For those who like to plan ahead, here’s a nonfiction class in DC that sounds interesting:
Place Called Home: A Creative Non-Fiction Writing Workshop
When: Saturday, December 8, 2012; 9:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Where: Source, 1835 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC (located near the U Street Metro)
Cost: $49
Learn how to capture readers’ imaginations and stimulate their curiosity with authentic descriptions of places and settings. You will explore the spaces you call “home” in this workshop, which blends elements of non-fiction, poetry and fiction writing. Home is a place, a memory, a feeling. Travel to the spaces you know best and discover just what it is that makes them special.
The workshop will be led by Willona M. Sloan, who is a local writer and editor, and a recipient of a 2013 Artist Fellowship award from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
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Feeling down in the dumps about your writing and/or writing life? I promise that no matter where you are in the grand scheme of writing—unpublished, published—this piece that I found via literary agent Janet Reid’s blog will speak to you:
Let’s say you are a young person, yes you are still young, because youth is relative, and so what if your siblings and friends have what they call “careers,” and marriages, and lives—you have something greater, something that exactly suits you. Your art, which fuels you, yes indeed it does. But unanticipated challenges have cropped up. Making rent. Paying bills. And something else which you are loathe to admit, but let’s be honest, here goes: in the dark and lonely hours, you’ve written short stories that you have submitted to some literary journals. And you’ve had some rejection, it’s okay, you knew that going in. You’re no dummy. A writer’s life is full of disappointment and rejection and criticism—and isolation, that too, and worse perhaps, unacknowledgment, editors and literary agents who don’t even have the courtesy to reject your work, but simply let it languish on their desks or hard drives forever without a reply. I mean, you’re okay with this. You knew what you were getting into when you signed on for this, a writing life.
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Writer Clifford Garstang’s blog Perpetual Folly tabulates the literary journals that get the most attention from the Pushcart Prizes over the past ten years. It’s a great way to see which journals are the places you want your work to be published in and to see which journals are trending. Or as Heidi Klum might say, “Who’s in, and who’s out.”
Here’s one link that will get you to any of the three categories: Fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
