The Write Away will feature weekly craft talks and a Saturday Craft Seminar, which includes a free craft book. Details on these craft presentations are below. All craft talks and the Saturday Craft Seminar will be recorded and shared with all Write Away participants.

Week 1

“Reaching Toward Unexpected Imagery” with Saúl Hernández

Tuesday, July 21 / 6:00-7:00 PM CT

In this presentation, we will learn how to create images that haunt, invite, and linger. We will read and analyze work by writers whose imagery inspires awe, and through generative exercises, create our own indelible images to use in our own works in progress, no matter your genre.

Saúl Hernández is a queer writer, who was raised by former undocumented parents. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. Saúl is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. His debut poetry collection, How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters, was longlisted for a PEN Open Book Award and received the Institute of Letters’ honor-winner for First Book of Poetry. He’s the winner of both the 2022 Pleiades Prufer Poetry Prize (judged by Joy Priest) & the 2021 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize (judged by Victoria Chang). His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize & Best of The Net. Saúl’s work is featured in American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Literary Hub, Columbia Journal, Pleiades, Split This Rock & elsewhere. He’s a Macondista, a 2021 Tin House Alum, & a 2024 Lambda Literary Fellow.

Week 2

“ABCs and 123s: Making the Personal Matter” with Emily Rapp Black

Tuesday, July 28 / 6:00-7:00 PM CT

In this presentation, we will look at personal writing written out of their authors’ contradictions, dialogues, and disputes. We’ll explore strategies for integrating research into our own first-person writing, toward answering some burning questions about writing the personal: How do writers use “real” experiences to make stories that move? How do they create context that matters, turn personal anecdote into universally applicable meaning and write fresh perspective into experience and topics that are age old: culture, travel, death or love? What is the best way to build context, to shape personal stories so that they have momentum and meaning?

We’ll experiment with these questions with a conversation about genre. Where does creative nonfiction intersect with fiction and poetry? The masters import the most useful components of each form into the others: the clarity and momentum of fiction into poetry; poetry’s economy of language into fiction and nonfiction; and the perspective, restraint and applicability of creative nonfiction into all writing. We will explore the concept of “truth,” and how and whether honesty matters for personal writing. Directness, irony and perspective are key, as is the ability to structure your writing so that it happens in an order that’s logical, engaging, and propulsive.

Emily Rapp Black is the bestselling author of five books, most recently I WOULD DIE IF I WERE YOU: Notes on Art and Truthtelling. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside, where she also teaches in the School of Medicine.

Week 3

“Getting Unstuck” with Ramona Ausubel

Tuesday, August 4 / 6:00-7:00 PM CT

Being a writer means coming up against self-doubt. But what if it doesn’t have to be so scary? What if the blank page felt more like an invitation than a cliff? Does it sometimes seem like your novel is trying to kill you? Have you considered divorcing a story? Me too. In this gathering we will work through a few exercises designed to bring joy and a sense of possibility and invention so that you and your writing will once again be besties (or at least unlikely to murder each other).

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of six books, most recently Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page. Her most recent novel, The Last Animal, won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize. Her previous books are Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin House, The Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her family.

WLT Saturday Craft Seminar: “A Long Game” with Elizabeth McCracken 

Saturday, August 8 / 10:00-11:30 AM CT

Elizabeth McCracken, author of bestselling novels, National Book Award long-listed story collections, and a highly praised memoir, has been teaching for more than thirty-five years, guiding her many students through their own answers to the many, many questions that arise while writing fiction. In this Saturday Craft Seminar, Elizabeth will present on descriptive language—metaphor, simile, and some straightforward description—and how it can build character. We will look at some published work, and then write our own sentences, envisioning our characters to bring them close to us, and our readers. The presentation will be followed by a conversation between Elizabeth McCracken and WLT Program Director Sarah Renee Beach and an audience Q&A session.

All attendees receive a FREE copy of the book.

In A Long Game, she shares insights gleaned along the way, offering practical tips and incisive thoughts about her own work as an artist. The book covers:

• Understanding and developing characters
• Plot, and what to do if it eludes you
• Her thoughts on common writing “rules”
• And of course, the Butter Cow Lady of the Iowa State Fair and her work as it relates to revision
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Writing “is a long game,” she notes. “What matters is that you learn to get work done in the way that is possible for you, through consistency or panic. Through self-recrimination or self-delusion or self-forgiveness: every life needs all three.”

As much a book about the life of a working artist as it is a guide to thinking about fiction, A Long Game is a revelatory and indispensable resource for any writer. 

Week 4

“Why This Now? A Guide to No-Judgment Revision” with Amy Gentry

Tuesday, August 11 / 6:00-7:00 PM CT

“Should I cut this? Add that? Combine these?” The revision process is a tsunami of choices, large and small. When decision fatigue hits, it’s easy to start see-sawing between defensiveness and despair–or lose faith in your ability to judge your own writing at all. And if you can’t judge your work, how can you fix it?

The key to breaking out of the cycle is evaluating your work with intention, not judgment. In this interactive presentation, we’ll discuss an easy but effective tool to help you escape decision fatigue and move forward in your revision. Rather than chasing impossible ideals of objectivity, we’ll be focusing on curiosity and reflection; asking, not “Is this right or wrong,” but “Why this, now?” Through revision exercises, we’ll practice asking this question at the level of plot, paragraph, and sentence; finally, we’ll apply it to the writing process itself, learning how to use these three simple words to improve workflow and motivation.

Amy Gentry is the author of the feminist thrillers Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits, as well as Boys for Pele, a book of music criticism in the 33 1/3 series. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in numerous outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, Salon, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Austin Chronicle. Her interests include cake decorating and horror films, and her favorite movie is The Women (1939). She holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago, where she wrote her dissertation on miniatures and modernism, and lives in Austin, Texas.