Illinois

Writing workshops in Illinois run on two poles: Chicago and Oak Park. The city listings put you in a room with other working writers; the suburban ones put you in a house with a literary history attached. If you want to join a writing group, Illinois has both, and the choice usually comes down to whether you want a class or a place.

What separates the Illinois listings from those in California, Texas or New York is the split between a city tradition and a small-town one. Story Studio Chicago serves writers who want a workshop in a dense urban setting, the kind of place where a class can meet after work and a manuscript gets read aloud the same evening. Ernest Hemingway's Birthplace Museum in Oak Park anchors the other end: a suburban house tied to a single novelist, useful to anyone writing about the Midwest or studying how a plain declarative sentence gets built. Elizabeth Berg sits between the two, a novelist whose workshops draw readers who already know her fiction and want to see how it is made. The sibling tags in England, Scotland and Wales lean on university towns; Illinois leans on Chicago and on Oak Park.