Each session includes required reading, a written lecture, creative exercises to further your learning, and a writing assignment to turn in for personalized feedback from your instructor.
Session One: The Short Story as a Form
Session Two: The Rough Draft
Session Three: Back to the Beginning
Session Four: The Middle
Session Five: The Ending
Session Six: Revision
Session Seven: Keep Writing
What will you learn?
Who should attend?
Required Reading
Meet the instructors
Speaker Name
Mark Spencer is the author of the novels An Untimely Frost, Ghost Walking, The Masked Demon, The Weary Motel (Omaha Prize for the Novel, Faulkner Award for the Novel), and Love and Reruns in Adams County; the best-selling nonfiction novel A Haunted Love Story: the Ghosts of the Allen House; as well as the short-story collections Wedlock, Spying on Lovers (Bradshaw Book Award), and Trespassers.
His short stories and articles have appeared in a wide variety of national and international magazines. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize eight times and has received four Special Mentions in Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. He also won the St. Andrews Press Short Fiction Prize. Trespassers, Mark’s most recent short-story collection, was a finalist in four national book competitions: the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award, the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, the A.E. Coppard Long Fiction Prize, and the Quarterly West Novella Competition.
After earning his B.A. in English Literature at the University of Cincinnati, Mark earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University and did Ph.D. work at Oklahoma State University.
Mark is a professor of English and Creative Writing in the MFA program and Associate Vice Chancellor in Academic Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. Several times, Mark has been named to Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers.
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John DeChancie
John DeChancie is the author of two dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction. His novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres have been attracting a wide readership for more than fifteen years, and over a million copies of his books have seen print, many in foreign languages. His humorous fantasy series, beginning with Castle Perilous, became a best seller for Berkley/Ace. Booklist described John’s novel MagicNet (William Morrow) as “a welcome sigh of comic relief…shamelessly droll, literate, and thoroughly entertaining. Magicnet is the fantasy genre’s whimsical answer to Neuromancer.” John’s other science fiction novels include From Prussia With Love (Prima Publishing), Masterminds of Falkenstein (Prima Publishing) and Innerverse (Avon), as well as his anthology of original fantasy short stories co-edited with Martin Greenberg—Castle Fantastic (DAW Books)
In addition to science fiction and fantasy, John also writes horror and nonfiction; his articles “A Fresh Look at This Island Earth” and “A Tribute to Rocketship X-M” can be found in Cult Movies). His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in numerous original anthologies, including Spell Fantastic (edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, DAW Books) and, most recently I, Alien edited by Mike Resnick (DAW Books), which contains John’s short story “The Loaves and the Fishes.”
His book Other States of Being: Sixteen Short Abductions, is a collection of stories, reprinted from various magazines and original paperback anthologies, that all explore the theme of the alien (offered as a print-on-demand title by Pulpless.com, Inc.). His latest book is a small press short story collection A Little Gray Book of Alien Stories published by Borderlands Press, Maryland.
John’s novel Witchblade: Talons was republished by iBooks (Simon and Shuster), and the entire Castle Perilous series and the Starrigger trilogy were recently published in translation in Russia.
