She is the author of  best-selling collections Ayiti (2011) and Bad Feminist (2014), a 2014 novel An Untamed State, the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017) for which she was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Autobiography.  

    Hosted by: Della Leavitt

    DOWNLOAD DISCUSSION MATERIALS HERE:

    BIO: Moira Sullivan has been participating in writing groups since 1993. She hosted a community open mic at the former Café Express in Evanston and continues to write poetry and short stories. She served as an associate editor for “RHINO: the poetry forum,” and participating in the Highlights Program. In graduate school, she collected political poetry in Brazil and became a professional translator and marketer at a global humanitarian association. Her short story The Pawnbroker’s Deal appeared in the collection titled Further Persons Imperfect (2007). Her story Caught in the Net appeared in Turning Points, the 75th Anniversary OCWW Anthology (2021) and her story Man of the House appeared in OCWW’s Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction anthology (2023). An OCWW member since 2018, she currently serves on the promotion committee and on the board as Secretary. These days you might find her working on a sci-fi novel at a local Evanston cafe as a member of the 2024-25 cohort in the “Novel in a Year Program” sponsored by Story Studio.


PAST SEASON'S WORKSHOPS  
- click title for full description -


19-Sep-24 Fred Shafer - The Habit of Learning: 3 SESSIONS
26-Sep-24 Vu Tran - The Imperfect Lens Of Narrative Point Of View
10-Oct-24 Peter Orner - Creating Living, Breathing Characters
17-Oct-24 Rebecca Makkai - Why Are You Making This So Damn Hard? On Complexity and Simplicity
24-Oct-24 Mary Ruth Clarke - Drama: A Collaborative Artform
31-Oct-24 Christina Clancy - Mistakes
7-Nov-24 Diana Goetsch - Working Against Your Drift
14-Nov-24 Catherine Barnett - Syntax and Improvisation
5-Dec-24 Rachel Swearingen - Managing Groups of Characters in a Single Scene or Story
12-Dec-24 Steve Almond - All the Secrets of Plot
19-Dec-24 Seema Reza - The Ritual of Discovery in Non-Fiction
9-Jan-25 Nadine Kenney Johnstone - Nonlinear: A Straightforward Approach to Complex Structures
16-Jan-25 Joseph Scapellato - Language Workout
23-Jan-25 Jeannie Vanasco - Finding Form(s)
30-Jan-25 Michelle Hoover - Saving the Saggy Middle
6-Feb-25 Sarah Stone - Reliable/Unreliable Narrators (and Characters)
13-Feb-25 Adam Vines - Unorthodox Approaches to Ekphrasis
20-Feb-25 Robert Anthony Siegel - Making Your Characters Physically Present on the Page: A Multigenre Craft Talk
27-Feb-25 Mary Kay Zuravleff - Building Literary Characters
6-Mar-25 Sarah Stern - The Prose Poem: A Perfect Contradiction
13-Mar-25 Juan Martinez - Fast Talk: Four Easy Ways to Make Dialogue Pop
20-Mar-25 Audrey Niffenegger - Writing a Sequel
27-Mar-25 Lori Rader-Day - Popular Fiction: Character and Story
3-Apr-25 Taylor Byas - The Architecture of the Sestina
10-Apr-25 Kathleen Rooney - Now I Know My ABCs: Using the Abecedarian Form to Transform a Project
17-Apr-25 Frances de Pontes Peebles - The Shape of a Story: What is Plot and How do We Write It?
24-Apr-25 Goldie Goldbloom - Going Deep: How to Achieve Interiority
1-May-25 Steve Trumpeter - The Best American Short Stories: Learning from the BASS Anthology Winners
8-May-25 Heather Sellers - Micro Memoir: True Stories in Tight Packages
15-May-25 Megan Stielstra - Let People Carry It: Publishing as Practice
22-May-25 Abby Geni - Writing a Novel-in-Stories
29-May-25 Magazine and Journal Editor Panel: Christine Maul Rice, Kira Tucker, John McCarthy, Laura Joyce Hubbard
5-Jun-25 Michael Zapata - Make a Mess


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