Summer Writing Contest Workshop
This year’s Writing Workshops will provide students with everything they need to complete a polished piece of work to submit to the writing contests like YoungArts or Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. These pieces could also be used for other journal or contest submissions. Modelled on Ivy League graduate-level writing workshops, these classes are suitable for both beginners and those with existing writing practices. We’ll focus on craft, exploring the chosen genre and the writing process through weekly readings, writing exercises, and discussions.
One unique benefit of these classes is that they are enhanced by video lectures. To help students with the difficulty these stories present in vocabulary and style, the instructors makes dynamic reading videos in which they reads the story aloud while defining terms, explaining historical context, and making observations about style and theme.
Workshop Summary
Age group: 9th-11th grade
Class size: 6 students
Tuition: $1299/student
Each workshop includes:
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Ten weekly, 1.5 hour class meetings, for a total of 15 hours live instruction
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Six challenging short story reading assignments with accompanying video lectures
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Recorded classes in case you have to miss a session
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One full hour of class time devoted to a discussion of your work
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1.5 hours of editing (online synchronous editing or offline asynchronous editing) to polish your work
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A curated list of age-appropriate journals and contests to submit to after class ends
Please contact info@ibridgeeducation.com for registration.
Students may choose to attend one of the following workshops. Once selected, changes cannot be made:
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Advanced Short Fiction
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Advanced Non-fiction & Journalism
Advanced Short Fiction
In this ten-session course, students will complete and revise a short story (<3000 words) suitable for submission to a youth literary magazine or national writing contest. This class is suitable for students who enjoy creative writing and who have some experience with it and/or those who have taken a creative writing workshop outside of their school in the past.
The structure of this class is similar to that of an MFA writing workshop. Each student will submit a short story of 1500-3000 words for discussion at three points during the course; we will set a schedule in the first class. During workshop, students will discuss their pieces with peers and the instructor and receive advice for further development. Students are welcome to submit more than one piece over the course of the course but are encouraged to submit at least two drafts of a single piece if possible.
In addition to workshop, we will read a short story each week of the five-week course. We will discuss these stories with an eye to what they can teach us about craft and what tricks we can borrow to help us in our own writing. We will also do some group writing exercises to explore these and other craft issues.
The requirements for this class are that you:
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Do your best to attend all ten sessions and miss no more than one
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Submit your 3 drafts for workshop in the week before we will read them
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Do your best to write every day for the duration of the course
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Read 5 contemporary short stories of varying genres
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Read 1-2 peer submissions for each class
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Do not use ChatGPT or any other form of generative AI for any of your work related to this class, at any point.
Advanced Non-fiction & Journalism
"T'is strange -- but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction; if it could be told." - Lord Byron
Creative storytelling isn't exclusive to wizards and dragons; it can come directly from your own life and the stories of the world around you, made all the more remarkable for the fact that it's true. In this fast-paced advanced creative nonfiction and journalism course, students will learn how to tell real-life stories with the style, voice, and impact of fiction. From personal essays to profiles and reported features, we’ll explore how facts and flair combine to move readers—and build a standout writing portfolio. Along the way, students will sharpen their critical thinking, master the art of interviewing, and walk away with polished, publication-ready work applicable to journals, school newspapers, essay contests, and even college essays.
About the Instructor
Miss Cat is a professional fiction writer and teacher with over 15 years’ experience helping students of all ages improve their writing. As an admissions essay coach, she has helped students gain acceptance to many top colleges and business schools, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, UPenn and Stanford. Her high school writing students have won Scholastic Gold Awards, New York Times’ Essay Contests, and YoungArts awards. She holds a BA magna cum laude in Music and English from Harvard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she was a De Alba Fellow and an Undergraduate Teaching Fellow. Her writing has appeared in Action, Spectacle!, The South Dakota Review, The Missouri Review, and The Fairytale Review. In 2019, she was the recipient of The Missouri Review’s Peden Prize for best story in a volume year, and she was a finalist for a 2023 Shirley Jackson Award.
About the Instructor
Tony holds a BA in Philosophy and Film Studies from Amherst College, where he graduated with honors and won the Film Studies Award, and an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, where he designed and taught courses in literature and creative writing and won the Carl Klaus Teaching Award. He has served as an editorial assistant for The Iowa Review and an assistant editor for the London Review of Books.
His college essay students have been accepted to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Penn, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Wash U, Duke, Michigan, Georgetown, NYU, Rice, and UCLA, among others — many with significant scholarships. Tony is a regular contributor to The Surfer's Journal, a literary magazine about the art and culture of surfing, a subject about which he is currently writing a book. He is represented by Creative Artists Agency.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Why workshop?
The workshop remains the basic format for most creative writing pedagogy at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the United States; it is also a popular format for elementary writing instruction. The workshop has two key functions. First, learning to read the work of one’s peers with a critical but compassionate eye is one of the best ways to become a better reader and editor of one’s own work. Second, the workshop recognizes that no one person can or should tell you how to write; getting a variety of inputs is more useful. And learning to listen and respond to critical feedback from a variety of sources is a key skill in both writing and life.
Who is this class suitable for?
Anyone who is interested in creative writing! It will be most helpful for students who have some interest in or enthusiasm for creative writing. It may not be the best option for students who actively dislike or struggle with writing or need remedial writing help of some kind.
What skills will students build in these classes?
Obviously, students will become better writers! I aim to help students improve their writing on both a sentence and story level. We hope that by the end of the class, students will feel more confident expressing themselves thoughtfully in both writing and speaking. Strengthening the imagination is a core goal, as is developing creative problem-solving techniques. These classes also emphasize improving vocabulary and critical reading skills—essential for learning to write well. Finally, students will learn to deliver and receive effective critical feedback. These skills are all applicable not just to creative writing but also throughout students’ academic lives and on into future professional lives as well!