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NEW Winter and Spring 2026 Creative Writing Workshops!

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Hello friends,

It’s been…quite a year. (I leave it to you to fill in all the blanks both general and personal.) At this point every December I write myself a letter that begins Dear Allie and then goes on to reflect on everything the year meant to me. These letters are starting to pile up –ten years’ worth now–and sometimes I read through a few of them and shake my head and laugh, because dang, it’s clear that, for good and not-good, I’ve always been who I am.

This is probably why I like to break out of my routines (I get sick of myself!) and why I need to break out of them. New energy, renewed energy, a spark of new creativity. If you feel the same, maybe a creative writing workshop is what you’re looking for. Or, maybe one would be the perfect gift for someone you love and appreciate.

I’ve just scheduled five new creative writing workshops for Winter-Spring 2026, along with our annual Write Together, which this year is January 12-17. Three of the newly-scheduled workshops are free, and the other two are $100. All are held via Zoom, so you can join in no matter where you are in the world. Below is the winter-spring schedule and thumbnail descriptions. Click here for all the details and registration info.

1. Write Together 2026! Jan. 12-17, 10-11 am CT

In our popular Write Together sessions, we convene each morning in our Zoom Room for a one-hour session. Each hour includes a brief reading and continues with a 30- to 45-minute guided prompt related to the theme of the day. Each day’s theme is different, each session features a different reading and a different prompt (or two to choose from), and all are designed to wake up the magical writer who lives within us all.

2. The Transformation of Trauma: three FREE workshops via Zoom

Have you gone through something awful, either recently or a long time ago? Maybe someone you love died, or you lost your job or home or a beloved pet. Maybe someone you love is an addict, and you struggle with conflicting feelings on how best to care for them and yourself. Maybe someone sexually assaulted you, or abused you over a long period of time. Maybe as a child, or adult, you struggled through domestic violence or emotional manipulation. If your life is compromised by any of these experiences, and you’re looking for some relief and support, welcome to these workshops. 

Mapping the Unmapped: Saturday, January 24, 12-3 pm Central Time (check your time zone)
This workshop is designed for anyone living in the wake of loss: of a loved one, a job, a home, a relationship, a long-cherished dream, your physical or mental health.

Rewriting the Story, Reclaiming the Self: Friday, March 20, 1-4 pm Central Time (check your time zone)
This workshop is designed for anyone living with the memories, recent or long ago, of abuse: bullying, domestic violence, an emotionally abusive relationship, a sexual or physical assault.

The Echo That Remains: Friday, April 17, 1-4 pm Central Time (check your time zone)
This workshop is for anyone who loved someone who died of suicide, substance abuse, or untreated mental or physical illness.

3. Winter and Spring 2026 Half-day Workshops via Zoom

Could your creative spirit use a recharge? Come join me on my (virtual) porch for an exhilarating, fun, intensive workshop! All my three-hour workshops are taught via Zoom and designed for writers of any and all experience. No preparation or skills required. Workshop offerings are regularly updated (check out the brand-new Plotting for Pantsers and The Intuitive Leap class), and I’d also be happy to design one specifically for your writing group. Each workshop requires a minimum of five participants and is capped at fifteen.

Half-day workshop fee: $100. Note that I also offer a pay-as-you’re-able option to participants under financial duress (I’ve been there myself), up to two per class, from $10-$95, no questions asked.

The Freedom of Form: Saturday, March 21st, 9 -12 Central Time (check your time zone)

When you’re stuck in a piece of writing, feeling lifeless, what do you do? Grind through, hoping desperately that a window will open? Give up? Take a break? Declare yourself a failure and slink off to drown your sorrows? I’ve taken a shot at all these methods, and none of them work as well for me as re-framing the work itself. I give myself seemingly arbitrary rules to work within, e.g., Write this scene as a series of text messages, or, Write this novel as a series of one-hundred-word passages. 

The freedom of assigned form is real, people, and it’s why novels usually have chapters, and picture books are usually under 500 words. It’s why enduring forms of poetry like haiku and sonnets and sestinas are still alive and thriving. In this workshop, which is designed for writers in all genres, we will play with form as a way to open up your writing, your mind and your heart to the freedom and creativity inherent in all art. We’ll complete some in-class writings, discuss published works and in general have a great and exhilarating time.

Memoir in Moments: Writing Your Life. Friday, April 10, 1-4 pm Central Time (check your time zone)

Maybe you’re at a new stage of life, looking back. Maybe you’re thinking about your family, or your children, and all the stories they might not know about you. Maybe you’re looking back on your childhood, the things you wondered about back then, the conversations you had, the places you went, how all of them were pieces of a much larger life puzzle. Think about that T-shirt you wore all the time in seventh grade. Think about your favorite dessert when you were five years old. Your favorite song as a senior in high school. The secret you’ve never told anyone. The dream that came true, and the one that didn’t. The unexpected turns your life has taken, and how they placed pattern to everything that came after. We’ll focus on memoir moments in this class, brief, specific writing prompts that shine up from the page and give readers a perhaps unexpected window into who you are. 

For more information on these and other workshops, check out my website.

Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Would you like to start the new year with an hour each morning of quiet writing in the company of others, without the pressure of sharing or feedback? Please join us for Write Together, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. $100, with one scholarship remaining. Click here for more information and to sign up. 

The violinist with the beautiful smile in this photo used to be one of my closest friends. She lived in a small bright green ranch house right across the street from the middle school, and we would sneak out of school at lunchtime and go there to drink chocolate milk and eat peanut butter sandwiches.

Her sisters and brothers were in high school, unimaginably older and cool, laughing and talking and making offhand jokes about things like sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. Had I been alone I would have been stunned and cowed and half-paralyzed by their coolness, their easy laughter. But I wasn’t alone. I was with her.

Why did she like me? In retrospect I was a quiet observer and not much fun back then, although maybe I’m not the best judge of that. But one reason she liked me is easy: she liked nearly everyone. She had a huge and generous heart. She was also unafraid of things that I was afraid of, like saying out loud that which scared me, hurt me, made me angry. She was honest about things. She saw life clearly, and stating the obvious didn’t scare her.

The boy I had a crush on used to ask if he could have a punch off my lunch ticket. Sure, I would say. I’ll pay you back, he would say. He’d run across the grass, back into the school. He won’t, you know, she observed. He won’t pay you back. And you’ll give it to him tomorrow if he asks. I looked at her. She looked back at me and smiled. She was wise. She was honest. She stated things the way they were. And she was unjudging. She was one of those rarest of creatures, a human being completely comfortable in her own skin.

She died of an aneurysm almost thirty years ago now, but I think of her most every day. That dark hair, those blue blue eyes, that grin. On the rare occasions when I drink chocolate milk, I make a mental toast to her. In my memory she is always smiling. A big, merry smile that showed off her high cheekbones. When I think of her, I also think of this poem.

My Dead Friends, by Marie Howe

I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were —
it’s green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,

whatever he says I’ll do.

Click here for more information about Marie Howe. Today’s poem first appeared in What the Living Do, published in 1998 by W.W. Norton & Company.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Manuel Iris

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Would you like to start the new year with an hour each morning of quiet writing in the company of others, without the pressure of sharing or feedback? Please join us for Write Together, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. $100, with one scholarship remaining. Click here for more information and to sign up. 

Because more than half of all suicides in the U.S. are by gun. Because my great-aunt’s leg was shot off by a hunting rifle. Because I watched a stolen Kia with boys hanging out the windows holding guns tear down my block. Because my friend was robbed at gunpoint in the church parking lot.

Because my cousin died by self-inflicted gunshot. Because someone once shot their gun off into my phone to make me think they were dead. Because my teacher friend sometimes calls in sick on Mondays because most school shootings happen on Mondays. Because the instructor in the gun familiarization class I took because I felt I should meet my enemy goes nowhere without his guns, not even room to room in his own apartment. Because when I’m in other countries I don’t worry I’ll be shot.

Prayer for a Potential Mass Murderer, a Future School Shooter, by Manuel Iris

May you find healing
before you find a weapon. 

May you find a safe place to cry
before you find a weapon. 

May your voice find the right words
and the right ears
before you find a weapon. 

May love be as available to you
as weapons are in America. 

I am talking to you
the deeply sad, the sick,
the neglected, the abused,
the bullied, the ignored,
the violent suicidal. 

You are also us,
you come from us
to bite us in the heart
with our own mouth. 

You will be us until we take
the hurt from your heart,
the rage from your mind,
the gun from your hands. 

May the silence heal
your thirst for revenge,
your heart full of hate,
your head full of plans
and scenarios. 

May your hurt
and our wound
stop existing. 

And may we stop being devoured
by the monsters we are, the pain
we have created. 

Click here for more information about Manuel Iris. Today’s poem was first published in Rattle #89, Fall 2025. 

alisonmcghee.com

Write Together 2026!

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Write Together 2026: January 12-17, 10-11 a.m. Central Time every day (note time zone)

Welcome to Write Together 2026! In our popular Write Together sessions, we convene each morning in our Zoom Room for a one-hour session. Each hour includes a brief reading and continues with a 30- to 45-minute guided prompt related to the theme of the day. Each day’s theme is different, each session features a different reading and a different prompt (usually two to choose from), and all are designed to wake up the magical writer who lives within us all.

The Write Together sessions were inspired by my regular January solo practice of a week devoted solely to generating new ideas, having fun, and playing around with cool new prompts. There’s something so comforting and freeing about knowing that a whole group are writing together at the same time, each of us in our little Zoom boxes, with no expectation of sharing or feedback. We do extend the last day’s meeting for an open mic session – anyone who wishes is welcome to read something generated during the week for applause and appreciation.

You won’t have to take time off work or your daily routine –unless of course you want to–but in the mini-session you will have six hour-long opportunities to write in a focused, intensive, exhilarating way in a room full of others doing exactly the same thing. Come have fun and see what you come up with!

Registration and payment for the January 2026 session: $100. To register, email me at alisonmcghee@gmail.com or simply send payment and note you’re registering for Write Together 2026. Registration is tentative until payment is received. You may send payment via Venmo to @Alison-McGhee-1, Zelle to alisonmcghee@gmail.com, or by personal check. Please email me with any questions. Note: I offer two half-price scholarships ($50 each) for this workshop – if you need one, let me know and it’s yours, no questions asked.

Poem of the Week, by Alice N. Persons

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When walking in crowds I sometimes think that man could be a rapist or that man could be a serial killer or I wonder if that’s a loaded gun in that bulgy pocket. There’s no fear in these thoughts, just a kind of distant, idle curiosity.

I’m switching things up now, though. Maybe that woman runs a senior dog rescue; maybe that man sings show tunes in a nursing home every Thursday; maybe she’s a pediatric oncologist; maybe he roams the neighborhood every day with a plastic bag; picking up trash.

Maybe that woman with the dark hair and sparkly eyeglasses once saw a young man standing by the edge of a tall building, and she sensed he was gathering his strength to jump, and she approached gently and told him how she had once felt the same way, and she was there to listen if he wanted to talk, and he did, and she listened, and now a decade later they send each other a tiny daily text, just to say Hi, thinking about you. Sending love.

the man in front of you, by Alice N. Persons 

is just tall enough
has soft black hair
and golden skin
wide shoulders
and smells good

you stand behind him
in the movie line
or buying flowers on boylston street
or see him on the subway
not far down the car
his clean brown hands
on the overhead rail

the man in front of you
could have just killed someone
or might have a bitter face
may love no one
or always sleep alone

the man in front of you
hurries out of the station
or rushes around the corner
and vanishes into a cab
you never see his face
but in dreams he comes to you
and does not slip away

Click here for more information about Alice N. Persons. Today’s poem appears in Never Say Never, published in 2004 by Moon Pie Press.  
alisonmcghee.com​ 
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Rob Ingraham

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In elementary school we had to write a lot of book reports, and this felt unbearable to me. How can a book possibly be boiled down to a few lines of plot and description of style? It would have crushed my soul, so I had to come up with an alternative, which was to make up imaginary books and then write book reports about them.

Most of my imaginary books were about winter pioneers, trying their best to survive in a one-room unchinked cabin, huddled around meager fires, facing the endless snows of winter. (Yes, I’m a northerner, and yes, I spent a lot of time reading the Little House books.)

To this day I can’t read book jackets, and it’s almost impossible for me to write jacket copy for one of my own books. I feel the same way about resumés. How can a bland listing of degrees and jobs possibly convey the truth of a human being?

Resumé, by Rob Ingraham

In French, it simply means a summary,
which limits what it can and can’t convey
despite my padding and hyperbole.
No room to cite the winter night I lay
inside an ambulance (my friend was dead),
they strapped me down, the flares lit up the snow.
No place to say how luckily I wed,
or itemize what took me years to know.
The format’s not designed to mention awe;
transcendence can’t be summarized at all.
And nowhere on the page to say I saw
a plane explode, I saw a building fall.
But these are skills not easily assessed;
all references provided on request.

I’ve been unable to find out more personal information about Rob Ingraham, but you can click here for another of his poems. Today’s poem was first published in Rattle #22 in the winter of 2004. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Faith Shearin

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When my son was eleven he went away to camp for a full month, a decision I was not at all sure of. The camp was three hours away in another state and I missed him terribly and wrote and sent packages and tried not to worry and hoped he was having fun, which it turned out he was. At the end of camp, parents had a choice: they could pick their child up or their child could ride back to the city on the camp bus. I chose to drive up, not knowing that literally every other camper would take the bus back.

When I got there it was raining lightly. The woods were green and deep, the cabins were empty, and I suddenly felt inadequate, as if I’d deprived my son of a few more hours of fun on the bus with his friends. No one was there but a few counselors and a quiet boy in a blue rain jacket, watching me with calm eyes, waiting for me to recognize him, this same boy who had once lived inside me.

Spelling Bee, by Faith Shearin

In the spelling bee my daughter wore a good
brown dress and kept her hands folded.
There were twelve children speaking

into a microphone that was taller than
they were. Each time it was her turn
I could barely look. It wasn’t that I wanted

her to win but I hoped she would be
happy with herself. The words were too hard
for me; I would have missed chemical,

thermos, and dessert. Each time she spelled
one correctly my heart became a bird.
She once fluttered so restlessly beneath

my skin and, on the morning of her arrival,
her little red hands held nothing.
Her life since has been a surprise: she can

sew; she can draw; she can read. She hates
raisins but loves science. All the parents
must feel this, watching from the cheap

folding chairs. Somewhere inside them
love took shape and now
it stands at the microphone, spelling.

Click here for more information about poet Faith Shearin. Today’s poem is from her collection Moving the Piano, published in 2011 by Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Stanley Kunitz

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I’ve kept two journals in my life, one at age nine and the other at nineteen. Most entries as a nine-year-old were about my cute baby brother or the boy I had a crush on. As a nineteen-year-old I wrote in code about things that felt overwhelming. Yesterday I read an interview with a woman who’s kept journals since she was a child. Sometimes she reaches for one and leafs through it, remembering who she used to be and the changes she’s been through. I wish I’d done that, I said to the Painter last night, then I would remember all the selves I’ve ever been. Who and what are our true affections? How do we reconcile our hearts to their feasts of losses?

The Layers, by Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

​Click here for more information about Stanley Kunitz, who, in 2000, at age ninety-five, became the tenth poet laureate of the United States. Today’s poem is from from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz​, published in 1978. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Djanikian

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Is it pure racism? Is that the only reason? I asked a friend late Thursday night, after they voted the repulsive bill into being. Do they not know any immigrants? I ask myself, do they not know their doctors, their teachers, their cooks, servers, friends? What about the people who pick their food, landscape their lawns, line up at the day labor pickup sites, or used to, before they were too scared to do anything but hide? Do they not know anything about their own families?

Because unless you’re Indigenous or your ancestors were brought here in chains, you yourself are descended from immigrants, people who left everything behind for a dream. There’s strength in that for me. If they had that kind of determination and strength to make things better, Alison, I tell myself, then so do you.

Immigrant Picnic, by Gregory Djanikian

It’s the Fourth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade.

And I’m grilling, I’ve got my apron,
I’ve got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I’ve got a hat shaped   
like the state of Pennsylvania.

I ask my father what’s his pleasure
and he says, “Hot dog, medium rare,”
and then, “Hamburger, sure,   
what’s the big difference,”   
as if he’s really asking.

I put on hamburgers and hot dogs,   
slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas,
uncap the condiments. The paper napkins   
are fluttering away like lost messages.

“You’re running around,” my mother says,   
“like a chicken with its head loose.”

“Ma,” I say, “you mean cut off,
loose and cut off  being as far apart   
as, say, son and daughter.”

She gives me a quizzical look as though   
I’ve been caught in some impropriety.
“I love you and your sister just the same,” she says,
“Sure,” my grandmother pipes in,
“you’re both our children, so why worry?”

That’s not the point I begin telling them,
and I’m comparing words to fish now,   
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,   
or like birds among the date palms by the Nile,
unrepentantly elusive, wild.   

“Sonia,” my father says to my mother,
“what the hell is he talking about?”
“He’s on a ball,” my mother says.

“That’s roll!” I say, throwing up my hands,
“as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll….”

“And what about roll out the barrels?” my mother asks,
and my father claps his hands, “Why sure,” he says,
“let’s have some fun,” and launches   
into a polka, twirling my mother   
around and around like the happiest top,  
 
and my uncle is shaking his head, saying
“You could grow nuts listening to us,”  
 
and I’m thinking of pistachios in the Sinai
burgeoning without end,   
pecans in the South, the jumbled
flavor of them suddenly in my mouth,
wordless, confusing,
crowding out everything else.

Click here for more information about Gregory Djanikian.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Julia Hartwig

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One night in college I woke up because something kept crashing down the stairwell. I peeked out and saw two giant, drunk, laughing male acquaintances throwing my bike down the stairwell, hauling it up, and throwing it down again.

Did I yell at them to stop? Nope. Did I grab my bike and bring it into my room? Nope. Tell them they owed me a new bike? Nope. What I did was instantly accept that my bike and I had met our fate and there was nothing to do about it. All I was conscious of feeling was a deep, exhausted resignation.

There have been other times in my life, when wronged, that I’ve done the same thing: give up and give in without even the beginnings of resistance. These memories are profoundly disturbing to me and I’ve finally trained myself out of it. So should everyone, especially these days, when what rightfully belongs to all of us is being snatched away by those who have no right to take it.

Demand It Courageously, by Julia Hartwig

Make some room for yourself, human animal.
      Even a dog jostles about on his master’s lap to
improve his position. And when he needs space he
runs forward, without paying attention to commands
or calls.
      If you didn’t manage to receive freedom as a gift,
demand it as courageously as bread and meat.
      Make some room for yourself, human pride and
dignity.
      The Czech writer Hrabal said:
      I have as much freedom as I take.

Click here for more information about Polish poet Julia Hartwig. Today’s poem is from In Praise of the Unfinished, published in 2008 by Knopf. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter