Live & Recorded Classes

Find community and grow your craft in our online workshops. We host both synchronous and asynchronous courses using Zoom and Canvas, an easily accessible, private online platform. Whether you’re a new writer or a well-published pro, you’ll find motivation, structure, constructive criticism, and a dedicated cohort.

Upcoming Classes

WRITING FICTION FROM LIFE: Finding Your Story Through Spoken Words

Instructor: Tricia Park

Date: Sunday, May 25, 2-4 pm ET on Zoom

Can’t make it on May 25th? No problem. A recording will be sent to all registrants.

Cost: $60

Open to writers of: All Genres

What if the key to writing a great story wasn’t writing at all—but speaking? Inspired by the late great Peter Elbow’s Vernacular Eloquence, this workshop explores how storytelling begins in the voice, not the page. Through guided exercises in talking your stories aloud before writing them down, we’ll unlock natural rhythms, authentic emotions, and the freedom to shape our narratives intuitively.

We’ll also explore progressive distancing—a technique that allows writers to step back from personal experience, transforming raw memories into crafted fiction. By shifting perspectives and filling in the gaps with imagination, you’ll discover how to turn personal moments into rich, compelling stories without feeling trapped by “what really happened.”

This generative workshop is perfect for writers who struggle with self-consciousness, feel stuck in personal truth, or simply want a more fluid, natural approach to storytelling. Participants can expect to leave with new writing to take home and develop. Come ready to talk, listen, and discover the hidden fiction in your lived experience.

Learn more about Tricia Park here.

ASS IN CHAIR: Commit to Your Writing Practice

90-Minute Sessions, hosted by Cleaver, on Zoom.

Sunday, May 4, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
Sunday, June 8, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
Sunday, July 6, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
Sunday, August 3, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
Sunday, September 7, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
Sunday, October 5, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom

Cost: $5

Open to: All Writers

Are you struggling to find writing time? Showing up for your writing practice is the hardest part—life knocks you off track.

Cleaver Magazine to the rescue! You don’t have to go it alone. Join us for our monthly Ass in Chair Sessions, a once-a-month, 90-minute commitment to your writing practice. With the communal energy that comes from writing together, you will make progress towards your writing goals, one word, one paragraph, one page at a time—by getting your Ass in Chair time. We’ll offer an optional prompt at the beginning—who knows where it will take you?

Each session costs $5 (because you’re more likely to show up for yourself if you have some skin in the game), and happens on the second Sunday of every month. Make the commitment to yourself. Register here. These sessions are not recorded.

EMBODIED RESISTANCE: Community Yoga for Writers and Other Humans

Instructor: Karen Rile, Cleaver Editor-in-Chief

Sunday, April 13, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
Sunday, May 18, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
Sunday, June 22, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom
Sunday, July 13, 2-3:30 pm ET on Zoom

Cost: $5

Open to: All writers, all genres, all humans

Embodied Resistance. It’s a metaphor; it’s a concrete concept. Resistance training is the key to longevity and long-term mobility. Join us for a Sunday afternoon functional yoga class to reconnect your body to your mind. We’ll practice a combination of movement, bodyweight resistance, brain mapping, and breathing for a fun, low-impact, anatomy-based workout. This class is based on the LYT Method (pronounced as in “litmag”), which combines the mindfulness of yoga with the intelligence of physical therapy to improve core strength, flexibility, and balance for humans of every age. You don’t need to be a writer, and you don’t need yoga experience to attend.

Our brains were designed to move; the better you move, the better you think.

This class will be conducted on Zoom. You’ll need a yoga mat and two yoga blocks. If you have knee pain, have a blanket or towel nearby. If your wrists bother you, you can use a pair of dumbells (any weight) for support. You don’t need to turn on your camera, but if you set up your mat and camera so I can see you, I may be able to give you live feedback. Questions? Email me. Each session costs $5 and happens on the third Sunday of every month. If cost is a barrier, email me directly and you’ll be added to the list, no questions asked. Make the commitment to yourself. Register here.

BUILDING A REWRITING PRACTICE

Instructor: Megan Stielstra

Date: Sunday, August 24, 2-4 ET on Zoom

Cost: $60 (Signups not yet available)

Open to writers of: All genres

We write what is urgent to us; we rewrite to make it urgent for others. This lightning-bolt session examines rewriting as an invitation to invite other people—readers—into your writing practice and, in many ways, your own head and heart. What will they need to understand what you’re trying to share? What will they need to feel what you felt, see what you saw? Pulling from both literary and oral storytelling traditions, we’ll engage in activities asking us to consider the different stages of the rewriting process—are you diving back into the work to find its deeper meaning, or preparing it to share with others, i.e. submission and publication?

We all have hard drives and handwritten notebooks full of stories. We wrote them for a reason—let’s find it. Let’s share it. Let’s get at your stories.

Recorded Classes

Missed it? No problem. Buy the recording.

This two-hour masterclass explores the impact of AI on the writing profession, from creative possibilities to practical concerns. Drawing on his expertise in AI research, Prof. Chris Callison-Burch will demonstrate key AI writing tools and discuss how writers might begin incorporating AI into their creative process. The session includes hands-on examples using popular tools like ChatGPT and Claude, strategies for using AI as a creative partner, and a frank discussion of AI’s limitations and ethical considerations.

Are we ever really objective when we write ourselves onto the page? Are we in complete control of our image? What happens when we approach ourselves with ironic distance or guilt or self-forgiveness? When we announce ourselves to be a liar? When we own up to having more questions than answers? When we change perspectives? Jenn Shapland, David Carr, Emilie Pine, Sonja Livingston, Bella Pollen, Alexandra Fuller, and Mark Doty will help illuminate the topic. Exercises will advance the art of self-portraiture on the page.

Take charge of your digital footprint! In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to create a professional website tailored to your unique voice and brand as a writer. You’ll be guided through each step of website development. We’ll choose the right platform, design an engaging layout, and integrate features that showcase your work effectively and engage your audience. You’ll also delve into optimizing your site for search engines and ensuring it’s mobile-friendly. By the end of the course, you’ll have a fully functional, personalized website that serves as a powerful tool for building your online presence. Whether you’re an emerging author or a seasoned writer, this class will provide you with the skills and confidence to create a professional digital space that highlights your work and attracts potential readers. Join us to transform your ideas into a dynamic online platform and enhance your visibility in the literary world.

Tired of submitting your work and getting rejected, or not hearing back at all? Want to build a self-publishing practice on your own terms? In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn how to create, grow, and monetize a successful email newsletter using Substack. Sophie Lucido Johnson, the creator of “You Are Doing A Good Enough Job,” will guide you through the essentials of building a newsletter that not only captivates readers but also generates revenue. With thousands of subscribers and a thriving community, Sophie brings her expertise and experience to help you turn your newsletter dreams into reality.

In this masterclass, we’ll peel back the curtain and look into how publicity works to advance your book at every stage in your writing process, and how you can help get the word out about yourself and your work. We’ll work together to create goals for how you would like to see your book move in the world, discuss the various tactics and strategies that are incorporated into a publicity campaign, and perfect your “elevator pitch” for your book. No matter where you are in your writing, knowing how to be an advocate for your book, and how the publicity process works will bolster your success.

This lightning-bolt session begins with the gut. What you need to tell; the memories, fascinations, and questions that live not in your head but your bones. Then: craft—how to tell our personal stories in ways that are equally urgent to an audience. Pulling from both literary and oral storytelling traditions, we’ll engage in activities to get our experiences out of the body and onto the page, encouraging risk and discovery and examining literary craft in new ways. How does telling a story aloud heighten our understanding of its structure? How does the presence of an immediate audience influence the rewriting process? What does it mean to build an individual writing process that will sustain us without the support of a class? Writers and storytellers at all levels are welcome. The work we’ll do is useful in generating new material and digging deeper into stories you’ve been wrestling with for years. Need to jumpstart an ongoing project? Need to finalize a manuscript? Need to get this story out of your body so you don’t have to carry it anymore? Let’s make it happen.

“Details aren’t automatically interesting,” Sarah Manguso once wrote, an aphorism that rings abundantly true. Details either illuminate the story or occlude it. They establish a pattern, render a character, extend an invitation to a particular time and place—or they make a mess of things. How do we know if the details we layer into our stories are truly telling details? How can we expand our capacity to generate fresh and meaningful details, while vanquishing those that are merely fluff or, worse, self-negating contradictions? In this master class, we’ll look to the work of Claire Keegan, Elizabeth Hardwick, and James McBride—isolating key details, taking note as those details evolve across pages, and discussing the additive impact. Generative prompts will be offered, as will opportunities to collectively edit oversaturated prose that will be created expressly for this purpose. This workshop is for writers at all stages, working in all genres.

This class will focus on how writers create unique and believable characters in very short stories. Our in-class discussion will revolve around published work with an eye toward how each author employs aspects of craft – including dialogue, action, thought and physical description — to build effective, unforgettable characters. xOur discussion will also include dynamic versus static characters, the inextricable union of character development and story arc, and guided exercises –in-class and take-home – designed to inspire new characters as well as revise/revive tired old characters from drafts. Students will leave the session with an understanding of character development and the aspects of craft involved in creating characters on a very small canvas.

This two-hour masterclass will equip aspiring writers with the skills, insights, and strategies to craft compelling MFA applications. Led by a writer with a wealth of knowledge in the MFA application process, this class is tailored to enhance your writing portfolio and illustrate what creative writing programs are looking for.

Since the dawn of the written word, humor has been a tool to tell the truth and target our humanity with brevity and a masterful air of ease. In fact, writing humor is no joke: there are a lot of complex principles and ideas that can make or break a piece of writing. Including humor in more serious pieces can provide levity and make deeper themes more salient, making this workshop appropriate for writers of all stripes. We will focus on the nuts and bolts of the ever-expanding genre of humor writing, and practice ways to incorporate levity into all types of compositions.

Journals, presses, and publishers often lack the resources to market your work. A successful writer needs to think of themselves as an entrepreneur, a business partner, a brand, and a literary citizen. It’s daunting for many writers, but promoting yourself and your work can be accomplished though small, mindful tasks. And, it may lead to freelance assignments, commissions, teaching gigs, agents, even that book deal. This masterclass will demystify marketing. We’ll talk about your small-business “must-haves,” use literary examples to illustrate the differences among social media platforms, and look at best practices across the literary community. We’ll do exercises to get you thinking about yourself as a brand and discuss ways to weave brand-building into your writing practice.

During this two-hour masterclass, you will learn about the book publishing process. Guided by a prose editor at Graywolf Press who is also an award-winning poet, this class will provide insight into the journey of publication – from both the writer’s and the editor’s perspective – as well as a rare opportunity to ask your questions directly to a top editor at an important and innovative publishing house. Topics will include: pitching agents, working with an editor, and book events like launches and readings. You will leave this class armed with information and a greater understanding of how book publishing works.

“Once the work is done, it’s not yours anymore,” wrote Frank Chimero. “If the thing you make goes anywhere, it’s because other people carried it.” The choice of if, when, and how to share our work with others is a deeply personal decision, both terrifying and exhilarating. How do you get there? And once you’re there, what do you… do? This two-hour masterclass reframes publication as a vital and informative part of the writing practice, as opposed to rejection/acceptance roulette. How can our unique publication goals influence the rewriting process? How does the consideration of a wider audience take our work to the next level and when should we leave those (scary and often very loud) outside voices at the door? And how can we demystify the nuts-and-bolts of submitting—finding the right literary journals or publishing houses, writing a solid cover letter, connecting with editors—and get back to what we’re all here to do: carry each other’s stories.

“Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind,” wrote Virginia Woolf in 1926. “On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night, the body intervenes.” This workshop examines how memory lives in the body, using our own stories and experiences as a contribution to a wider cultural and political dialogue that centers human beings. Pulling from both literary and oral storytelling traditions, we’ll engage in activities that will take our writing out of the head and into the body, generating new work and digging deeper into material you’re already exploring.

Writers and storytellers at all levels are welcome. While the workshop centers the personal essay/memoir, writers of all genres may find it useful in the development of story and character.

Writing doesn’t stop when you pen the final line, or even when you make the final revision. If you’ve written a flash story, and it’s wonderful, you probably want it to be published so you can share it with the world—but first, there’s that pesky process called “submissions.” This class will help writers at all levels untangle the sometimes daunting process of taking your flash and microfiction from private to public.

“All I know about grammar is its infinite power,” Joan Didion wrote, and if that sends a shiver of curiosity up and down your spine, welcome to my workshop! This one-day class is a high-energy exploration of the rhetoric of grammar: how to think strategically about form. We’ll look at how writers make decisions when they confront a sentence: the patterns sentences typically follow and the different ways clauses hang together. By the class’s end, you’ll be able to diagnose what makes a sentence boring and tweak it until it has more suspense than a Netflix thriller.

Writing, let’s face it, is hard. Life gets in the way. Discipline brings us back to our desks but so, in the end, do our obsessions. In this two-hour, prompt-rich workshop, we’ll be thinking about how to make the most of our obsessions in our writing practice and in our storylines. We’ll be looking to writers like Michelle Zauner, Will Dowd, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kate Zambreno, and Claire-Louse Bennett for inspiration and to obsessions like food, weather, the natural world, and books. We’ll transform lists into metaphors and thru-lines. We’ll launch sentences. We’ll leave the session with a better understanding of what sparks us as we write, how our own sparks can become the stuff that galvanizes readers, and some brand-new passages.

Most writing is the act of rewriting, or re-vision, from the moment we craft a piece and begin to imagine its next draft. The word revolution is an auto-antonym; it means both to return to a point of origin, and the opposite, to depart from a fixed point by making a significant change. Thus the concepts of revision and revolution go hand-in-hand whenever writers undertake the rewriting process. This two-hour master class reframes revision as a dynamic collaboration between writer and text, rather than a combat sport. How can we embrace revision as a creative partnership that helps us transform our work into its next iteration? In what ways might we nurture both the work and ourselves during these transformational stages? Writers will leave the session with a set of actions they can take to begin or continue the process of revision on a short story, essay, or longer work.

In this single-session workshop, writers will explore point of view as both a craft element and an opportunity for play and practice. Through interactive readings, discussion, and writing exercises, writers will examine point of view as a portal of exploration in their prose and their creative practice.