creative writing

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 Dorianne Laux

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Poem friends, if you are on both this list and my Substack list and want to be removed from one or the other, please let me know. None of us need yet more extraneous emails! Thanks.  

In grad school one night, at the end of the workshop, one of my classmates jokingly referred to me as the workshop’s den mother. Why? Because I sometimes baked muffins and brought them to class? Because I had a toddler and I was pregnant? I can still hear his voice. I’m not your den mother, I said. You kind of are though, someone else said, and I went silent.

Did they not think of me as a writer, a peer, their full and complete equal? Did they not see the fire that burned inside me, the fire that had always burned inside me? I was burning then, I’m burning now.

Moon in the Window, by Dorianne Laux

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Click here for more information about wondrous poet Dorianne Laux.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

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

Posted on by alisonmcghee

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 June Beisch

Posted on by alisonmcghee

When your world is being swamped with cruelty and greed, when you’re exhausted by the hatred and pain others seem determined to unleash, what do you do? How do you resist? One way is to write fiction. Not as an escape, but a conjuring.

Doesn’t matter if you’re not a writer, write the world you want to live in. Write the world you do live in but make it better, full of people who see others as they truly are – fellow humans with dreams, hopes, sorrows, loves. Don’t give away your power. Understand that conjuring begins with knowing that things that seem impossible right now aren’t. Think of those bulbs that flower under snow, and imagine the world you want to live in, and then stubbornly live in it as if it already exists. Will a better world into being until it blooms.

Henry James, by June Beisch

“Poor Mr. James,” Virginia Woolf once said:
“He never quite met the right people.”
Poor James. He never quite met the
children of light and so he had to invent them.
Then, when people said: No one is like that.
Your books are not reality, he replied:

So much the worse for reality.

He described himself as “slow to conclude,
orotund, a slow-moving creature, circling his rooms
slowly masticating his food.”

Once, when a nephew asked his advice
on how to live, he searched his mind.
Number One, be kind, he said.
Number Two, be kind and
Number Three, be kind.

Click here for more information on June Beisch. Today’s poem was first published in 2004 by Cape Cod Literary Press in Beisch’s collection Fatherless Woman. 
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

(NOTE: CLASS IS FILLED) Another One-Day Creative Writing Kickstart class!

Posted on by alisonmcghee

CLASS IS FILLED, but I will continue to offer one-day workshops regularly. Thanks.

 

Greetings, writers and writerly types,

I’m offering a one-day creative writing workshop –Creative Writing Kickstart– on Sunday, April 14. The class will touch on various aspects of creative writing craft, but our main focus, now that the snow is (nearly) gone is to get the creative juices flowing.

In one afternoon, we’ll read and discuss some fabulous published works –poetry, memoir and fiction, with maybe a little children’s lit thrown in there– talk about what makes great writing great, and complete three or four short writing prompts.

The class is fun and low-key and designed for writers of all abilities, experience levels and genres. If you’re a longtime writer in need of a boost or someone who’s always had an interest in writing but never known how to sit down and get started, please join us! And please feel free to send this email to anyone else who might enjoy the class.

Limited to eleven. If you’re interested, please email me at alison_mcghee@hotmail.com to reserve a spot.

Date: Sunday, April 14
Time: 1-5 p.m.
Place: my house in the Uptown neighborhood of south Minneapolis. On-street parking is usually plentiful, and I’m three blocks from several bus stops in all directions.
Cost: $50.
Bring: yourself, a pen and a notebook. Water and some sort of tasty treat will be provided.


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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Manuscript Critique Service:
https://alisonmcghee.com/manuscript.html

Poem of the Week, by Paul Farley

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The Power
– Paul Farley

Forget all of that end-of-the-pier
palm-reading stuff. Picture a seaside town
in your head. Start from its salt-wrack-rotten smells
and raise the lid of the world to change the light,
then go as far as you want: the ornament
of a promenade, the brilliant greys of gulls,
the weak grip of a crane in the arcades
you’ve built, ballrooms to come alive at night,
then a million-starling roost, an opulent
crumbling like cake icing …
Now, bring it down
in the kind of fire that flows along ceilings,
that knows the spectral blues; that always starts
in donut fryers or boardwalk kindling
in the dead hour before dawn, that leaves pilings
marooned by mindless tides, that sends a plume
of black smoke high enough to stain the halls
of clouds. Now look around your tiny room
and tell me that you haven’t got the power.

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For more information on Paul Farley, please click here: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=27
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Manuscript Critique Service Available

Posted on by alisonmcghee

typewriter-have-a-wonderful-day1

Are you a serious writer looking for a careful, devoted reading and critique of your manuscript? We are senior editor-writers with many years’ experience in both writing and editing books of all kinds. Our specialties: novels (adult, young adult and children’s), memoirs, short story collections, essay collections, general nonfiction, mysteries, thrillers and noir.

Critique services

1) an extremely careful reading, followed by 2) a summary critique letter, usually 3-5 pages, detailing the editor’s overall sense of your work and what sort of revisions would make it the best possible manuscript, followed (if desired) by a telephone consultation.
Fees:
$600 for a book-length work of up to 60,000 words.
$800 up to 80,000 words.
$1000 for 80,000-100,000 words.

Line-editing and margin notes are also available for an additional charge of $60/hour.

Testimonials

“Brad Zellar is a writer capable of conjuring character, situations and images that shift fluidly between the painful and the hilarious, always in a way that gives me a jolt of recognition. I love so many of his stories. I treasure his opinions on literature, on music, and on film. As for his editorial skills, the fact is that my graphic memoir Stitches would not exist if it were not for Mr. Zellar.  He recognized in me an ability and a strength that I thought I didn’t possess. He took me (figuratively, of course) by the collar, stared me in the eye, bared a single glistening fang, and dared me to write and draw what turned out to be the book of my life.”
– David Small, Caldecott Award winner and author of Stitches (W.W. Norton, 2009), which Kirkus Reviews, in a starred review, called “Emotionally raw, artistically compelling and psychologically devastating graphic memoir of childhood trauma. . . . Graphic narrative at its most cathartic.”

“Brad Zellar is as precise and economical an editor as he is a writer. He read my novel, The End of Baseball, helped me to see and, more importantly, understand, its strengths and weaknesses – without excessively finagling with the plot. If you want a professional who can help make your prose clean and your characters real, Brad Zellar is your man.”
– Peter Schilling, author of The End of Baseball (Ivan R. Dee, 2008) which the Baltimore Sun called “the best baseball novel so far this century.”

“Thank you for introducing me to Mr. Zellar. When I first read his critique, it was evident he knew exactly what I was trying to do, and say, in my novel. I knew before I went into the critique that I had major issues with a certain area of the manuscript. Mr. Zellar immediately noticed and identified the problem. Through his critique and our subsequent conversation, I came up with a great solution to my problem! What’s funny is that I had strayed far from the course, and he led me back to where I originally began. His advice is invaluable.” – M. Longstreth

“I have worked with Mr. Zellar for almost one year now. In that time, he has edited and made suggestions for revising seven of my short stories and a novel manuscript. He reads everything at least three times, comparing notes he makes with each reading so that his final review is particularly well thought-out and consistent. For some of my shorter pieces he recommended very little change, and for others major reorganization–in other words, he doesn’t use a script.  The scope of his editing services has included suggestions for reading certain novels and short stories to help me understand a suggestion, e.g., a subtle change in a narrator’s voice. I wouldn’t think of sending out a submission of any kind without the advantage of his remarkable critical eye. Please feel free to contact me with any questions (contact info available upon request). – Donna Trump

Payment (via Paypal or personal check): Two-thirds upon manuscript acceptance and the last third upon completion of the edit. Turnaround time is approximately three weeks, often sooner. For more information, email alison_mcghee@hotmail.com. You may send your work as a Word or WordPerfect attachment.