Writing workshops

Writing workshops are where a draft stops being private. People come to them with a half-finished novel, a stack of poems, a memoir chapter that will not hold, and leave with notes they can use. The path to such groups usually starts the same way: a manuscript that has gone as far as it can alone.

Some are weekly classes, some are one-off sessions, some are run by a single author and some by an organisation. What they share is a room, physical or virtual, where work gets read closely.

Geography splits this category first. A writer in Oakland or Los Angeles looks at the California tags; someone in Houston or the Hill Country looks at Texas; Brooklyn and the rest of New York sit apart from Pennsylvania and Illinois. Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Washington and West Virginia each carry their own scenes. Outside the United States the map continues through England, Wales, Northern Ireland, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Ontario and British Columbia. Elora Writing Workshops and Centauri Arts belong to the Ontario and Canadian group; Faber Academy sits in England; Brisbane Writers Workshop in Queensland.

The second split is between a fixed address and a screen. Online tags a workshop you attend from your own desk, which matters if the nearest group meets two hours away. The rest divide by what they do with a manuscript. Austin Bat Cave and Charlotte Lit work with young writers and community groups. Clarion West runs intensive speculative fiction. Barrelhouse and Blue Stoop serve literary writers, Brooklyn poets serves poets, Emerald Coast Writers and A Reason to Write take beginners and working writers alike. Ernest Hemingway's Birthplace Museum and Boyds Mills draw on a place and its history; Elizabeth Berg works with novelists on the page itself. Choose the branch that matches the draft in front of you.