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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Introduction to Creative Writing
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Advanced Short Fiction
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Advanced Non-fiction & Journalism
Introduction to Creative Writing
In this ten-session course, students will complete two pieces, a work of short fiction and another of creative non-fiction. This class is appropriate for younger students (13-15) and/or students who are interested in creative writing but don’t have much experience with it.
In the first four weeks, students will work with instructor Cat Powell, exploring the building blocks of fiction: plot, character, world-building, narrative voice, dialogue, and scene. We will also read and discuss a “flash” short story (<1000 words) in a different genre each week. Along the way, students will complete their own flash stories. In week five, students will present their pieces and receive feedback from their peers and the instructor, including advice for further development of the piece.
In week six, students will begin the non-fiction unit with instructor Tony.
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
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 a number of top colleges and business schools, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, UPenn and Stanford. She has been coaching middle and high school creative writers for the last two years and has worked with nearly a dozen students on submissions for the Scholastic Awards specifically. 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, and The Missouri Review. In 2019, she was the recipient of The Missouri Review’s Peden Prize for best story in a volume year. She is currently working on her first novel and is represented by the literary agency Janklow and Nesbit.
About the Instructor
Tony holds a BA in Philosophy and Film Studies from Amherst College, where he graduated cum laude and won the Film Studies Award, and an MFA in Creative 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 for "outstanding talent as a teacher of creative writing." He has served as an editorial assistant for the Iowa Review and an assistant editor for the London Review of Books.
Introduction to Creative Writing
Advanced Short Fiction
Advanced Non-fiction & Journalism
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!