March 15th, 2010

Grub Street News

Welcome to the latest installment of the Grub Street Rag, a newsletter of the Boston literary scene sent out every Monday from the impromptu surf shop in the basement of Grub Street's world headquarters. As always, if you are receiving this e-mail in horror, please advance to the bottom of the page to unsubscribe yourself.

Our new workshop schedule promises to make it feel more like Spring

We're springing forward with our brand new Spring workshop schedule! All classes are online now, and registration is underway. We have a wonderful lineup of 6- and 10-week workshops, as well as weekend classes and seminars. We're pleased to be offering some great new classes this term, including a cool poetry course called Shaping Terror, a new fiction class called The Art of the Scene, and a great new reading class, Best American Short Stories Salon. Of course, we have all your favorites as well, like Novel In Progress, Fiction I, Jumpstart Your Writing, Travel Writing, Your Entire Book, and many more! Call us at 617.695.0075 to sign up.

"Grub Gone. . . Blue" is gone, baby, gone

Do we know what blue means now? Not really, but who cares! We had a great crowd at “Grub Gone…Blue” on Friday night, and were psyched to see so many new (and also so many familiar) faces. If you were one of the almost two hundred guests, you know that contest winners Teresa Valdepenas and Mary Ann Mayer read some sensational poetry, and that the readings by featured authors Diana Joseph, KL Pereira, and Randy Ross were awesome too. A huge thanks to emcee Steve Almond, who did his usual stellar hosting job. Since so many of you came up to us asking when Grub is doing a similar event in the future, we wanted to let you know about two wonderful upcoming events: The first is Steve Almond's book launch for his new book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life on April 16th at the Brattle Theater. More of a party than a traditional reading, Steve promises strange candy as door prizes, dancing, and personally designed mix CDs for five lucky attendees. To buy tickets or learn more, click here: http://www.harvard.com/events/press_release.php?id=2491. And reader and Grub instructor KL Pereira is teaching a not-to-be-missed seminar called "Crafting the Villain" here at Grub on March 22nd--details on that are below. Thank you to everyone who made the event so fun on Friday!

P.S. Huge apologies for spelling contest winner Teresa Valdepenas' name incorrectly in last week's Rag. We should have asked: "Is it 'v' as in victory?" when we heard her named spelled out loud.

Cheers,
Whitney, Sonya, Chris, Chip and Alexis

Grub Events

In addition to our ongoing workshops, Grub Street offers numerous writing-related events around town. See our website for a long-term view of all we do. Ready to sign up? Call us at 617.695.0075 and we'll get you on the list.

SEMINAR: Monday, March 15th 7:00 PM - 10:00pm, How To Survive As a Writer (Without Selling Your Plasma)
Instructor: Steve Almond
Very few of us -- aside from the criminally insane -- pursue writing as a means to unreasonable wealth. In fact, most writers eventually face financial difficulties, particularly those drawn to writing for artistic reasons. In this intensive (and potentially incoherent) seminar, Steve Almond will discuss how to balance the creative work you want to do with the stuff that pays the bills. Steve's bankruptcy attorney, Sheldon Pivnick, will be our Special Guest.
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

SEMINAR: Monday, March 15th 7:00 PM - 10:00pm, All The Right (Opening) Moves
Instructor: Jasmine Beach-Ferrara
A revised reprise of the sold-out seminar from Winter 2008: We all hear that the opening moves of a story or novel must grab the reader and capture her imagination. But how exactly does that happen? In this seminar, we will look closely at the first two pages of a range of short stories and discuss the strategies they use to immediately activate character and plot. You'll then have the chance to try these strategies out with the opening of one of your fiction projects.
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

SEMINAR: Monday, March 15th 7:00 PM - 10:00pm, Crash Course in Guerrilla Book Promotion Instructor: Ethan Gilsdorf
If you're about to publish a book, you've probably got questions about how to best publicize and sell it --- as well as wondering what to expect. In this seminar, Ethan Gilsdorf reports on the lessons learned from his 50+ city budget book tour and six month guerilla effort to promote his book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Whether you have a big or small publisher, or chose self-publishing, there are both traditional and non-traditional methods to identify and reach your target audience and build an audience in various potential book-buying communities. We'll discuss setting up a promotional budget; creating a book tour (and not just at bookstores but other venues) and brainstorming special contests, promotions and giveaways unique to your book; establishing yourself as an expert and tying in your book to current events; using traditional media like print, TV and radio; and jumping on social media like Facebook and Twitter to develop a fan base and create buzz about your book. We'll also over what your publisher should do and what you can do (and how you can work with your publicist), and the problems that self-publishing creates. Finally, managing expectations is the crucial mental element to book promotion. Come with questions.
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

WEEKEND SEMINAR: Saturday March 20th - Sunday March 21st, 9-4pm, Revision Bootcamp
Instructor: Michelle Hoover
A reprise of the hit workshop from Winter '09! Working with Robert Boswell's concept of "transitional drafts," students will receive feedback on their work in small groups before beginning a step-by-step revision process. We will start with the deeper concerns of theme, structure, character, and conflict, and move on to issues in setting, dialogue, pacing, and refining our sentence style. At the end of the weekend, students will have made their way through several revisions and be closer to a completed story. We will spend the majority of our time doing the individual work of revising, so please bring your laptops if you regularly write at a computer and/or a journal if you write by hand. To start us off, please also bring five copies a short story or novel excerpt (first chapter preferred) that you are ready to revise and willing to share.
$220/$195 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street.

WEEKEND SEMINAR: Saturday March 20th - Sunday March 21st, 9-4pm, Writing From Real Life
Instructor: Judah Leblang
The full weekend version of a popular one-day workshop: Writers are observers, continually examining our lives and the lives of others. For memoir writers, and for those who write in other genres, our life experiences become the raw material of our creative work. In this seminar, we will focus on the key challenges in our lives today, and other hurdles we’ve overcome – in other words, difficult circumstances that might become the rich “raw material” for new work. We will discuss strategies for developing this material in a way that avoids the sentimental and general, and look at a few short examples of how other writers (i.e. Didion, Ehrenreich, Sedaris) use essays as a way of making meaning of difficult circumstances. By the end of the day, you will have chosen a topic and be on your way to writing about it in a thoughtful and critical way. Limited to 12 students.
$220/$195 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street.

WEEKEND SEMINAR: Saturday March 20th, 9-4pm, Publish That Chapbook!
Instructor: Wendy Mnookin
Back by popular demand, the chapbook workshop will continue working on manuscripts to uncover the best arrangement of poems. In class discussion and through peer review, we will consider temporal chronology, interruptions of memory, emotional arc, weaving poems together through image as well as first and last lines, and manuscript and poem titles. Please bring two copies of about 24 poems, along with 11 copies of your first and last poems and Table of Contents. This workshop is open to new as well as returning students. Limited to 10 students.
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street.

WEEKEND SEMINAR: Sunday, March 21st, 9-4pm, Fiction Writers' Workout
Spend the day with one of Grub Street’s most popular instructors generating new scenes, characters and descriptions. What you write on this day can either be integrated into current stories and novels or serve as springboards for future narratives. Along the way, you’ll look briefly at some published texts and examine them as writers. By the end of the day, we’ll have made sure that you’ve produced pages of new material ready for revision or development when you get back to them on Monday morning.
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street.

FREE MEMBER EVENT: Monday, March 22nd, 9-10am, Mondays in March: What's Your Story?
Kick-start your writing week at Grub Street this March! Come to the Grub office from 9 AM to 10 AM every Monday to find inspiration and connect with other Grub members. Each meeting will include a short period of conversation about a specific topic as well as time to mingle. This week’s topic is “What’s Your Story?” Can you give interested parties a concise one- or two-sentence description of your story or book? Share your synopsis with us to see if it clearly articulates the big picture. This matters...come find out why!

FREE MEMBER EVENT: Monday, March 29th, 9 - 10am, "Writers Groups, Colonies, and Conferences" Member Mondays in March
Kick start your writing week at Grub Street in Boston! From 9:00 – 10:00 on Monday mornings this March, find inspiration and connect with other Grub members. Each meeting will include a short period of intentional conversation about a specific topic as well as time to mingle. March 29th's topic: Writers Groups, Colonies, and Conferences. Members are fortunate to have the support of the Grub Street community, and many of you have expressed interest in forming writing groups. Let’s mingle with intention to connect with other writers and consider the possibility of sharing work. We’ll also talk about connecting beyond the Grub St community at colonies and conferences.

SEMINAR: Monday, March 22nd, 7-10pm, The Art of Column Writing
Instructor: Suzette Martinez Standring
With the explosion of blogs and websites, everyone is a columnist with a memory, opinion or skill to be shared. But creating compelling prose in 500 words or less is a special art. Vivid and insightful columns written in a unique voice catch an editor’s eye or a syndicate’s attention. The skills required to craft a taut and memorable column improve all types of writing. Learn the tips and techniques used by award-winning newspaper columnists to stand out and fuel a faithful readership. An expanded version of the “Hour of Power” seminar at the 2009 Muse and the Marketplace conference.
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

SEMINAR: Monday, March 22nd, 7-10pm, Crank the Tunes, Crank the Prose: Music as the Path to Literary Improvement
Instructor: Steve Almond
Have you ever wondered whether listening to music can improve your prose? It can. Certified Music Geek will explain how, using actual songs, by actual musicians, as his text. There will be a writing exercise, though it will not involve Steve doing his famous "Freebird" air guitar solo. (Unless the class begs).
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

SEMINAR: Monday, March 22nd, 7-10pm, Winning Things: An Evening of Inspirational Plotting
Instructor: Jill McDonough
There are a billion magazines out there that want to publish your work, places that want to give you fellowships and time to write and grant money to make it happen. Not a lot of money, sure, but enough. How can you get it? If you are an experienced writer and you wonder if you're ready to put yourself out there and try to publish some writing and win some stuff, come to this session. We'll get into the nitty gritty of writing proposals, ideas about where to find the perfect venue for your work, and strategies for dealing with the hassles and insecurities that keep us from setting our work loose in the world.
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

SEMINAR: Monday, March 22nd, 7-10pm, Crafting the Villain
Instructor: KL Pereira
Some of the best and most memorable characters in literature are villains, rough and tough monsters, sly and sexy femme fatales, and naughty and deceitful oligarchs. They unnerve and excite us, sending a chill down our spines, and striking fear into our hearts. Yet when creating our own villains we often fail to overtly acknowledge the complexity and moral ambiguity that compels them to cause mayhem, delegating their motivation to a need to cause evil for evil’s sake and resulting in two-dimensional baddies. In this one-day seminar we will discuss traditional and non-traditional villains, why they are an essential part of any juicy tale, and how we can develop truly sinister and captivating characters that will antagonize, needle, and provoke even the bravest reader.
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ, 160 Boylston Street, Boston, MA

Be sure to check out our events calendar for a comprehensive view of upcoming events.

Spreading the Love

Grub Street wants to promote YOU! Please send events for consideration to whitney@grubstreet.org. Our apologies in advance if we cannot fit you in. Please note that we do the best we can to evaluate requests, and do privilege requests from members, but can not be held responsible for the quality of these events and programs or the legitimacy of contests. We expect that readers will do their own due diligence before sending their work or their money to any individual or organization.

--SEMINAR: Saturday, March 20th, 2-5pm, The Real Scoop: How to Make a Living Creatively
Award-winning filmmakers and creative professionals, The Jermanok Brothers, are excited to present a three hour workshop for all aspiring creative professionals: actors, singers, comedians, writers, directors, filmmakers, producers, musicians and artists. It’s an empowering, bottom line, and pragmatic approach to everything you need to know to make a living creatively. This insider experience could save you many, many years. And put you on the road to building a real creative career, with a dose of serious motivation. Using their real-life experiences, The Jermanok Brothers will cover: how to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack, whether leaving New England is necessary, the art of schmoozing, why learning the business side of your craft is important, how to pay the rent while pursuing your dreams, using your life history as a networking strength and pitching yourself. Learn more and buy tickets at http://www.howtomakealivingcreatively.com/Home.html.
$60, 2pm - 5pm, Harvard Law School, Pound Hall, Room 101, 1563 Mass Ave., Cambridge

--CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: The Drum
Be a part of a new literary magazine, The Drum, publishing short fiction, essays, and the occasional author interview in audio form. Our inaugural issue comes out in May. We're looking for work that pays close attention to language while never losing sight of the narrative drive. We want stories that really do tell a story. And essays that engage in the complexity of an idea. The Drum is a home for emerging and established writers who value the power of writing out loud. For more information, go to www.drumlitmag.com or email editor@drumlitmag.com.

--DEPARTMENT OF CAN I PLEASE DO THIS?: July 19 to August 23, Art Workshop International Creative Writing and Visual Arts Workshops in Assisi, Italy
Work in an enchanted setting with distinguished professionals, attend lectures, join field trips, and benefit from time to focus on your work. One to Four Week
Sessions in Visual Arts, Creative Writing, Immersive Italian Language, and an Independent Program for professional and advanced artists and writers. Learn more at http://www.artworkshopintl.com/.

--CONVERSATION: Thursday, April 1st, 2010, PEN New England's Monthly Writers Series
PEN New England cordially invites you to join a conversation with Christopher Lydon & Stephen Burt. Stephen Burt is a literary critic who teaches at Harvard University. Burt's most recent book, Close Calls with Nonsense, was a 2009 National Book Critics Circle finalist. Burt writes books about poetry, essays on other people's poems, books of his own poems, and shorter pieces about poems, poets, poetry, comics, science-fiction writers, political controversies, obscure pop groups, and the WNBA. 5:00 - 6:00 Wine Hour; 6:00 - 6:45 reading & conversation.
FREE, Upstairs on the Square, Harvard Square, Cambridge.

--PORTRAIT SESSIONS FOR WRITERS: March 20-21, 10-4pm each day, Headshot Days - From StageSource and New England School of Photography
Take advantage of low-cost headshots taken by the portraiture students at New England School of Photography.
Participants receive a thirty-minute photo session and a thirty-minute editing session.  At the end you get a CD with one touched up photo (one or two major retouches) and up to 20-30 of the photos taken during your thirty minute photo session.  Prints are available through your photographer as well as additional services.  To arrange for prints or additional services please speak with your photographer after your session. Call the StageSource office at 617-720-6066 or visit www.stagesource.org to register. For more information on this program visit http://www.stagesource.org/pages/22445_headshot_days.cfm.

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