ZYZZYVA Remote Writers’
Workshops
As we all adhere to social distancing and sheltering in place in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, ZYZZYVA will continue to offer our Writer’s Workshops, in a slightly altered format.
These three-hour courses will be conducted over Zoom’s conferencing service, and will be limited to five students. Courses will include a craft discussion from the instructor, as well as traditional workshop-style group discussion of the attendees’ submitted work.
Following the Workshop, attendees will also be sent a page of feedback on the submitted work from the instructor.
Point of View Workshop with Dana Johnson
January 30, 2021
11:00 am – 2:00 pm PST
Submissions close: January 16, 2021
About this workshop
Point of view is one of the most important story elements. Careful selection of who tells the story and from what narrative distance can make or break a story. From Jeffrey Eugenides's first-person plural masterpiece The Virgin Suicides to Edward P. Jones's spellbinding omniscience in The Known World, point of view can crack the code of an elusive story that has been just out of the writer's reach. In this workshop, Flannery O'Connor Award-winning author Dana Johnson will discuss all the things a writer can do with a story, but with a particular emphasis on point of view.
Dana Johnson is the author of the short story collection In the Not Quite Dark. She is also the author of Break Any Woman Down, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the novel Elsewhere, California. Both books were nominees for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and she was a finalist for the 2020 Dos Passos award. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Callaloo, The Iowa Review and Huizache, among others, and anthologized in Watchlist: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest, Shaking the Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, and California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century. Born and raised in and around Los Angeles, she is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit a fiction manuscript (short story, flash fiction, or novel excerpt) of no more than 2,500 words (roughly 10 pages double-spaced). Make sure it is a manuscript you wish to discuss in the workshop.
The non-refundable application fee is $15. Accepted applicants will be informed by January 23, 2021. If accepted, the fee to attend is $150.
