Welcome to Hypertext Magazine & Studio’s Writing Project Inaugural 2021 Workshops!

*If cost is prohibitive, contact Writing Project Artistic Director @ crice@hypertextmag.com.

 

Every time you spend money, you are casting a vote for the kind of world you want.

—Anna Lappe

 

WHAT IS THE WRITING PROJECT?

HMS’s Writing Project is a series of 75-minute workshops taught voluntarily by our favorite writers, teachers, & people: Chelsea Laine Wells, Christine Sneed, Cyn Vargas, Alina Stefanescu, Sahar Mustafah, Tony Bowers, Fleda Brown, & Christine Maul Rice. Each generative workshop will give you time and space to think about a piece of writing in a new way, start a new scene/poem/hybrid, rewrite a scene, etc. You can take a single class or a series of classes. It’s your choice. Think Master Classes without the deep pockets. And what’s more, the money you spend on the class goes directly toward our publishing and nonprofit writing workshop programming.

Please note: Each 75-minute class costs $49.

A little more about where our nonprofit. HMS is a Chicago-based arts and culture nonprofit and recipient of grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the City of Chicago’s CityArts Department of Cultural Affairs. We are firmly rooted in the belief that engaging the creative mind is essential to both individual and community health. To that end, we’ve been publishing online since 2010 and, since 2017, have published gorgeous biannual literary journals. What’s more, HMS is one of the only literary organizations that combines social justice work with literary citizenship (let’s reclaim that word). To this end, HMS offers free writing workshops to Chicago-area adults—in collaboration with local nonprofits including Above & Beyond Family Recovery Center, Breakthrough Urban Ministries, St. Leonard’s Ministries and, in 2021, Lawndale Christian Health Center and Thresholds Military Project—looking to learn techniques to tell and write personal narratives and fictional stories. In 2019, we began publishing our nonprofit student writing in our print journal and online.

Creative Nonfiction Flash: Writing a Mini-Instance Collection
Thursday, July 28, 2021, 6-7:30 pm CT
$49 USD* — REGISTER/PAY HERE
Participation via Zoom link.

In this workshop, you will focus on some aspect of your life that you’d like to explore and then get it onto the page in the form of three short instances centered around either objects, places, or characters. We will generate the inspiration for your instances through reading, visualization activities, verbal tellings, coaching, and finally some group writing time. Sharing your work afterwards is encouraged but optional.

Chelsea Laine Wells has been published in Gravel Magazine, Flapperhouse, Paper Darts, Little Fiction, PANK, Hobart, The Collapsar, Hippocampus, The Butter, The Other Stories, Third Point Press, wigleaf, and Heavy Feather, among many others, and won a 2015 Best of the Net award. She is managing and fiction editor of Hypertext Magazine and founding editor of Hypernova Lit. She and her teacher/writer husband live with their cats, dogs, and children in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, TX, where she teaches freshman English and creative writing at a public high school. Her work is represented by Marie Massie of Massie McQuilkin. You can learn more about her at ChelseaLaineWells.

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Precision: The Art of Writing Memorably and Clearly
Saturday, August 7, 2021, 3-4:30 pm CT
$49 USD* — REGISTER/PAY HERE
Participation via Zoom link

Perhaps the most important characteristic of successful writing – whether it’s fiction or nonfiction or narrative poetry – is its preciseness. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how to write with greater specificity and exactness; we’ll eschew unnecessary abstraction and focus instead on what can be comprehended through the five senses. As William Carlos Williams said, “No ideas but in things.” The best writing uses strong, imagistic verbs and nouns and distinctive modifiers: “…a glowering man with a thick and uncompromising moustache, a brush to sweep a pool table.” – Dave Eggers, We’ll look at examples like the one from Eggers’ 2003 novel You Shall Know Our Velocity and work on writing some of our own memorable sentences, character descriptions, and scenes.

Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New York Times, New England Review, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, Story, and other publications. She has received the Grace Paley Prize, the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, Chicago Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and has also been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Pasadena, California and teaches for Northwestern University’s and Regis University’s MFA programs, and on occasion for Catapult.

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Mornings After: Subverting the Aubade
Sunday, August 22, 3-4:30 pm CT
$49 USD* — REGISTER/PAY HERE
Participation via Zoom link

The aubade, or “dawn song”, is a traditional song of lovers parting at dawn given the warning of a watchman. Aubades thrive in the fertile discontinuity between two worlds–the rapture of lovers and the demands of daily lives. In this sense, aubades straddle the public and the private. Rooted in the subversive aspects of romantic love, the aubade begs to be subverted, fractured, re-imagined. In this generative aubade-making workshop, we will explore contemporary aubades that expand the aubade’s horizon to include objects, places, books, ghosts, animals, anything beloved who has existed, and left.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020). Her poetry collection, dor, is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press in July 2021. Alina’s writing can be found (or is forthcoming) in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Poetry Editor for Random Sample Review, Poetry Reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. More online at AlinaStefanescuWriter.

Origin Stories: Exploring How Our Characters’ Past Shapes Present Action
Wednesday, September 1, 7-8:30 pm, CT
$49 USD* —REGISTER/PAY HERE
Participation via Zoom link

Why do our characters make particular choices? What are the forces that have brought them to this moment in time? When we start writing, we tend to leap to an obvious conflict without taking time to discover how it manifested. In this workshop, we’ll excavate our characters’ past and explore moments that can help expand plot and foster a more intimate understanding of their motivation.

Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, an inheritance she explores in her fiction. Her first novel The Beauty of Your Face was named a 2020 Notable Book and Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review, one of Marie Claire magazine’s Best Fiction by Women in 2020, and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times United We Read. It was also long-listed for the Center for Fiction 2020 First Novel Prize. Her collection of short stories Code of the West won the 2016 Willow Books Fiction Prize. Mustafah earned her MFA from Columbia College Chicago where she was the recipient of the David Friedman Award for Best Fiction. She writes and teaches outside of Chicago.

Life as Story: Crafting the Autobiographical Novel
Wednesday, September 15, 7-8:30 pm CT
$49 USD* — REGISTER/PAY HERE
Participation via Zoom link

Have you ever said, “My life could be a novel.” If that’s true, it should be easy to write autobiographical fiction, right? But what scenes are important? What scenes might need to be shelved? From James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Tim O’Brien (& many authors in between), writers craft fiction using elements from their lives. Some authors, like Nora Ephron, write scenes so close to reality that readers can see through the author’s thin veil. Others, like Zora Neale Hurston, cherry-pick elements from their experience and fictionalize scenes to fit their novel’s narrative arc. This workshop will guide each participant to identify the most compelling material from what often seems like an overwhelming abundance of experiences. Digging? Excavating? Yes. We will prod beneath the surface of your life to lift and draw out. Hopefully, this poking and prodding will lead to new discoveries.   

Christine Maul Rice’s novel-in-stories Swarm Theory (University of Hell Press) was awarded an Independent Publisher Book Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, a Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award, and was included in PANK’s Best Books of 2016 and Powell’s Books Midyear Roundup: The Best Books of 2016 So Far. In 2019, Christine was included in New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago 2019 and named One of 30 Writers to Watch by Chicago’s Guild Complex. Christine’s short stories and essays have been published in MAKE Literary Magazine, BELT’s Rust Belt Anthology, The Literary Review, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Big Smoke, The Millions, Chicago Tribune, Detroit’s Metro Times, among other publications. Christine is the founder and editor of Hypertext Magazine. Twitter: @ChrisMaulRice  hypertextmag.com  christinemaulrice.com

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Breath of Life: Creating characters that live on the page
Saturday, September 25, 3-4:30 pm CT
$49 USD* — REGISTER/PAY HERE
Participation via Zoom link

During this 75-minute workshop, you will learn skills to create realistic and believable fictional characters, craft zesty dialogue, and apply direct and in-direct characterization. Direct characterization describes a character through physical description, line of work, passions and pursuits, among other elements. In-direct characterization describes a character through that character’s thoughts, actions, speech, and dialogue, among other elements.

Tony Bowers is a tenured associate professor of English & Creative Writing at the College of DuPage; where he currently serves as the co-chair of the creative writing committee. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College and a Masters in Teaching from National Louis University. He is the 2006 recipient of the Follett Fellowship in Creative Writing and his short story collection On the Nine, was published by Vital Narrative Press in 2015. He is hard at work on his first novel, A Dollar Short.

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Crafty Moves: How to Do Good Camera Work Inside the Poem
Monday, October 11, 6-7:30 pm, CT
$49 USD* — REGISTER/PAY HERE
Participation via Zoom link

If we think of ourselves led by a camera inside a poem—a both an emotional and visual camera—what can we learn about how the poem gathers to itself what it needs? The camera work of a poem is a measure of how the mind moves with the material, inward and outward, and how it adjusts, which is what the poem is always in some way attempting to do, to adjust to a changed or awakened meaning. We’ll look at a poem or two with the idea of drawing a map to use for our next poem, to see if we can get someplace new.

Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her new memoir, Mortality, with Friends will be out from Wayne State University Press Fall 2021. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07.