International Women's Writing Guild |
The Road to Publication May 19, 2023 | You’re ready to go! You have or soon will have a finished project ready for the world. Now what? This session will deal with the tricky business of getting an agent and editor interested in your project. We will break down the intimidating “behind the scenes” of the publishing world, so you can have a deeper understanding of the true ins and outs of publishing. This behind the scenes tour will include a range of helpful insights—from the best approach for getting an agent to what editors are really saying about you and your book, to the realities of the marketplace and how you can put your best foot forward. |
Christine Pride is a writer, editor, and longtime publishing veteran. She’s held editorial posts at many different trade imprints, including Doubleday, Broadway, Crown, Hyperion, and Simon & Schuster. As an editor, Christine has published a range of books, with a special emphasis on inspirational stories and memoirs, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. As a freelance editorial consultant, she does select editing and proposal/content development, as well as teaching and coaching, and pens a regular column—“Race Matters”—for Cup of Jo. She lives in New York City.
Finding the Dimensions of June 7, 2023 | We tend to spotlight character and plot when writing fiction, but often setting is where the real story begins. A claustrophobic place wrought with a tenuous history that forces characters together is often the beginning of determining the parameters of conflict and defining the dimensions of your world. For this workshop, we’ll go beyond thinking about place as merely the backdrop of your story—we’ll look for the story in the place! We’ll try to understand how the dimensions of a story can instigate the tensions and conflicts of a character’s world, and we’ll go beyond verisimilitude to construct the layers of a place. Like a tiered cake, we will build from the ground up, interrogating the ways that physical geography, history, and characters can lead to dynamic characterizations of setting that inform the conflict of your story. By the end of the workshop, you should have some concrete ideas for how to address setting in your writing in a more purposeful and nuanced manner. |
Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in The Journal of Black Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters, and Afropolitan Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury Publishing). She is a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellow, and she was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. Iromuanya earned her Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago and affiliate faculty of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Her second novel, A Season of Light, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books (2024). http://julieiromuanya.com
Credit/Refund Policy: If you withdraw from a workshop or class:
Please note that notification of withdrawal must be processed via email writers@iwwg.org. If IWWG must cancel a class for any reason, we will provide a full refund or credit towards another workshop.