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:
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, June 14, 2-3:30 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, July 12, 2-3:30 ET
- CHOPPED! Flash and Micro Marathon, July 18, 12-12:30 ET
- CATNIP FOR WRITERS July 26, 2-4 PM ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, August 9, 2-3:30 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, June 14, 2-3:30 ET
- ASS IN CHAIR SESSION, July 12, 2-3:30 ET
- CHOPPED! Flash and Micro Marathon, July 18, 12-12:30 ET
- CATNIP FOR WRITERS July 26, 2-4 PM 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: 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.
Instructor: Kathryn Kulpa
Date: Saturday, July 18, 12 PM to 2:30 PM ET
Cost: $60.
Open to writers of: Flash, Micro, and anyone else who wants to try!
Class Limit: 20
Come into the kitchen and see what you can cook up! Generate new flash and micro stories in the company of fellow writers, with inspiration from a variety of open-ended prompts, tight deadlines, and accountability. See what you can accomplish in short, intense bursts of writing ranging from 10 minutes to 30 minutes. We’ll take brief breaks to check in with each other, and there will be time at the end for those who’d like to share their new work. It’s a low-key, low-tech way to create new flash stories and bring a sense of community to the lonely work of writing. This class is open to all levels.
Instructor: Tricia Park
Date: Sunday, July 26th from 2-4pm ET
Cost: $60. Can’t make it on the 26th? Recordings will be sent to all who register.
For writers of all genres and species.
In this refreshing two-hour Zoom workshop, we’ll use prompts, discussion, and observation to explore cats as characters, symbols, companions, mysteries, and forces of chaos—or whatever cats mean for you. We’ll draw inspiration from diverse literary models such as Rilke, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gaitskill, and everything else on the shelf. If needed, We’ll Prescribe You a Cat. Come prepared to write, rant, share, and discover wherever feline inspiration leads. Writers of all genres, species, and experience levels are welcome.
BROWSE OUR LIBRARY OF RECORDED CLASSES
This class covers how to create eye-catching graphics that represent your author brand, giving you a look at how to source royalty-free images, as well as two powerful design tools: Photoshop and Canva.
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?
WORKSHOP FACULTY
