Author: Sharla Yates

Break out of your habitual syntax, and harness the energy in the smallest, most important narrative unit.

For Memoir and Nonfiction Prose
Included in the Season Pass

Writing lives or dies at the sentence level. So what makes a sentence work? Learn the nuances of sentence craft and make sure every line carries its weight.

The sentence is the essential building block of any piece of writing—and it must do multiple kinds of work at once: convey meaning, generate emotion, and sustain momentum. Yet many writers underestimate how much power resides at this level and how deliberately sentences must be shaped to carry that weight. This isn’t about grammar or a particular “literary voice,” but about understanding the mechanics of sentence craft to carry out your true, distinct voice while delivering a powerful story.

In this webinar, we take a focused look at the art of the sentence. You will learn to shape sentences that create authority, distinctiveness, and voice; build fresh new patterns that sustain reader interest from line to line; and diagnose the hidden strengths and weaknesses in your own sentence-level habits.

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In this webinar, you will:

• IDENTIFY the sentence habits that limit a manuscript’s effectiveness 
• APPLY three key sentence techniques—compression, expansion, and rhythm control—to create more compelling prose
• BUILD special sentence-level craft skills, including strategic withholding, revelation, and syntactic variation
• LEARN how to revise ordinary sentences into memorable, voice-driven lines that carry greater emotional and narrative impact AND
• DESIGN purposeful sequences of sentences that generate momentum, surprise, and flow on the page

This webinar is ideal for beginning writers or seasoned pros in need of a tune-up.

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

Dr. Heather Sellers has been teaching for over thirty years, and she doesn’t teach like anyone else. Her classes are innovative and groundbreaking, and students describe them as fun, lively, and warm—the kind of workshop where you laugh out loud and walk away having learned an enormous amount. 

She is the author of You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, a popular memoir about family and face blindness. An Oprah Book-of-the-Month Club selection and Editor’s Choice at the New York Times Book Review, the award-winning book was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Dick Gordon’s The Story, Dateline, The Today Show, and Good Morning America with George Stephanopoulos. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The Sun, Reader’s Digest, Good Housekeeping, The Best American Essays, and numerous journals and anthologies. She is the author of four books on the craft of writing, including The Practice of Creative Writing.

Her fifth collection of poetry, Women in Tampa Talking About Alligators, is just out from Lynx House Press. Currently, she is a member of the MFA faculty at the University of South Florida, where she won the university’s highest teaching award. She also offers in-person workshops and private lessons for writers at all levels.

REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

There are no refunds after the replay is sent.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

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Unlock every CRAFT TALKS webinar from January to June 2027 (plus office hours) with one simple pass!

Your Season Pass registers you automatically for all 25 CRAFT TALKS webinars through June 2027, with live access, replays, and follow-up materials for each. You’ll also get three drop-in, live-editing office hours with writing coach and editor Allison K Williams, where you can ask questions, meet other writers, and get feedback on your pages. And you’ll have access to a private forum just for Season Pass holders.

Here’s what that means…

Season Pass holders are registered for all 25 webinars this season. No sign-ups. No stress. Less worry about missing the next great webinar.

For each webinar, you’ll receive:

• Live access to each session, where you can ask questions and take away ideas you can put into action right away.
• A replay and downloadable materials (slides, notes, and any follow-up resources), delivered to your inbox within 3 business days of the live event. Download them within 30 days, and they’re yours to keep permanently.
• A private online forum to check in, connect, and share with other season pass holders!

You don’t need to attend live to get full value from the pass. Many season pass holders watch on their own schedule.

Plus, drop-in office hours with Allison!

Three sessions with writing coach, editor, and co-founder of CRAFT TALKS, Allison K Williams (dates TBD). Think of them as small-group conversations, where you get to:

• Ask questions about craft and your current project
• Learn from watching live edits on submitted work
• Get feedback if you submit pages and attend the hour, even if Allison doesn’t live-edit yours

“Pages” means whatever you’re working on now, whether that’s a memoir, essays, fiction, or something you’re just getting started on. You bring what’s on your desk!

“I am always in awe of Allison’s wise and perceptive edits and observations and will look forward to more in the next season of CRAFT TALKS.” — Donna C.

Throughout the season, you’ll learn from acclaimed teachers and authors across the craft of writing, the writer’s life, and the business of writing.

Webinar lineup

January

• Jan 6: Bethany Jarmul, Goal Setting for Writers
• Jan 13: Allison K Williams, Newsletters and Substack
• Jan 20: Amy L. Bernstein, The Goldilocks of Book Research: Infusing Just the Right Amount Into Your Nonfiction or Fiction
• Jan 27: Patrick Madden, Writing the Undramatic Narrative Essay

February

• Feb 3: Dinty W. Moore, Embracing the Power and Flexibility of Hybrid Memoir
• Feb 10: Katie Bannon, The Dreaded So What? How to Build Stakes
• Feb 17: Michelle Cutler, Memoir and Reported Nonfiction
• Feb 24: Ethan Gilsdorf, Understanding Point of View

March

• Mar 3: Allison K Williams, Reaction, Reflection, Narrative
• Mar 10: Andrea A. Firth, Submit Smarter
• Mar 17: Tiffany Yates Martin, Backstory
• Mar 24: Brenda Miller and Holly J. Hughes, Mindfulness and Writing

April

• Apr 7: Katie Bannon, How to End a Memoir
• Apr 14: Allison K Williams, Spiral Structure Scenes
• Apr 21: Ethan Gilsdorf, The Braided and Research Essay
• Apr 28: Brenda Miller, Speculation and Creative Nonfiction: Embracing Imagination

May

• May 5: David Wogahn, Self-Publishing Foundations
• May 12: Laraine Herring, Remembering Your Why: Inspiration, Hope, and Strategy for Writers in Unstable Times
• May 19: Tiffany Yates Martin, Flashback
• May 26: Brenda Miller, Micro and Flash: Writing Small to Write Big

June

• Jun 2: Andrea A. Firth, What Makes an Essay Unforgettable? Lessons from the Best of Contemporary Nonfiction
• Jun 9: Allison K Williams, Write Your Synopsis
• Jun 16: Bethany Jarmul, Level Up Your Writing: Sentence-Level Revision Strategies
• Jun 23: Tiffany Yates Martin, Context and Specificity
• Jun 30: Ethan Gilsdorf, TBD

Topics and dates are subject to change.

Want a season of learning, feedback, and progress?
It’s already on the calendar.

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The Fine Print

✨ This is a limited opportunity, and we’re excited about our commitment to you!

📅 Can’t attend live? No worries! You’ll always get the recording and can download the webinars to watch at your convenience.

🚫 No refunds after Jan 6, 2027.

❌ The Season Pass does not include seminars, intensives, workshops, or masterclasses.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

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Revision, some say, is the hardest part of writing, but this stage can also be the most rewarding and pleasurable.

For Memoir and Nonfiction Prose
Included in the Season Pass

Capturing our memories—vividly, thoroughly, and carried along by palpable emotion—takes skill and concerted effort. But the task of writing compelling memoir doesn’t end there. Once we’ve given the story our best shot, once we’ve powered our way through an early draft or two, how do we take what we’ve created and use the powerful tools of revision to make the memoir shine?

Contrary to common wisdom, this is one task where it’s often not productive to start at the beginning. A story has multiple moving parts—sentences, paragraphs, chapters, the beginning, and the end. Successful revision happens when we learn to step back from our writing, making deliberate choices about when to intervene, where to intervene, and what changes will work best.

The key to effective revision—whether you’re writing a memoir or a six-page personal essay—is understanding that revision can take multiple approaches. Learn how to weigh those choices with intention, and walk away with tools you can apply to any project, in any genre.

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In this webinar, you will:

• LEARN how to enjoy revision, looking forward to it with anticipation
• DISCERN which revision approach works best at what stage of the writing
• OVERTURN that nagging feeling that you have been “revising forever”
• FIND the best ways to establish what should be included in the memoir and what should be left out

This webinar is ideal for writers at any level, at any stage who…

• are uncertain how to effectively improve early drafts
• worry they spend too much time polishing and re-polishing sentences
• find revision unpleasant or worrisome

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

One of our most popular and beloved presenters, DINTY W. MOORE is author of the memoirs Between Panic & Desire and To Hell With It and the writing guides Crafting the Personal Essay and The Mindful Writer, among other books. His insightful teaching, calm sensibility, and wicked sense of humor make his classes a delight as well as bringing useful techniques for every writer. Dinty has published essays and stories in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Short Reads, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of Brevity, the preeminent journal of flash nonfiction, and an editor at The Brevity Blog.

REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

There are no refunds after the replay is sent.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

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Your memoir is not what happened to you—it’s why it mattered. Memoirs that sell connect a single focus from your story with readers. 

For memoirists
Included in the Season Pass

One of the most challenging things for memoirists to do is find the singular story out of a lifetime of stories they’re telling in their memoir. A memoir is a single lens on an aspect of a life—not an entire biography, and memoirists must learn to distill their work. The events they choose to dramatize must be those most relevant to the internal growth trajectory of the narrator. In other words, they must learn to ask “who cares?” ruthlessly about key events in their lives. Not a task for the faint of heart! 

In this interactive webinar, we’ll explore powerful questions to help you find the heart of your memoir. If you aren’t sure yet what your story is, these questions can help you understand what’s missing! We will also look at the concept of a misbelief and learn how tracking a character’s misbelief leads us to the memoir’s theme and point. Whether you’re just starting your memoir, already have several drafts, are struggling with a proposal or are getting rejections for “I didn’t connect” or “I don’t know who the audience is,” these exercises will strengthen your understanding of your work.

Please bring writing materials and be prepared to write!

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In this webinar, you will:

• EXPLORE examples of memoir “points”
• UNDERSTAND the difference between plot and story (what and why)
• LEARN how point and theme are connected
• IDENTIFY the scene that their memoir requires in order to exist
• PRACTICE finding the heart of their memoir

This webinar is ideal for intermediate and advanced memorists…

• who are struggling to complete a memoir draft
• who can’t see the forest for the trees in their story
• seeking clarity on their memoir’s focus
• who are writing book proposals and stuck on the overview or the audience
• curious about how their narrative connects with a larger audience

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

Funny, kind, and direct, Laraine Herring is a popular CRAFT TALKS presenter and one of our strongest voices on deeply personal writing that powerfully connects with readers.

Laraine’s memoir, A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens, was released in 2021 from Regal House. She’s the editor of the anthology Becoming Real: Women Reclaim the Power of the Imagined through Speculative Nonfiction (Pact Press, 2024) and a trilogy of writing books from Shambhala, including Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice. A retired professor of creative writing and psychology, Lariane has worked with writers for thirty years. 

She’s also an illustrator and a grief counselor and creator of The Grief Forest: a book about what we don’t talk about. She founded the online ‘zine Hags on Fire, a place for women to share stories about menopause, and co-designed The Imaginal Memoir Cave immersion program with Gayle Brandeis. Laraine’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Tiferet, The Rumpus, The Manifest-Station, and many more. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Counseling Psychology and lives in the mountains of northern Arizona with many cats.

REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

There are no refunds after the replay is sent.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

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Beyond the chronology of a story, we can speed up and slow down time within scenes, immersing the reader more fully in the moment. Explore four kinds of time in this write-along webinar. 

For creative nonfiction, nonfiction, and fiction
Included in the Season Pass

Time on the page creates tension, amplifies emotion, and controls the pace of the story. This can be the time it takes characters or the narrator to move across a room, a montage of the past or flashbacks within the present scene, and the time created by different verb tenses and points of view. 

Writers most often work with four types of time: 

• Linear/logical time that sustains plot and point of view
• The Continuous Present, which brings immediacy to the page and can support multiple or collective points of view
• Long Time, with which we can depict extraordinary amounts of time passing in a flash piece and show how the deep past informs the present and the future
• Meticulous Time, when the time within the story is actually shorter than the amount of time it takes to read it. By slowing time and examining smaller details and moments, greater emotion is created on the page or the reader’s focus is controlled. 

With examples and instructions, explore the fascinating craft of creating, expanding, and contracting time by rewriting a single scene in each of the four times. You’ll finish our action-packed hour with a deeper understanding of how time elapses within scenes and flash pieces and a stronger understanding of when and why to use each type of time. 

This webinar will also help you find a well of creativity and freedom to draw from in connection to how you replicate time on the page.

Come ready to write!

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In this webinar, you will:

• LEARN about four different types of time to use in creative writing
• HEAR examples that illuminate the advantages of using different time elements
• EXPLORE how time is its own craft element, helping writers guide their readers through plot
• WRITE in four kinds of time to truly understand this craft technique
• KNOW how, when, and why to expand and contract time in your work

This webinar is ideal for …

• intermediate and advanced fiction and nonfiction writers who are obsessed with time—how it moves, bends, and plays tricks on the page
• writers looking to explore fresh aspects of craft and push past familiar techniques
• writers whose scenes feel flat or rushed and want to learn how to stretch a moment until it earns its weight
• writers struggling with pacing—either everything moves too fast, or nothing moves at all
• writers who want their prose to mirror the way memory, boredom, or deep focus actually feel, instead of defaulting to straightforward chronology
• writers ready to experiment with structure and are looking for a framework to do it with intention, not just instinct

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

An informal-but-informed teacher focused on actionable results, Sherrie Flick is the author of six books, including the short story collection I Have Not Considered Consequences (Autumn House Press, 2025). She is co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America and senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her work has been performed at Symphony Space for NPR’s Selected Shorts and has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Flash Fiction Forward. An essay from her debut essay collection, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist (University of Nebraska Press), was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2023. Her most recent awards include a Creative Development Grant from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. She is a visiting professor in the West Virginia Wesleyan low-residency MFA program.

REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

There are no refunds after the replay is sent.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

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Learn to cultivate a writing process that provides fertile ground for unexpected discoveries and how to make the most of moments when you’re surprised by your own writing.

For creative nonfiction, nonfiction, and all writers eager to find more spontaneity in their process
Included in the Season Pass

Sometimes the exact thing your writing needs is the thing you least expect: the subject you weren’t meaning to consider, the turn of phrase you didn’t know you had in you, or the connections you never realized you could make. These “Lucky Drafts” are happy accidents, turning serendipity, coincidence, and unwitting juxtaposition into exquisite nonfiction. And often, these drafts surprise us with their flow and power, transcending the labor of writing to reach our strongest authorial voice. 

I never meant to be an essayist. The first long-form piece of creative nonfiction I ever wrote was meant to be an 800-word contribution to a roundtable on race and poetry. It turned into a 9000-word essay that went explosively viral upon publication. Nearly every essay I’ve published since has similarly arrived while I was writing something else entirely. This is true of many of my poems, too. 

Other writers across genres—poets, novelists, and essayists—have shared with me their own adventures in happy accidents, to borrow a phrase from legendary painter and PBS fixture Bob Ross, and how inadvertent nonfiction can become the best essays we never meant to write.

In this webinar, we’ll consider why and how the inadvertent can so often be so much more interesting and satisfying than the thing we were meaning to write. We’ll discuss strategies for cultivating and embracing happy accidents and learn to create the circumstances (and welcome the surprises!) to generate exciting new work that surpasses our own expectations for our writing.

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In this webinar, you will:

• DISCOVER examples of accidental turns in essay writing
• EXPLORE how and why the unintentional can result in potent and memorable writing
• LEARN how to embrace the unexpected and let it lead us to fresh and exciting new essays
• RELEASE over-control of your writing to allow yourself to surprise yourself

This webinar is ideal for writers who…

• feel stuck or blocked
• are writing a ton but publishing less than they hope to
• seek to differentiate their work from everyone else’s in an oversaturated media moment
• are waiting for their writing to “flow” instead of pushing

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

A personable and lively teacher, Jaswinder Bolina’s superpower is translating complicated ideas into plain English. His conversational, humorous sessions are transformative for students’ work. Noted for being analytical yet highly approachable, Jaswinder’s most recent book English as a Second Language and Other Poems (2023) was awarded the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. He is author of three previous poetry collections, The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), and of the essay collection Of Color (2020).

REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

There are no refunds after the replay is sent.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

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Some stories demand more than what we already know: interviews, research, quotations, and reportage. Learn the skill of turning facts into scenes with inspiration and truth.

For Creative Nonfiction, Narrative Nonfiction, and Memoir
Included in the Season Pass

We are often told to ‘write what we know.’ But what if the story we’re telling, whatever our own role in it, requires us to seek out information, perspectives, and knowledge beyond our own experience? Even as we write beyond ourselves, the question at the heart of the book or essay must drive our inquiry. Why we are telling this story in turn dictates how that story unfolds and is structured and told.

Learn narrative nonfiction writer Michael Copperman’s best techniques for conducting and writing interviews, researching, exploring archives and analyzing keepsakes, quoting from other first sources, and reportage. Through examples of transforming source material into recreated and imagined scenes and text, you’ll discover the combination of skill, patience, and inspiration that powers successful narrative nonfiction.

Proceeds for this course support Short Reads, the free, flash-nonfiction literary magazine, and the writers they publish. Find out more and subscribe to Short Reads here.

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In this webinar, you will:

• EXPLORE different kinds of research, reportage, investigation, and interviews
• INTERROGATE the ethics of transforming anecdotes, facts, and data into narrative
• CONSIDER models of transforming research into a story
• LEARN how to begin doing this work for your own writing

This webinar is ideal for beginning and intermediate writers who…

• want to include archival materials and research and/or conduct interviews to enrich their own work
• wish to consider or include knowledge and perspectives beyond their own immediate experience
• want to write compelling, enlightening narrative nonfiction that appeals to audiences, agents, editors, and readers

Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔

ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER

MICHAEL COPPERMAN’s memoir TEACHER: Two Years in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi 2017), about the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, was a finalist for the 2018 Oregon Book Award in CNF. A funny, generous and thoughtful teacher, he blends specific information with the inspiration to use it, right away.

Michael’s prose has appeared in The Oxford-American, Guernica, The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Boston Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Triquarterly, Kenyon Review and Copper Nickel, among many others, and has won awards and garnered fellowships from the Munster Literature Center, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission. His work is represented by David Dunton of Harvey Klinger.

REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.

There are no refunds after the replay is sent.

Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com

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INSTRUCTOR

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