I'm teaching at The Loft!
I couldn’t be more thrilled to join the virtual faculty at Minneapolis’s gem of a literary center, The Loft. Starting this summer, I’ll be teaching workshops and classes online for students anywhere. Come join me for one!
My classes: https://loft.org/artists/sarah-cypher
All courses: https://loft.org/classes/current-class-list
You’ve finished your manuscript, polished your query letter, and even made a long list of agents who are accepting work like yours. But months later, you’ve crossed many names off your list after rejections come in—until one (or more) of those rejections praises the manuscript and asks to see a revision. Writers feel confused and disappointed when their revisions still haven’t gone deep enough to persuade an agent to commit to a project. What can you do to avoid that tricky place, and how much of it is in your control?
Join me in this brief class and Q&A session, where we’ll consider not only some ways to move deeper in our revisions, but strategies for assessing what’s really wrong, and what your options are for making the right revisions for the right agent.
No matter where you are in your writing practice, getting to the next stage of your journey often means assembling a professional, creative application for residencies, grants, MFA programs, and juried workshops. In this concise session, we will discuss the basic elements of good artist statements, statements of purpose, project descriptions, CVs, and online profiles. We’ll look at examples of each, share resources to identify interesting opportunities, and find ways to support each other. We’ll also save some time for a general Q&A about how these various opportunities can help you.
In this generative class, we’ll get inspired by using other texts as access points for new drafts or as fresh angles for revision of old drafts. We’ll consider a variety of examples across fiction, creative nonfiction, and maybe a poem or two to explore how we can crack open forms that often have little to do with creative writing and find a starting point for our own stories, which can make inventive and critical use of their source material.
Each session will include discussion of a text (to be read either at home or more briefly in class), time for workshop and optional sharing, and short writing exercises based on prompts that also foster connections between students.