Live & Recorded Classes
Find community and grow your craft in our online workshops. Whether you’re a new writer or a well-published pro, you’ll find motivation, structure, constructive criticism, and a dedicated cohort.
Upcoming Class Calendar:
- SARAH FRELIGH: The I’s Have It, April 26, 2-4 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, May 17, 2-3:30 ET
- JACKSON TATGE: Picturing A Digital Presence, May 31, 2-4 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, June 14, 2-3:30 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, July 12, 2-3:30 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, August 9, 2-3:30 ET
- SARAH FRELIGH: The I’s Have It, April 26, 2-4 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, May 17, 2-3:30 ET
- JACKSON TATGE: Picturing A Digital Presence, May 31, 2-4 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, June 14, 2-3:30 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, July 12, 2-3:30 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, August 9, 2-3:30 ET
Join us the second Sunday of every month, from 2-3:30pm ET (occasionally dates may shift due to holidays). Register for our upcoming sessions on: May 17th, June 14th, July 12th, & August 9th.
Cost: $5. Open to: All Writers
Are you struggling to find writing time? Showing up for your writing practice is the hardest part—life knocks you off track.
Cleaver Magazine to the rescue! You don’t have to go it alone. Join us for our monthly Ass in Chair Sessions, a once-a-month, 90-minute commitment to your writing practice. With the communal energy that comes from writing together, you will make progress towards your writing goals, one word, one paragraph, one page at a time—by getting your Ass in Chair time. We’ll offer an optional prompt at the beginning—who knows where it will take you?
Each session costs $5 (because you’re more likely to show up for yourself if you have some skin in the game), and happens on the second Sunday of every month. Make the commitment to yourself. Register here. These sessions are not recorded.
In this short course, we’ll examine the various ways writers of both prose and poetry have employed the first-person narrator/speaker and how that might translate to writing and revising our own poems, stories and memoirs. In-class discussion will revolve around published work that employ a variety of forms—including epistolary, monologue/persona, peripheral first person, and the journal/diary—that we’ll use as a springboard to inspire new work as well as revise/revive old work. Students will leave the session with some drafts-in-progress and a better appreciation of the range of first-person point of view. Open to writers of both poetry and prose at any level.
You don’t need to be a designer to make a strong visual impression; you just need the right tools and a little guidance. This workshop introduces you to the world of digital media content creation, giving you a hands-on look at how to source royalty-free images with and without AI, as well as two powerful design tools: Adobe Photoshop and Canva. Tailored specifically for writers, this class will show you how to create eye-catching graphics that represent your author brand—from book promotion images and social media visuals to website banners and newsletter headers. We’ll walk through the core features of both platforms, explore when and how to use each one, and give you the confidence to start creating on your own. Whether you’re announcing a new book release, building up your social presence, or simply enhancing your website, this class will put you in charge of your own visual identity on the web. Bring your creative ideas, and leave with graphics you can use right away.
Read about Jackson here.
CHOPPED! Flash & Micro Marathon
Instructor: Kathryn Kulpa
Date: Coming soon.
Cost: $60.
Open to writers of: Flash, Micro, and anyone else who wants to try!
Class Limit: 20
This intense online session, hosted on Zoom, will test your writing mettle with a nonstop series of flash and micro writing challenges—some as short as 5 minutes, others up to 30 minutes. Write against the clock and banish writer’s block! Creative and open-ended prompts will encourage you to play with words, form, and images. You should leave this workshop energized and inspired, with up to six flash or micro drafts or beginnings. While all the prompts are different, writers can continue work they start in one timed prompt with the next one, so if you are working on a novel, novella, or themed collection, this workshop could be a good way to dive in.
Due to time constraints, this class is only for generating new work—not for critiques—but I will offer some revision workshops where you can continue what you start here.
BROWSE OUR LIBRARY OF RECORDED CLASSES
In this hands-on workshop, you’ll create a professional website tailored to your unique voice and brand as a writer.
This workshop dives deeper into search engine optimization (SEO), equipping you with the tools and strategies to increase your site’s visibility and grow your audience.
Morgan Larocca: Be Your Book’s Best Advocate
In this masterclass, we’ll peel back the curtain and look into how publicity works to advance your book at every stage in your writing process.
Sophie Lucido Johnson: Building a Writing Practice with Substack
In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn how to create, grow, and monetize a successful email newsletter using Substack.
Jen Mathy: YOU, INC.: Building Your Writing Brand
In this class, we’ll talk about your small-business “must-haves,” and look at best practices across the literary community.
Chris Callison Burch: What Writers Need to Learn about AI and Large Language Models
This masterclass explores the impact of AI on the writing profession, from creative possibilities to practical concerns.
This two-hour masterclass will equip aspiring writers with the skills, insights, and strategies to craft compelling MFA applications.
Anni Liu: Behind the Covers: Publishing Your Book
In this class, we will provide insight into the journey of publication – from both the writer’s and the editor’s perspective.
Marnie Goodfriend: Writing the Body
In this workshop, we’ll use guided exercises and short readings to generate new material from lived experiences, such as eating, politics, aging, gender, health, intimacy, trauma, and crime.
Are we ever really objective when we write ourselves onto the page? This class offers tips for writing about yourself with complexity and power.
Beth Kephart: The Art of the Telling Detail
In this class, we’ll take note as details evolve across pages, and discuss the additive impact. Generative prompts will also be offered.
Beth Kephart: Writing Advanced by Categories: Obsessions into Stories
This workshop will use guided exercises and short readings to generate new material from lived experiences, such as eating, politics, aging, gender, health, intimacy, trauma, and crime.
Beth Kephart: Transcending the Tumult: Write Right Now
In this master class, Beth Kephart will share brief passages from writers who have offered written proof of beauty and meaning during the noisiest times.
Megan Stielstra: Let Others Carry It: Publishing as Practice
This class reframes publication as a vital and informative part of the writing practice, as opposed to rejection/acceptance roulette.
Megan Stielstra: Get Out of Your Head
In this class, we’ll take our writing out of the head and into the body, generating new work and digging into material you’re already exploring.
Megan Stielstra: Urgency and the Personal Essay
In this class, we’ll engage in activities to get experiences out of the body and onto the page, encourage risk and discovery, and examine literary craft in new ways.
Megan Stielstra: Building a Successful Rewriting Practice
We write what is urgent to us; we rewrite to make it urgent for others. This lightning-bolt session examines rewriting as an invitation to invite other people—readers—into your writing practice and, in many ways, your own head and heart.
Students will leave this class with an understanding of character development and the aspects of craft involved in creating characters on a small canvas.
Kathryn Kulpa: Submit Your Flash (and Get It Published)!
This class will help writers at all levels untangle the sometimes daunting process of taking your flash and microfiction from private to public.
Francine Witte: Sharpen, Shift, Surprise: Revising Flash Fiction
You’ve written the draft. Now what? This interactive session explores revision as a creative act, not just a clean-up job.
Kathy Fish: Ready! Set! Write!
Expect to leave this session with three exciting flash drafts and an abundance of tools and tricks to call upon the next time you face the blank page.
Sheree L. Greer: Point of View as Play and Practice
In this class, writers explore point of view as a craft element, an opportunity for play, and a portal of exploration in prose and in creative practice.
Sara Levine: Delusions of Grammar
This class is a high-energy exploration of the rhetoric of grammar. We’ll look at how writers make decisions when they confront a sentence.
Sophie Lucido Johnson: Write Funny
In this class, we will focus on the nuts and bolts of humor writing, and practice ways to incorporate levity into all types of compositions.
Andrea Caswell: Revision Revolution
This class reframes revision as a dynamic collaboration between writer and text, rather than a combat sport.
CLEAVER CLINICS
Would you like personal editorial feedback for your work-in-progress?
Nonfiction Clinic
1-on-1 with Sydney Tammarine
(on leave Dec 1 through June 1, 2025)
Short Story Clinic
Nonfiction Clinic
1-on-1 with Andrea Caswell
WORKSHOP FACULTY
