Being a writer is all about composing effortless first drafts in your secluded cottage before greeting fans on a nationwide book tour and cashing royalty checks, right? Well, no. In this craft talk, we’ll break down the expectations and realities of various aspects of the writing life, including: the writing process, receiving critical feedback, revision, the submission process, literary agents, publishing, payment, rejection, self-doubt, distraction, and more, all to help participants create fruitful and fulfilling writing lives of their own.

Do you wonder how poets pay the bills? Join us for a frank discussion from several prominent Northeast Ohio poets who share real life strategies about how they’ve juggled bills and dactyls. We’ll discuss just how they’ve made a living over the years and their money-making (and money-saving) tips to help poets at any age have more time to do and share the writing they love.

If Judy Blume and John Green are your spirit animals, this just might be the workshop for you. Join author Jen Jones Donatelli for a lively and informative workshop on writing fiction that resonates with tweens and teens. This 90-minute workshop will focus both on the craft and the business of middle-grade and YA fiction—exploring plot, developing characters, writing dialogue that feels true to younger audiences, getting published, and much more. Attendees will also engage in writing exercises and have the chance to share their work if desired.

In this workshop, participants will learn how to craft a narrative stance for memoir, nonfiction narratives, and personal essay writing. The narrative stance allows the writer to create a point of view, tone, narrative energy, and more. If your writing is intended to surprise your readers then you must surprise yourself. That's achieved by unearthing just who you really are, by excavating yourself to locate your narrative stance. We'll learn some craft principles, engage in writing prompts, spend some time sharing ourselves and our work.

One of the pleasures of writing poems is to see, in a fresh way, words and their arrangement on the page. In this workshop we will riff off of the poetry of Craig Santos Perez, who breaks words into smaller words to shift a poem’s meaning with surprising plot twists. We’ll look at poems that break down language into its smallest pieces, to see how few words are needed to convey meaning, and to see how the white space makes us understand the words differently. Perez's poems are part of a project on poetry and the native Pacific Islanders’ disappearance.