Event Description
In our time-crunched world, it can be satisfying to write, complete and publish shorter works–such as the short story and personal essay. During our March IWOSC panel, we will explore these forms of narrative writing with a panel of authors who pen them.
We’ll cover:
- Developing your voice
- The importance of reading other’s work
- Where their ideas come from
- The basics of character development, setting, plot and tension
- Structure – do’s and don’ts
- Revision
- Tips for successfully resolving the story in a short amount of words
- Submitting these works for individual publication
- Combining stories into a collection and getting it published
- How to reach readers
This panel is for you, whether you’ve always wanted to make time to write shorter pieces and need inspiration and ideas, or are already doing so and are looking for tips for taking them to a higher level. Join us!
Our panelists are:
Rosemary (Tantra) Bensko
Rosemary (Tantra) Bensko has taught writing for 20 years with schools such as the UCLA Extension Writing Program, Writers.com and her own school. She coaches for all levels and genres of short story writing from experimental to traditional. Bensko is widely published, including 230 short stories of various genres in magazines and anthologies, including Mad Hatters Review, The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fiction International, and Surreal South. http://lucidmembrane.weebly.com/
Sue William Silverman
Sue William Silverman’s personal essays have won contests with The Los Angeles Review, Mid-America Review, Hotel Amerika, Under the Sun, Blue Mesa Review, and Water-Stone Review. Others have appeared in The Rumpus, LiteraryHub, Ms. Magazine, Redbook, Chicago Tribune, Creative Nonfiction, Lilith, Prairie Schooner, and Brevity. Silverman is also the author of five books of nonfiction including Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, which was made into a Lifetime TV movie, and How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, which won the Gold Star in Foreword Reviews’ Indie Book of the Year Award. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is the creative nonfiction editor for Hunger Mountain Review, and a contributing editor for Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. www.SueWilliamSilverman.com
Corie Adjmi
Corie Adjmi is the author of the short story collection Life and Other Shortcomings, published by She Writes Press. The title won an International Book Award, an IBPA Benjamin Franklin award, and an American Fiction Award. Her essays and short stories have appeared in dozens of journals and magazines, including HuffPost, North American Review, Indiana Review, Medium, Motherwell and Kveller. She’s been featured in Travel and Leisure, New York Magazine, The Hollywood Times, Parade and BuzzFeed. Adjmi’s forthcoming book, also from She Writes, is a novel titled The Marriage Box and is due out in August 2022. corieadjmi.com
Lisa Morton
Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, and prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 150 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert. Morton’s recent releases include the fiction collection Night Terrors & Other Tales, Weird Women 2 (an anthology of classic stories co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger), and Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances. Her latest short stories appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2020, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and Speculative Los Angeles. Her weekly original fiction podcast Spine Tinglers is now live at My Paranormal Network. www.lisamorton.com
And Our Moderator for the Evening:
Robin Quinn
Robin Quinn – a book coach, editor, and copywriter – has provided editorial support to the independent publishing community for over 30 years.
Her editorial and coaching projects include Ayn Cates Sullivan’s award-winning collections of traditional stories Legends of the Grail: Stories of the Celtic Goddesses and Heroines of Avalon and Other Tales, Jason W. Park’s personal essays, and David Konrad’s Project Adventure middle-grade book series.
In addition to being on the Board and Program Planning Committee of IWOSC, Quinn is host to the group’s Westside Satellite where she regularly interviews authors one-to-one. www.writingandediting.biz
