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Blog

Our blog is where we publish our writers’ work, introduce new instructors, and share our thoughts on the writing process. Be sure to check out our newest online creative writing workshops, in person workshops and one time workshops.

Holiday Gift Guide

Whether you are looking for a gift for the other writers in your life or thinking of ways to commit to your craft in 2026, we put together a gift guide perfect for the holiday season. BOOKS We asked our instructors and staff to share the book they’re giving friends and family this holiday season. Take a look at the list below for the readers on your shopping list! Libby

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December 9, 2025

When I Can

BY SUZANNE FARRELL SMITH At my first grad school program, my inaugural class was a writing-heavy course on cultural criticism, co-taught by a famous, cantankerous, prolific author. He told us, in so many words, “Writers must write every day. If you don’t write every day, you are not a writer.”  I stored that sentiment away, packed it up in my suitcase to bring to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop the

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September 11, 2025

A Story Scavenger

BY BARBARA JOSSELSOHN Not too long ago, my family and I took a week-long vacation to Sonoma. The weather was glorious, and eager to spend lots of time outdoors, I asked the hotel concierge for the best local hiking trails. She told me that the Jack London State Historic Park had both trails and a museum dedicated to London’s life and work. A literary museum combined with a day of

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August 16, 2025

Writing Workshops: What To Expect For New Students

BY LIZ MATTHEWS I have had the pleasure of teaching and coaching writers who consider themselves beginners (or beginning again) for the past eight years, and a few themes have emerged over the years. As September is almost upon us, I thought it would be helpful to share some of these insights for those who are thinking of joining (or rejoining us) in the fall. Every person in the workshop

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August 6, 2025

Weight of Our Wheels

BY MADDIE EVANS*  WEIGHT OF OUR WHEELS Amid the humid blur of fleeting days  And the renaissance of fluorescent blooms among naked limbs My solace is found within the ever familiar symphony Of rubber wheels strumming the chords of black pavement A sound I am not a stranger to  And a performance that I applaud for  As my families car journeys past green and yellow road signs The silent friends

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July 13, 2025

5 Reasons You Might Want to Self-Publish Your Book and 1 Reason You Might Not

BY LIBBY WATERFORD Self-publishing has become easier and more accepted than ever, but there are still many authors who are uncertain about taking the plunge. After being initially published by a small press, I began self-publishing my steamy contemporary romance novels in 2020. I relish the challenges and the rewards of a DIY approach to publishing, but the path is not for everyone. How do you know if self-publishing is

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June 26, 2025

Every Sun Sets

BY CHRIS ALTROCK From ages seven through ten, my twin brother Craig and I spent the dying moments of each daylight on our living room couch. In front of us was the brick fireplace that burned from October through March. To the left stood a freezer-sized television with a large aluminum antenna, reminiscent of the recently launched Skylab. To the right, a bookshelf held some of Dad’s scientific books and

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June 15, 2025

What is 500 Words of Summer?

BY LIZ MATTHEWS Inspired by National Novel Writing month a.k.a. NaNoWriMo (which challenges writers to write 50,000 words during the month of November), and Jami Attenberg’s 1,000 words of summer (1,000 words a day for two straight weeks), our challenge is to write 500 words every weekday in July.  Why? We all need some accountability during this hectic time of year when schedules are in flux, and our regular routines

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June 10, 2025

Under the Marula and the Oak: Writing Between Two Landscapes

BY ELISE CHIDLEY Three miles on a dusty, bone-rattling road to school. When the potholes punched holes in the tires, we would pull over. My mother, with her long red fingernails, would expertly deal with jacks and spares on the stony shoulder while we kids looked out over the valley to the hillside shacks made of wattle, corrugated iron, and clay. On rainy days, the road became soft as warm

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June 1, 2025

Hot to Go: Metaphors, Music & Motherhood

By Amanda Parrish Morgan April is National Poetry Month, and every year to mark the occasion, my kids’ elementary school does a poetry unit. I wish there were more opportunities for poetry in the elementary school classroom, but I’m so grateful for this stretch they have each spring. It’s a time of year when student exhaustion runs high and the kind of natural beauty that inspires so much of young

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April 30, 2025

How to Get More Words on the Page

by Libby Waterford “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” –Annie Dillard, The Writing Life Writers are notorious procrastinators. We’ll find any number of useful, important, and not-so-important tasks to perform before we allow (or force) ourselves to sit down and write. If, however, what stops you from getting your words on the page is not your internal struggle with your creative endeavors, but

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October 9, 2024

Five Questions with Blake Schnirring about Blake’s Books!

1. Have you always been an avid reader? My mother began reading to me from a very early age. I loved books and how you could escape into them. There are so many that I remember, but one that stands out is when I was alone in the library, bored and in 7th grade when I found a book called The Girl Who Owned A City.  It blew me away how strong and

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March 20, 2024

Celebrating our 20th: An Interview with long-time fiction instructor, Chris Belden

1. How long have you been teaching with WWW and what was your first workshop? My memory is ominously spotty, but I think I started at WWW somewhere around 2013 or so—Valerie Ann Leff had recently become the Executive Director. My first workshop must have been a Beginners-level group. I remember it took a while for some of those early workshops to catch on—sometimes we didn’t get enough people signed

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February 6, 2024

From Freewrite to Final Draft

In our workshops, we discuss: freewriting, the craft of writing, revising/editing, and how and where to submit, but usually not at once! Many writers join our community with a few polished pieces but no idea where or what to do with these essays or stories or poems. We thought we’d take use this time and space to outline the journey, or at least a possible journey since each one is

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January 8, 2024

What is (a) Hybrid?

Is it part fiction writer and part poet? Is it part screenwriter and party memoirist? Or is it an AI-generated robot who can write all genres simultaneously? Well maybe the answer lies in between and among those possibilities in some universes. Here, in our Westport Writers’ Workshop community, a hybrid workshop is one in which writers may join in person or remotely. The instructor holds the class at the workshop

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November 29, 2023

Five Questions with our new Instructor, Cara Wall

Meet our new instructor, Cara Wall. What’s your favorite book and why? I like long, character driven novels I can sink into, like The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert and Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. What do you love about writing? I love words, I love living inside the emotional lives of my characters, I love the hard, painstaking work of living half in and half out of my

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October 17, 2023

Beware the Information Dump

By Douglas Moser Information dumps happen to the best of us. Hell, sometimes they’re even useful, and warranted. Take your typical TV procedural. The network shows demand a certain format, with each act separated by commercials. To refresh the viewer, you’ll often find the cops giving a quick review of events up to this point, e.g., “We can’t find the rapist and we’ve combed all of Central Park. 1PP is

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October 13, 2023

Writing Lessons from Clown School

By Lauren LoGiudice For the last two summers I traveled to France to stand on a classroom stage and have a Frenchman with a drum tell me how I’m falling short, like, for instance, how “my words sound like a fart in a bath.” I got a triple zero for that one and needed to “get off the stage… immediately.” And I’ve become a better writer for it. École Philippe

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October 12, 2023

How to Give Feedback in Workshop

Hi, this is Jessie McEntee. I’ve worked at WWW as an instructor for almost eight years. I’m sometimes asked for tips on giving great feedback during a workshop. I’d say the following: Learning to give great feedback is an art, and you’ll develop a style of your own as you take more and more workshops. Here’s a quick list of pointers. 1) In the beginning, perhaps concentrate on your emotional

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September 6, 2023

Notes on dialogue: It’s not just what you say

“I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight.” This line, spoken by Emily Blunt in the film “The Devil Wears Prada” (screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna and Lauren Weisberger) is one of many great laughs in a very funny movie. And while it’s unsporting, perhaps, to dissect a joke, for our purposes, it’s worth a look to see just why it works. First and foremost, it’s grounded in

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July 13, 2023

Q&A with Rebecca Stay: Showrunner/Creator Sheryl J. Anderson

Sheryl J. Anderson is the Showrunner on the hit Netflix series, Sweet Magnolias, which is releasing season 3 this month. The streamer categorizes the beloved show as “Heartfelt, emotional, and feel good.” It’s the type of show we all seem to be craving these days. Sheryl is one classy dame and I’ve had the good fortune to develop with her. She’s all the things you hope for: collaborative, warm, smart,

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July 7, 2023

Catching Up With Allison Dickens

Former Penguin and Random House Senior Editor Allison Dickens has taught a slew of WWW classes, from generative workshops in which students write to prompts to revision workshops wherein advanced students share and comment on large chunks of their completed manuscripts. She and her family relocated to London last year. We recently chatted with her electronically. Read on to learn about a recent literary adventure she undertook in a picturesque

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June 22, 2023

Marine Assaiante and the Fundamentals of Creating a Web Series

Just days after delivering her second child, Marine Assaiante was back at the computer, determined to finish writing her half-hour pilot. But this writer, producer, actress, also had a passion project in the works, a web series entitled, Mom to Be, which recently received a 2023 grant from the NYC Womens Fund. Thrilled for her, the Dramatic Writing Lab (DWL) wanted to know more about Marine’s web series journey and

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June 1, 2023

Q&A with Rebecca Stay

I read somewhere that wisdom = knowledge applied, so for me there was no one better than the honorable showrunner, Donald Todd to talk to about the craft of writing. You may be familiar with some of Donald’s work. Among his many credits, he created the Netflix limited series, Florida Man, the ABC comedy series, Samantha Who? starrring Christina Applegate, which won an Emmy and a People’s Choice Award, was

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May 9, 2023

Five Questions with Poetry Instructor, Cheryl Wilder

1.) When did you know you wanted to be a writer? When Mr. Langford, my high school English teacher, pulled me aside a month before I graduated, a stack of my creative assignments in his hand, and said, “If you enjoy doing this, keep doing it.” 2.) What do you love most about the writing process? I love the quiet monastic work of deep revision. 3.) What do you love

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May 3, 2023

Five Questions with Intro. To Memoir Instructor, Amy Shearn

1. When did you know you wanted to be a writer? I really always wanted to be a writer! I was always a big reader and writing felt like a natural way to be a part of that conversation. When I was a kid I had a secret backup plan of being an English teacher, because that would also involve getting to think about books and I thought it would

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May 2, 2023

Five Questions with Lisa Cloherty, Our New Writing For Young Kids Instructor!

1.) When did you know you wanted to be a writer? I’ve loved writing all of my life. While my friends were out playing soccer or doing theater, I was dreaming up stories and poems. My grandfather was a writer. While my grandmother was at the mall, he would sit and write stories about the people he saw and things he felt. He fostered my love of books and writing.

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May 1, 2023

Meet Courtney Maum, Our Pitch & Publish Keynote Speaker

Author of five books, including the game changing publishing guide BEFORE AND AFTER THE BOOK DEAL and the memoir, THE YEAR OF THE HORSES, (chosen by The Today Show as the best read for mental health awareness), Courtney is a writer and book coach hellbent on preserving the joy of art-making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. Courtney’s essays and articles on creativity have been widely published in outlets

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April 25, 2023

Five Questions with Diane Parrish

1. Why did you decide to attend the conference? I had a finished novel that had not attracted the attention of an agent or publisher and so I decided to sign up and in the hope that I would learn more about pitching and the industry in general. I was so so nervous about pitching that I almost bailed many times, but Amanda (Parrish Morgan, Diane’s daughter and WWW instructor)

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March 27, 2023

What is Flash?

Flash is prose that is typically 1,000 words or less. The craft of writing flash shares many techniques with writing poetry, including a focus on language, imagery, and resonance. You can write a flash piece based on a life experience, create a fictional story, or write a combination of both. Flash covers all genres and experimentation is encouraged! But like all craft, there’s no silver bullet, no easy roadmap. A

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March 13, 2023
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