ZYZZYVA Remote Writers’
Workshops
ZYZZYVA offers the community virtual Writers’ Workshops.
These three-hour courses are conducted over Zoom, with varying class sizes. Courses include a craft lecture and generative writing prompts from the instructor, as well as group discussion.
Whose Story Is This? — On Point of View: Hosted by Mary Otis
April 27, 2024
11:00 am – 2:00 pm PST
Ticket sales end: April 25, 2024
About this workshop
The person who tells the story controls the narrative, and so it is with fictional characters. Point of view, which is used to express the emotions, thoughts, motivations, and experiences of one narrator or many, is one of your story’s crucial strategic choices and can deeply affect your reader’s perceptions of and connection to your book. In this workshop, we’ll discuss distance as it relates to authorial stance, the differences between first and third person as well as other less frequently used points of view such as second person and the “royal we,” aka Pluralis Magestatis. Also to be covered: POV leaks, head hoppers, and unreliable narrators. We’ll look at the writing of Joy Williams, George Saunders, Zadie Smith, Rick Moody, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and others to see how point of view supports their storytelling. (This is a lecture and close-read workshop with in-class exercises.)
Mary Otis is the author of Burst (Zibby Books), which was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and won the Silver Medal in Literary Fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. She has also published the short story collection Yes, Yes, Cherries (Tin House). Her stories, essays, and poetry have been published in Best New American Voices, Zyzzyva, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, Bennington Review, Los Angeles Times and many other literary journals and numerous anthologies. Her story “Pilgrim Girl” received an Honorable Mention for the Pushcart Prize, and her story “Unstruck” was a Distinguished Story of the Year in Best American Short Stories. Mary has taught at UCLA and was a founding fiction professor in the UCR Low-Residency MFA Program. She lives in Los Angeles. www.maryotis.com
Ticket details
Tickets to attend this workshop are $150. Cancellations or refunds are only honored until one week before the workshop date; after that date, all ticket sales are final.
Telling It Slant — The Essence of Plot and Discovery: Hosted by Elizabeth McKenzie
May 11, 2024
11:00 am – 2:00 pm PST
Ticket sales end: May 9, 2024
About this workshop
In this workshop we’ll talk about ways to surprise ourselves as writers of fiction by defamiliarizing the ordinary in our work. We’ll experiment with some of the “restraint based generative devices” used by the Surrealists to discover ways to prompt new ideas; participants will also be asked to bring passages from works-in-progress to which we will apply some of these methods that reinvigorate our prose and break us out of habitual syntactic ruts. We will discuss how keeping things off-center at both the big picture and sentence level creates dynamic novels and stories.
Elizabeth McKenzie’s novel The Dog of the North was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in fiction. Her novel The Portable Veblen was longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and received the California Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, and others. McKenzie is the managing editor of Catamaran and senior editor of Chicago Quarterly Review. She recently completed a translation of Giacomo Sartori’s Anatomy of the Battle through an NEA Translation Fellowship with partner Michela Martini.
Ticket details
Tickets to attend this workshop are $150. Cancellations or refunds are only honored until one week before the workshop date; after that date, all ticket sales are final.
The Art of the Interview: Hosted by Ruth Madievsky
June 15, 2024
11:00 am – 2:00 pm PST
Ticket sales end: June 13, 2024
About this workshop
The literary interview is a mainstay of the book publication process. Interviewing writers is a great way to develop your voice as a writer, to meet your heroes, to build relationships with editors and publications, and to get your byline out there. In this generative workshop, we'll focus on both the craft of conducting an insightful and fun interview, as well as the more practical elements of getting early copies of books, pitching publications, negotiating your rate, and the pros and cons of different interview formats. I will share actual pitches I've used to land interviews. We'll study interviews that are as artful as the books being discussed themselves! And we'll do a writing exercise to generate sample interview questions for writers we admire, which participants are encouraged to pitch for publication after the workshop.
Ruth Madievsky is the author of the nationally bestselling novel, All-Night Pharmacy, and a poetry collection, Emergency Brake. She has covered books for GQ, The Atlantic, The Cut, Electric Literature, Them, BOMB, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Originally from Moldova, she lives in Los Angeles, where she works as an HIV and primary care clinical pharmacist.
Ticket details
Tickets to attend this workshop are $150. Cancellations or refunds are only honored until one week before the workshop date; after that date, all ticket sales are final.