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Season pass now half off for the remainder of the season.
Give your writing practice some new colors this fall by joining our virtual Write-Ins!
September 10 to December 2
Our 12 write-ins will be led by 7 of the Writers Grotto's highly-accomplished writer-instructors, published experts in their genres. Learn new ways to generate or revise your writing from the varied perspectives of professional poets, screenwriters, memoirists, flash fiction writers, and others.
Make an appointment with yourself to find focus, community, inspiration, and new tools to strengthen your writing.
Our 60 minute Write-Ins are offered on a variety of days and times. Check the schedule to see which ones work best for you.
Cost: $25/session or now only $50 for a season pass!
Sessions:
Instructor: Constance Hale
Banish your anxiety about grammar and get you new tricks to make your sentences sing.
Six hours, a free book, bagels galore, and buckets of grammar. How can you resist? Whether you dream of being a social-media monarch, a literary lioness, or a tough lawyer—words, sentences, and stories are your currency. You cannot afford sloppy syntax. Connie will lead you through a series of hilarious exercises and prompts to perk up your writing in surprising ways. (We’ll use Connie’s Sin and Syntax as our guide, but dip also into her book on verbs, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch.) You will stretch new muscles, ditch bad habits, and duke it out in a war of words. We’ll also talk about how to cultivate that most elusive of literary elements: the writer’s voice. This one-day workshop is perfect for writers of all genres who want to take their prose to the next level. No grammar competency required, but a sense of humor is a must.
Students completing this workshop will:
*learn the parts of speech—which ones to exploit, which ones to expunge
*discover the dynamics of a sentence—master the subject-predicate tango
*banish all fear of the semicolon (and other punctuation minefields)
*avoid, forevermore, the five biggest bonehead grammatical mistakes
*figure out the fuss over dangling participles
*play with pronouns—yes, pronouns—to explore POV and voice
Constance Hale has transformed “writing reference” shelves with her irreverent books on language—which are used in writing classes around the world. A former editor at Wired, Health, and the San Francisco Examiner, her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, Honolulu, and Smithsonian, among other publications. Her six books include the bestselling Sin and Syntax: How to Write Wicked Good Prose. Once called “E. B. White on acid,” Connie has directed creative nonfiction conferences at Harvard and U.C. Berkeley and wrote an eight-part series for “Draft” at the New York Times’ Opinionator. She covers writing and the writing life at sinandsyntax.com.
Instructor: Kristen Cosby
This four-week class focuses on beginnings and sticky places in a piece of writing. Whether you’re struggling to start a new memoir, feeling stalled midway through a personal narrative or short story, or trying to regain momentum on a longer project, this generative workshop will help you reconnect with both your writing practice and your work-in-progress through a supportive community of fellow writers.
Together, we’ll explore ways to generate fresh material and cultivate a sustainable writing habit through guided prompts, discussion of published examples, and practical strategies for overcoming creative blocks. During class, you’ll write in response to prompts and experiment with techniques drawn from fiction, memoir, and personal narrative while developing tools you can return to long after the course ends.
Rather than focusing on completing a single piece, this class is designed to help writers make meaningful progress on existing projects and generate new material. You might draft a new chapter of a memoir, discover the opening of a novel, create a series of flash-fiction pieces, or uncover an unexpected direction in a larger work.
Participants are welcome, but never required, to share their work and receive feedback from peers and the instructor. Writers at all levels are welcome. Come with a notebook and a project, or simply the desire to start one. You’ll leave with new pages, renewed creative energy, and a clearer path forward. No homework required!
Kristen Cosby is a freelance writer, editor, educator, and performer. Her work has received support from the Jan Michalski Foundation (Switzerland), Can Serrat (Spain), the Corporation of Yaddo (USA), the MacDowell Artist Colony (USA), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (USA). In addition, her essays have won the Normal Prize in Nonfiction and a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. Other works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Normal School, The Normal School Online, Kenyon Review Online, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Pitt Med Magazine, Proto, and Lodestars Anthology, as well as been anthologized in The Pleasure Principle, The Moment, and The Spirit of Disruption. Kristen has performed work as a storyteller at The Moth, Redwood Nights, the Naked Truth, the Marsh Theater, and Stage Werx’s Solo Sundays, and as part of La Cocina’s Voices from the Kitchen.
Take some time for your writing this fall with a series of virtual Write-Ins hosted by The Writers Grotto. Led by one of the Grotto’s many talented and accomplished writers, each of the sessions below provides 60 minutes of space and guidance in which to get your creative energy flowing, generate new material, bring old material up to snuff, and just make contact with the community of writers that is the Grotto, our teachers, and our students.
Write-Ins are held on a variety of days and times to give our students the opportunity to choose a Write-In that works best for their schedule.
Cost: $25/session or $50 for a season pass!
Sessions:
Instructor: Sabina Khan-Ibarra
In this four-week generative poetry course, students will explore how contemporary poets create emotional resonance through image systems, repetition, compression, silence, pacing, and associative movement. Rather than focusing on traditional form, this class investigates how emotional pressure shapes structure and language.
Through readings, discussion, prompts, and in-class writing, students will generate new work rooted in recurring imagery, emotional tension, obsession, memory, and embodied experience.
We will read work by poets such as Marie Howe, Ada Limón, Ilya Kaminsky, Sharon Olds, Aracelis Girmay, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Mark Doty.
This class is ideal for poets and hybrid writers interested in creating work that feels emotionally layered, image-driven, and structurally alive.
Students will:
* generate new poems
* explore repetition, silence, pacing, and compression
* develop stronger image systems and emotional architecture
* learn strategies for creating resonance without over-explaining
* read and discuss contemporary poetry
* finish class with multiple drafts and revision strategies
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pashtun Muslim American poet, writer, and educator whose work appears in Anomaly, SWWIM, Rising Phoenix, and iO Literary, and has been recognized by CRAFT and the SmokeLong Award for Flash Fiction. Her poetry collection, What My Mouth Holds, is a two-time semifinalist. She also teaches at Litquake and San Diego Writers Ink, where her classes focus on image, emotional architecture, fragmentation, and contemporary literary forms. She serves as Director of Rooted & Written, a fellowship and conference program centering BIPOC writers.
Instructor: Lyzette Wanzer
The lyrical essay has become a highly popular genre in multiple disciplines, from journalism to the personal essay. Authors from Purpura and Forché to Didion and Dillard have written them. But what, exactly, is this form? Poetic essay or essayistic poem? Both – or neither? The form employs a series of images or ideas, rather than chronicle or argument, to sculpt a narrative. Often inconclusive, lyrical essays reach beyond archetypal classical frames to a meditative sense of place and displacement. In this introductory workshop, we'll read and analyze several lyric essay examples, learning what distinguishes a lyric essay from other essay forms. We'll then try our hand at writing a short lyrical draft, incorporating the hallmarks and characteristics we discussed during the morning. The focus of this workshop is on experimentation rather than perfection.
Prior fiction or nonfiction writing experience is required. Students should be comfortable sharing early drafts with others.
Students completing this workshop will:
*be able to identify key components of the form and know how to negotiate its terrain
*understand what the lyric essay borrows from other genres, such as poetry
*have a clear direction about how to undertake crafting a full-fledged lyric essay
*be able to spot a lyric essay when they see one
Lyzette Wanzer’s work appears in over 30 literary journals, magazines, and books. Her book, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives, appears on Library Journal’s 2022 Top 10 Best Social Sciences Books list and was a 2023 Black Women’s Studies Association selection. A contributor to Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth From the Margins, Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area, and the multi-award-winning The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, Lyzette has appeared on a lyric essay panel at the 2023 AWP Conference and published an article on the form in the Essay Daily column. A National Writers’ Union and Authors Guild member, Lyzette has had her work supported by the California Arts Council, California Humanities (a National Endowment for the Humanities partner), the Center for Cultural Innovation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. She’s a Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center.
Take some time for your writing this fall with a series of virtual Write-Ins hosted by The Writers Grotto. Led by one of the Grotto’s many talented and accomplished writers, each of the sessions below provides 60 minutes of space and guidance in which to get your creative energy flowing, generate new material, bring old material up to snuff, and just make contact with the community of writers that is the Grotto, our teachers, and our students.
Write-Ins are held on a variety of days and times to give our students the opportunity to choose a Write-In that works best for their schedule.
Cost: $25/session or $50 for a season pass!
Sessions:
Sometimes the best parts of the holidays are the stories we tell. In this generative class, we'll turn your most celebratory, difficult, and hilarious moments of 2026—from vacation adventures to birthday bashes—into narratives or poems that fit on a greeting card. We'll use art, music, and writing prompts to turn your holiday treasures and triumphs into literary gold. The goal is to craft compelling, joyous stories from the memories that shaped you in 2026. This class is all about having fun and creating. We'll provide blank greeting cards, pens, pencils and art supplies to make cards unique to your experience, you can also bring your own notebooks or a laptop.
Instructor: Julie Lythcott-Haims
This class is a two-hour interactive Zoom seminar for those who want to better understand the genre of memoir, the craft elements required to write it well, and the red flags inherent in writing about real humans. In this course we will explore the tensions inherent in being author, narrator, and subject all at once; unpack the subjectivity of truth; commit to treat all characters fairly; learn to report from the body; discuss the importance of the story you can’t bear to share; and examine your obligations to the others about whom you will be writing.
Students will complete this course with:
* heightened understanding of the genre - both what it is and what it isn’t
* deepened understanding of craft tools that will yield better memoir
* greater confidence in knowing the red flags and in assessing whether and how to proceed
New York Times bestselling author, speaker, teacher, mentor, and activist, Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is interested in what gets in our way. Julie's first book, How to Raise an Adult, inspired a widely viewed TED Talk. Their PEN Oakland award-winning memoir, Real American, explores personal experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. A third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, is considered a groundbreakingly frank guide to navigating adulthood. Julie's forthcoming book, The Not So Empty Nest: A How-To Guide for Parents and Adult Children Living Together, releases in May 2027. Julie holds a B.A. from Stanford, a J.D. from Harvard Law, an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts, and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Puget Sound. They also teach memoir at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD.
Take some time for your writing this fall with a series of virtual Write-Ins hosted by The Writers Grotto. Led by one of the Grotto’s many talented and accomplished writers, each of the sessions below provides 60 minutes of space and guidance in which to get your creative energy flowing, generate new material, bring old material up to snuff, and just make contact with the community of writers that is the Grotto, our teachers, and our students.
Write-Ins are held on a variety of days and times to give our students the opportunity to choose a Write-In that works best for their schedule.
Cost: $25/session or $50 for a season pass!
Sessions:
This month's Grotto Literary Salon invites you to an evening celebrating new releases from Grotto writers. Nina Schuyler, Lenore Weiss, Elizabeth Svoboda, Mike Trigg, and Sarita Sarvate will read from and discuss their new books. Emceed by Jessica Martinez. At the Grotto, 1663 Mission St., Suite 602, San Francisco.
Instructor: Lyzette Wanzer
A powerful, succinct artist statement is a 21st-century necessity for the most lucrative literary grant and fellowship applications. Often your only opportunity to demonstrate that you are a thoughtful, deliberate writer who takes your literary career seriously, this statement lends significant support to your funding applications. In this one-day workshop, you'll learn how to cast your work in its strongest, most evocative light.
• You'll read statement examples and learn how vetting committees use them.
• Through a series of exercises, you'll generate ideas on how to talk about your work.
• You'll craft, workshop, and revise your own statement.
• You'll explore grants, fellowships, and other funding opportunities appropriate for creative writers.
You’ll leave class with a statement that’s ready to impress! This class is open to writers of all genres, including fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, songwriting, and graphic novels.
Lyzette Wanzer’s work appears in over 30 literary journals, magazines, and books. Her book, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives appears on Library Journal’s 2022 Top 10 Best Social Sciences Books list and was a 2023 Black Women’s Studies Association selection. A contributor to Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth From the Margins, Civil Liberties United: Diverse Voices from the San Francisco Bay Area, and the multi-award-winning The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, Lyzette has had her work receive funding from the Awesome Foundation, Black Artist Foundry, California Arts Council, California Humanities (a National Endowment for the Humanities partner), the Center for Cultural Innovation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Vashon Artist Residency, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Take some time for your writing this fall with a series of virtual Write-Ins hosted by The Writers Grotto. Led by one of the Grotto’s many talented and accomplished writers, each of the sessions below provides 60 minutes of space and guidance in which to get your creative energy flowing, generate new material, bring old material up to snuff, and just make contact with the community of writers that is the Grotto, our teachers, and our students.
Write-Ins are held on a variety of days and times to give our students the opportunity to choose a Write-In that works best for their schedule.
Cost: $25/session or $50 for a season pass!
Sessions:
Instructor: Sabina Khan-Ibarra
What makes a character stay with us long after we’ve finished reading? Is it what they want, what they refuse, the contradictions they carry, or the things they cannot bring themselves to say?
The most compelling characters are rarely defined by elaborate backstories or lists of personality traits. Instead, they reveal themselves through their choices, gestures, memories, desires, and silences.
In this four-week generative workshop, we’ll explore characterization across fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Through readings of Carmen Maria Machado, Ken Liu, Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, and Robert Hayden, we’ll examine how compelling characters emerge through action, voice, point of view, and what remains unsaid. Through discussion, writing prompts, and revision exercises, we’ll practice creating complex, memorable characters without relying on explanation.
Each week explores a different element of characterization: desire, contradiction, voice, and revelation through action and silence. Sessions combine close reading, craft discussion, generative writing, optional sharing, and revision.
Students are welcome to work in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, or a combination of genres. Writers may develop new characters or bring existing characters from works in progress.
This course welcomes writers at all levels.
By the end of four weeks, students will:
* explore characterization through desire, contradiction, voice, memory, and action;
* study how accomplished writers and poets create complex, memorable characters;
* generate at least four new pieces or character-centered drafts;
* experiment with characterization across literary forms;
* practice techniques for revealing emotion through gesture, objects, dialogue, and silence;
* learn revision strategies to deepen complexity without overexplaining;
* revise one of the four generated character pieces using techniques explored in the workshop;
* leave class with practical tools for strengthening characterization in future writing.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, migration, identity, and inheritance. Her writing appears in AGNI, SWWIM Every Day, Anomaly, FERAL, and Panoply, among other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she graduated with Distinguished Honors. A former Director of Rooted & Written at the Writers Grotto, she also teaches generative workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction at San Diego Writers, Ink. Her teaching emphasizes experimentation, close reading, creative discovery, and revision. She is currently working on a poetry collection, What My Mouth Inherited; a short fiction collection, The Mountain Lions; and a novel, A Poppy Flower.
Instructor: Sabina Khan-Ibarra
What if the strangest thing in your writing is the thing you should trust most?
A dead person speaks. A woman becomes a bird. Time collapses. An ordinary object carries impossible weight. An image defies logic but feels emotionally exact.
In this four-week generative class, we will explore what happens when writers embrace the unexpected, surreal, and uncanny, allowing images, experiences, and imaginative leaps to exist without immediately explaining them to the reader.
Each week, we will explore a different way writers make the unfamiliar feel necessary: defamiliarizing the ordinary, allowing the impossible into otherwise recognizable worlds, resisting the urge to explain every cultural reference or experience, and following associative or imaginative leaps that logic alone cannot make.
Through contemporary readings, discussion, and generative exercises, students will experiment across poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. There will be opportunities to share new writing and discuss what emerges, though sharing is always optional. The goal is not to make writing strange for strangeness’s sake, but to recognize when an unexpected choice opens a door that realism, explanation, or convention cannot.
Students will:
* experiment with defamiliarization and unusual perspectives;
* explore surreal, fabulist, and uncanny elements;
* practice incorporating culturally specific language, traditions, and references without over-explaining;
* use associative leaps, unexpected images, and imaginative logic;
* examine how to build enough trust for readers to follow unfamiliar choices;
* generate new work each week and leave class with multiple drafts to continue developing.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, migration, faith, and inheritance, often moving between realism, fabulism, and the surreal. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, SWWIM Every Day, Anomaly, FERAL, and Panoply, among others, and has been named a strong semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Felix Pollak Poetry Prizes, longlisted for Palette Poetry’s Love & Eros Prize, and shortlisted by SmokeLong Quarterly. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and also teaches creative writing with San Diego Writers, Ink, and Litquake.
Instructor: Julie Zigoris
Most journalists — and many writers — dream of seeing their work in the publication at the top of the food chain: the New York Times. You, too, can submit your words for an opportunity to appear in that famed font, thanks to the accessible entry point of a Tiny Love Story. A pint-sized version of the Times’ famous Modern Love column, these 100-word tales capture a small moment with big meaning in any kind of relationship. They pack it all in a petite container: drama, dialogue, narrative arc, and imagery. But tiny doesn’t mean easy. Over two sessions on Zoom, we will work together to unpack the formula of the TLS and brainstorm, craft, and revise our own Tiny Love Stories. By the end of the two weeks, you will have a draft ready for submission.
For our first session, I will share the story behind my own TLS and show the edits I made to bring it to publication. We will then look at models of the genre and begin to define the formula. We will have time to brainstorm and share our own ideas, as well as to freewrite and generate a narrative. After composing a longer-than-needed draft for session two, we'll work together on revision, structure, and beginnings and endings. We will discuss how to select an image to include with your submission — a required element. We’ll have time to revise and learn the final steps for getting our Tiny Love Story into the Big Wide World! You will emerge from this class with a revised TLS ready for submission as well as skills for writing with precision and emotional impact.
Julie Zigoris is a reporter and writer in San Francisco whose Tiny Love Story "Animal Instinct" brought the tale of her roommate-romance-turned-marriage into the public eye in 2025. In 2024, she won the Society of Professional Journalists award for general excellence in arts and culture reporting, and in 2023, the New York Times named her work “local journalism worth reading.” The author of Belomor: Criminality and Creativity in Stalin’s Gulag, Julie holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Studies and has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Stanford University, the Jewish Community High School, and in the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.
Instructor: Joanne Furio
As Isabel Allende put it, “Most male authors want to look good in their memoirs and have a place in posterity, while most women know that posterity is what happens when you no longer care.” In this in-person generative craft class we will be reading the work of women who, in effect, by “no longer caring” created groundbreaking memoirs that caused a stir – by bending genres, exploring sexuality, veering from gender roles, or otherwise challenging the status quo. Discussions on craft will be followed by in-class freewrites and short homework assignments. Some pieces will be workshopped.
The writers whose work we’ll examine include Grace Paley, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lidia Yuknavitch, Abigail Thomas, Roxane Gay, and Melissa Febos. Craft-wise, we’ll analyze how these writers bucked traditional forms to turn their experiences into page-turners, the eternal debate between truth versus what David Sedaris calls “true-ish” details, and the pros and cons of sharing the most intimate details of one’s physical and mental lives versus a more distanced narrative approach. Students will leave class with a greater knowledge of new approaches they can apply to their own memoir-writing.
Joanne Furio is an award-winning journalist and writer of creative nonfiction whose genre-fluid work ranges from prose poetry to flash, memoir, and personal essay. Her work has appeared in such publications as La Piccoletta Barca, Juked, Panoply, Craft Literary, The Believer, and Catapult, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was the recipient of a teaching fellowship, and has taught creative writing at Saint Mary’s, the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, and Poets & Writers.
Instructor: Lisa Lerner
In this two-hour workshop, we will define a pitch (sometimes called a logline or hook) and discuss where and when you will need it. We will review the necessary ingredients of, as well as formulas and templates for, a successful pitch. As we analyze pitches that resulted in book deals, you will have the opportunity to write your pitch in class and work through a series of exercises to revise it until it sings. You’ll leave with one killer sentence that makes readers excited to dive in.
This workshop is suitable for all writing levels of fiction (middle-grade, YA, and adult) and memoir.
Optional Add-On: Lisa is available for a one-hour private Zoom consultation for registered students. These consultations will be scheduled outside of class sessions, at a time that is mutually convenient for instructor and student. This consultation includes reading a one-page pitch and synopsis and a maximum of a five-page sample of your manuscript. All submissions should be 12 pt font double-spaced. The consultation hour will involve an in-depth conversation regarding the writer's story premise with the aim to understand, clarify, and elevate the writer's unique vision. Sign up for Add-On when you purchase your class.
Long ago, Lisa Lerner was a professional rubber stamp cutter, children’s party entertainer, and NYC performance artist. Then one day that lasted five years, she wrote a novel called Just Like Beauty that became a New York TImes Notable Book of the Year and is now in development as a movie shooting in 2027. Lisa has been writing stories for educational publishers such as Scholastic and McGraw Hill for over 25 years, as well as penning short fiction for McSweeney’s, Hobart, and other places, and teaching writing workshops to adults and kids. When she is not writing her next adult novel, she is a proud member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, a juror for the annual Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, and a trustee on the board of the Kingston Library in New York. Visit www.lisalerner.com for student testimonials and a glimpse into Lisa’s past and present lives.
Instructor: Matthew Félix
While a focus on craft is indispensable, writers often overlook underlying fundamentals that profoundly influence not only the writing itself but also the writing life.
Attention, energy, and inspiration are just some of the factors essential to creating your best work, while challenges like self-doubt, writer’s block, and perfectionism can leave you anxious or burned out.
In this eight-week program, writer and life coach Matthew Félix explores the often-overlooked connection between wellness and creative success. Drawing on breathwork, nervous system regulation, resilience training, and his own personal experience, Falling into Writing: Wellness for Craft and the Writing Life incorporates instruction, embodied exercises, structured assessments, group discussion, and written reflection (workbook included).
Participants can expect to:
* gain clarity about their current writing life, including what’s working and what can be improved;
* develop greater presence, attention, and focus, with practical tools for managing distraction and mental chatter;
* learn to manage stress, anxiety, and energy to support resilience and avoid burnout;
* cultivate a deeper relationship with inspiration and intuition, and greater comfort with uncertainty and the unknown;
* identify and work through resistance, including self-doubt, perfectionism, and limiting beliefs;
* create habits and boundaries to support a sustainable, flourishing creative life.
"Matthew is an empathetic, knowledgeable, supportive instructor."
—The Body & the Pen retreat participant
Matthew Félix is the author of four books, a certified life coach, a speaker, and an interviewer. Publishers Weekly called his debut novel, A Voice Beyond Reason, “(a) highly crafted gem.” His work has been recognized with a Solas Awards Grand Prize for Story of the Year and Gold for Memoir in the Northern California Publishers & Authors Awards, and he ghost-writes, edits, publishes, and markets books for other authors. Matthew has certifications in personal resilience, nervous-system fitness, and intuition medicine, as well as immersive breathwork training through Esalen. His Have Fun Falling: the Program is for people ready to re-create their lives from inside out—and the inspiration for his Falling into Writing program. Matthew co-founded the daylong wellness and writing retreat The Body & the Pen, and he regularly interviews leading thinkers and authors, including two recent sold-out conversations with Isabel Allende.
Instructor: Grace Loh Prasad
Do you have a book coming out? Are you building your author platform? Whether you’re an established or emerging author, or an organizer of literary events, no one will work harder to promote your work than you will. Canva makes it easier than ever to design your own promotional materials, but making eye-catching graphics that inspire readers to stop scrolling and pay attention requires mastering some basic principles to ensure clarity, readability, and visual appeal. This hands-on one-day class will provide you with skills and techniques to help you for years to come in promoting your written work and in building an audience of readers. (Note: This class does not teach, use, or endorse AI for making graphics.)
Students taking this class will:
*learn step-by-step techniques for creating graphics in Canva
*understand basic design principles and avoid common mistakes made by non-designers
*come away with templates/concepts for the five graphics every author needs
*enjoy using their own brains, hands, and creativity to market themselves and their writing, and to avoid AI slop
Grace Loh Prasad’s debut memoir The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, 2024) was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction and the Feminist Press Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. Grace writes frequently about belonging and diaspora for publications including the New York Times, Literary Hub, Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Oldster Magazine, and KHÔRA. Her writing has received support from Hedgebrook, Ragdale and Writing Between the Vines, and she has taught memoir and essay writing for Tin House, Rooted & Written, and the Writers League of Texas. Born in Taiwan and raised in New Jersey and Hong Kong, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Instructor: Lindsey Crittenden
Writing memoir draws upon all of us. We are the writer, the narrator, and the character living the events recounted. But which events, and how recounted? And how do we organize it all? Our stories rarely leap fully-formed to the page, however well we think we remember all the pieces.
This class will provide concrete help through exploration and practice of such craft elements as narrative distance, scene and summary, and the handling of time. We'll explore the challenges of writing about real people and our own lived experience, of placing our narrative in a wider context, and of examining our own motivations, perceptions, and insights.
If you're committed to finding your story, and telling it as only you can tell it, please join us for eight weeks of discovery. There will be regular reading assignments and written homework, as well as in-class exercises and sharing of work in a supportive atmosphere. Students will finish the course with a portfolio of work designed to provide both structure and content for moving toward a complete memoir.
Required class reading: Writing the Memoir by Judith Barrington
Lindsey Crittenden's memoir writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Best American Spiritual Writing, Cimarron Review, Image, and many other publications. She is the author of The Water Will Hold You (which Publishers Weekly called "gorgeously written"), and has taught memoir-writing for more than 20 years.
Instructor: Lisa Lerner
Maybe you have a novel you've been dying to write, but have no clue how to begin. In this workshop, we will focus on nailing down the most important elements of story: conflict, stakes, consequences, and the emotional heart at its core. We will sketch out a beat sheet, with an emphasis on the foundational beats and do a deep dive into your main character's internal psyche and how their external journey (the plot) will help them heal the wound that's preventing them from achieving their heart’s desire. If it sounds like a lot – it is! But you'll have all of cold, dark February to plan the narrative structure and themes so you can start cranking out that hot first draft in the shine of spring. Let's go!
We will use the beat sheet plotting tool in Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, so please have a copy before the first class. You don't need to read the whole thing in advance, but it will save time if you use the book to identify your genre ahead of our first class.
This workshop is appropriate for writers of middle grade, YA, and adult fiction, or of memoir.
Optional Add-On: Lisa is available for a one-hour private Zoom consultation for registered students. These consultations will be scheduled outside of class sessions, at a time that is mutually convenient for instructor and student. This consultation includes reading a one-page pitch and synopsis and a maximum of a five-page sample of your manuscript. All submissions should be 12 pt font double-spaced. The consultation hour will involve an in-depth conversation regarding the writer's story premise with the aim to understand, clarify, and elevate the writer's unique vision. Sign up for Add-On when you purchase your class.
Long ago, Lisa Lerner was a professional rubber stamp cutter, children’s party entertainer, and NYC performance artist. Then one day that lasted five years, she wrote a novel called Just Like Beauty that became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and is now in development as a movie shooting in 2027. Lisa has been writing stories for educational publishers such as Scholastic and McGraw Hill for over 25 years, as well as penning short fiction for McSweeney’s, Hobart, and other places, and teaching writing workshops to adults and kids. When she is not writing her next adult novel, she is a proud member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, a juror for the annual Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, and a trustee on the board of the Kingston Library in New York. Visit www.lisalerner.com for student testimonials and a glimpse into Lisa’s past and present lives.
Instructor: Sabina Khan-Ibarra
How do you know when a piece is finished, and how do you find the right place to leave the reader?
Endings carry enormous weight. A final line can return us to the beginning, shift the meaning of everything that came before, leave us with an image, open a new question, or stop just before we expect it to. The strongest endings feel both surprising and earned.
In this four-week generative class, we will study how contemporary poets and prose writers such as Ada Limón, Ross Gay, Ocean Vuong, and Lydia Davis bring their work to a close.
Each week, we’ll explore a different approach to ending: the turn or surprise, the return and echo, the image or gesture, and the unresolved or open ending.
Through close reading, discussion, and writing exercises, students will experiment with endings in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. We’ll also take existing drafts and try multiple endings, asking how changing the final lines can change the entire piece.
Students will:
* study different approaches to endings across poetry and prose;
* experiment with turns, echoes, images, gestures, and open endings;
* learn to recognize when an ending is over-explaining or arriving too soon;
* write multiple endings for the same piece and examine how each changes its meaning;
* revise existing work with greater attention to where and how it ends;
* generate new work and leave with practical strategies for finishing future drafts.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, migration, faith, and inheritance across poetry and prose. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, SWWIM Every Day, Anomaly, FERAL, andPanoply, among others, and has been named a strong semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Felix Pollak Poetry Prizes, longlisted for Palette Poetry’s Love & Eros Prize, and shortlisted by SmokeLong Quarterly. Sabina holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and also teaches creative writing with San Diego Writers, Ink, and Litquake.
Instructor: Jenny Bitner
Is writing hard? Is it tedious, a drag, something you want to do but don’t do? In my 30 years of teaching I have found that many people create every excuse to not write and that sadly some of the people who most want to write don’t do it because of their inner critical voice. If you’re one of those who feel that way, this one-day writing retreat will change how you feel about writing. We’ll explore some deeply held emotions and beliefs about writing. I will use my skills as a writing teacher and a hypnotherapist to guide you in hypnosis, playful writing games, and coaching to get you unstuck and to create positive, affirming new thoughts. You will also have plenty of time to write and an hour break for lunch. You’ll leave class believing that there is no one right way to write, that writing is process and not perfection, and that writing is an exciting adventure. And maybe even that you love writing.
Jenny Bitner is a writer, teacher, and certified hypnotherapist whose work explores the imagination, the unconscious mind, and the creative process. She is the author of Here Is a Game We Could Play (Acre Books, 2021). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Fence, PANK, The Sun, The Fabulist, and Mississippi Review, and her work has been selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. Her nonfiction has appeared in Utne Reader, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Men’s Health. Jenny holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia and has taught writing for 30 years in community and academic settings. Her teaching integrates craft, intuition, and the psychology of creativity—helping writers access deeper layers of imagination and stay connected to the joy of writing.
Instructor: Sabina Khan-Ibarra
Most writers have something they cannot stop writing about.
A house. A person. A childhood moment. A body of water. A question that never gets answered. An object that keeps appearing. A place we left. A life we almost lived. Sometimes we worry we’ve already written about these things too much. But what if repetition is not a failure of imagination? What if it is showing us where the deepest material lives?
In this four-week generative class, we will explore creative obsession: the subjects, images, memories, questions, and desires that return to our writing again and again. Rather than forcing ourselves toward entirely new material, we’ll learn how to approach recurring subjects from different angles and discover what they still have to reveal.
Through contemporary readings, discussion, and generative exercises across poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, students will experiment with recurrence, image systems, and shifts in perspective, time, and distance. We’ll consider how writers return to the same material without simply repeating themselves, and how an obsession can become a body of worthwhile work. Students will have opportunities to share new writing and receive supportive feedback, though sharing will be optional. The emphasis will be on generating new work rather than formal critique.
Students will:
* identify recurring subjects, images, questions, and patterns in their own writing;
* experiment with approaching familiar material from new perspectives;
* use repetition and recurrence intentionally;
* explore how time and distance can change the meaning of a subject;
* examine how writers build larger bodies of work around enduring obsessions;
* generate new work each week and leave with multiple drafts to continue developing.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, migration, faith, and inheritance across poetry and prose. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, SWWIM Every Day, Anomaly, FERAL, and Panoply, among others, and has been named a strong semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Felix Pollak Poetry Prizes, longlisted for Palette Poetry’s Love & Eros Prize, and shortlisted by SmokeLong Quarterly. Sabina holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and also teaches creative writing with San Diego Writers, Ink, and Litquake.
Members of The Writers Grotto are invited to meet committee reps and explore volunteering opportunities to deepen their engagement with the orgnaization. We'll have pizza!
An in-depth editorial review for poets ready to elevate a small body of work. Submit up to four poems (seven pages total) and receive annotated feedback before a 30-minute discussion focused on craft, image cohesion, and sequencing. We’ll talk through how each poem functions individually (imagery, language, craft, etc) and as part of a packet, thematic threads. You’ll leave with a revision plan and submission strategy tailored to your goals. Flat fee: $50. Feedback provided prior to the session. 30-minute consultation via Zoom.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pashtun-American Muslim writer and poet based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She co-directs Rooted & Written at The Writers Grotto and leads writing initiatives for BIPOC writers. Her work has appears in SWWIM, Rising Pheonix, Taboos & Transgressions, and others. A semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and University of Wisconsin's poetry contest, she teaches at LitQuake and The Writers Grotto. She's currently working on a poetry collection, A New Vocabulary, and a novel, The Poppy Flower.
A short, high-impact consultation for poets who want specific feedback on a single piece.Send one poem (up to two pages) and receive detailed notes prior to a 15-minute meeting. We’ll focus on imagery, sound, emotional center, and revision strategy—clarifying what’s working and where to cut or expand. You’ll leave with actionable next steps, not abstract notes. erfect for poets of all levels. Flat fee: $25. Feedback provided in advance. Session via Zoom.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pashtun-American Muslim writer and poet based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She co-directs Rooted & Written at The Writers Grotto and leads writing initiatives for BIPOC writers. Her work has appears in SWWIM, Rising Pheonix, Taboos & Transgressions, and others. A semifinalist for the Philip Levine Prize and University of Wisconsin's poetry contest, she teaches at LitQuake and The Writers Grotto. She's currently working on a poetry collection, A New Vocabulary, and a novel, The Poppy Flower.
Editing on consultation on nonfiction book manuscripts.
A dramaturgical script consultant can function in several ways. Depending on the project we function as a literary, historical, or artistic advisor as you are developing your script for the stage or screen.
Consultations can look multiple ways. For example, perhaps you just need 1-2 script meetings to discuss story evolution, character development or consistency in theme. Or perhaps you need someone to comment on what is working, what feels like it is missing, and a list of questions to support development. Or perhaps you want 4 -6 session of coaching, homework, and suggestions for how to strengthen, tighten, clarify in the service of moving your script forward.
Consultation fees are developed in conversation about the project (bespoke), and begin around 150.00- 200.00 an hour.
Doug Henderson offers two levels of developmental editing:
Full Developmental Edit for $12/page. This level provides writers with a comprehensive road map that will help them hone their manuscripts for publication. This includes:
-An initial conversation about the project (via Zoom).
-Extensive page notes, including editing suggestions, margin comments and questions.
-A thorough editorial letter discussing craft and structure elements — such as theme, tension, narrative and character arcs — as well as thoughtful suggestions to strengthen your story.
-A second conversation to discuss next steps.
Read-Through Evaluation for $8/page. This level is good for writers who want broader feedback, including new writers who want early advice, or more experienced writers who seek general input, but don’t need or want detailed editing. This includes:
-An initial conversation about the project.
-Light page notes.
-A thorough editorial letter discussing craft and structure elements — such as theme, tension, narrative and character arcs — as well as thoughtful suggestions to strengthen your story.
-A second conversation to discuss next steps.
Let’s chat about how your ideas fit into a basic story structure that will lead to an engaging narrative. Send me up to 2000 words of idea or story summary prior to meeting consult. Session will take place via Zoom.
Polish your writing with Carly Stern, an award-winning independent journalist. Carly offers one-on-one consultations on all forms of narrative non-fiction, with an emphasis on writing about the self. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, the Guardian US and The Washington Post.
Initial bespoke services consultation to determine the fee. Polish your prose with New York Times best-selling author Julia Scheeres.
Initial bespoke services consultation to determine the fee.
Are you struggling to finalize a piece of science writing, whether it's an academic manuscript, article, or marketing blog? Need editorial help to make sure your message is clear and concise without losing accuracy? Jenny can help you improve your scientific content, using her unique combination of scientific and creative expertise.
Jenny Qi has a PhD in Cancer Biology from UC San Francisco and over a decade of experience in science communication spanning a range of industries, including biopharma, tech, and journalism.
This listing is for a 20-minute consultation to determine the scope of the project.
As an award-winning journalist, author, and consultant with decades of experience, I offer expert editorial consulting services at competitive rates. I write reports, policy briefs, articles, op-eds, blogs, and other materials for major national institutions and individual clients. As a veteran reporter, I also help writers develop and tell their stories for articles and book projects. First, we discuss your project and needs and how I can meet them, then I provide you with an estimate and we move forward with a simple straightforward contract. I look forward to talking with you, learning more about your project, and working together. Estimates are based on $100/hour fee. You can check out my work at www.christopherdcook.com.
Industry veteran writer-director-producer provides consulting for documentary and narrative film projects of any length and at any stage, from concept to pitch deck to rough cut to screenplay draft. Production services also available through Bay Area-based The Unscripted Company.
We will build your fictional work in a collaborative process for as long as it takes to create a whole and satisfying story. Thaisa Frank, a Pushcart Fellow, has published a novel and three collection of short stories. Her original approach, developed through teaching, addresses fiction from all cultures.
Initial bespoke services consultation to determine the fee. Laird Harrison, author of the novel Fallen Lake, provides editing and consultation services on all aspects of novel writing.
Initial bespoke services consultation to determine the fee. Laird Harrison will work with you one-on-one to improve your written communication. Laird has experience with both creative and business writing and can assist with all levels of writing.
Full-length poetry collections (45-80 pages in length).
Individual Poems up to 2 pages in length.
Folios consultation, up to 7 pages in length, with no more than 5 poems.
Chapbooks consultation (16-40 pages in length).
Got an idea for a children’s book? As the brilliant Madeleine L'Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grownups, then you write it for children.” In this 30-minute private Zoom consult, Lisa will give feedback on your idea to help you realize your vision and elevate your story to reach multiple audiences in today’s market. And if you don’t know what “multiple audiences” means in the kid-lit genre, that’s okay; she will tell you! Lisa’s YA crossover novel JUST LIKE BEAUTY was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and is in pre-production as a movie. She has decades of experience writing children’s books for major publishers and regularly teaches workshops to kids and adults who want to write for kids. In her free time, she enjoys petting rabbits and eating cake. Curious cats can find out more at www.lisalerner.com
In this three-session package of Creativity Hypnosis, experienced hypnotherapist and writing coach Jenny Bitner will help you delve into the depths of your subconscious mind to awaken your imagination and overcome creative blocks. This can be customized to deal with whatever issues around writing you are experiencing. Start this journey today!
Unleash your writing potential with Jenny Bitner. As a trained hypnotherapist, coach, and writing teacher, she'll help you overcome fear and tap into your creativity. Experience a transformative hypnotic session to release barriers and claim your full potential as a writer. Take the first step today.
Initial bespoke services consultation by email to determine the fee. Katia will draw on her expertise as an award-winning longform journalist to provide written feedback on magazine pitches. Katia has written for The New Yorker, Forbes, Mother Jones, Marie Claire, The Atavist Magazine and many other publications.
Initial bespoke services consultation to determine the fee. Maw is a writing coach and editor for poets. Maw has many years of experience as an educator, author, and editor. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. You can learn more about her at mawsheinwin.com.