Write by the Lake 2016

The UWisc Writing Center is a fantastic resource. They offer affordable online classes and critiques for writers, as well as hosting a writing conference and a week-long workshop, Write by the Lake, in June. 

When I matriculated at Goddard in 2013, I signed up for a generative poetry workshop. The course had five units, accessed through an online learning system, that one could work through at one's leisure. However, it also had an instructor, Angela Rydell, who read one poem and one revision per unit. I learned a lot about poetry and ended up publishing most of the poems I wrote.

One of the hardest parts of attending a low-residency program with a residency at the end of June was passing up on a lot of great writing events and opportunities in order to go to Vermont. This is my first free June since 2013, and I'm happy to report that I'll be spending a week in Madison at Write by the Lake. Angela is offering a manuscript workshop on improving the first fifty pages--a key component of any novel. Thanks to a last-minute cancellation, I'll be attending her masterclass.

The workshops run from 9:30-12:30 am, leaving plenty of time for the daily homework assignments and exploring Madison. I'm excited to be attending, even though the last-minute nature of the decision means I have to have a polished first fifty pages, a novel synopsis, and a scene-by-scene of the first fifty pages ready to go by the end of the week.

​Happy writing!