A Note from Blake Kimzey
Running an independent creative writing school for the last nine years has brought me back to my roots as a writer. Though I went through the traditional MFA route at UC Irvine, I found my most transformative early creative writing education in community college continuing education classes. This experience sparked my fascination with the alternatives to MFA programs that are flourishing across the country. It ultimately led me to found WritingWorkshops.com, an independent, artist-run creative writing school and an official education partner of Electric Literature.
When The Writer’s Chronicle asked me to moderate a discussion about these alternative pathways, I was eager to explore how organizations like ours are filling gaps left by the disappearance of accessible community-based writing education while offering alternatives to the high price tag of many MFA programs.
Our conversation brings together remarkable leaders who have built vibrant literary communities outside traditional academia:
- Rebecca Makkai, the New York Times bestselling author and artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago, has helped transform a small for-profit workshop into a major nonprofit serving over fifteen hundred writers annually.
- Julia Fierro, Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and founder of Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, created from her kitchen table what Time Out New York called “New York City’s best writing class,” which has served as a creative home to over ten thousand writers since 2002.
- G. E. Patterson, poet, attorney, and senior director of craft at Minneapolis’s Loft Literary Center, brings deep literary roots and a commitment to anti-racism and equity to one of the nation’s leading independent literary centers.
We met for almost three hours in early August to explore how these alternative programs complement—and sometimes compete directly with—traditional MFA education, serve writers at all career stages, and create supportive communities that keep writers writing for the long haul. The conversation has been edited for length and flow.
Blake Kimzey
I’m interested in origin stories, as any writer is. Each of you has chosen to build alternatives to the traditional MFA model. What specific moment or realization led you to decide that creative writing education needed a different approach, and how did that shape your organization’s core philosophy? I’ll start with you, Julia.
Julia Fierro
So for me, the origin story is very personal. I did not go into it trying to start a school or a business. It was in some ways very selfish. I was a couple of years out of my MFA program. My first book didn’t sell, and I was lonely for writers who were really serious about craft. I wanted to just be, like, super dorky and just, like, read together.
So I put it out on Craigslist. I just was like, “Come hang out with me in my kitchen and have a workshop.” I was very young. I was very intense and excited about craft. So it quickly became a class for other people like that. I guess I started to get this reputation as like, “Oh, there’s this woman who’s running these workshops for serious writers,” but really it was for people who just wanted to talk about craft.
And I was teaching at universities at the time. And I understood pretty quickly that I did not belong in academia. I didn’t want to talk about the ideas. I wanted to talk about how it was made. And I remember bumping into another professor in the hallway and he was carrying The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. And I was like, “Oh, I love that book. It’s helping me learn how to write close third-person point of view.” And he was like, “Oh, I’m using it for a class about capitalism.” And I was like, “Whoa. I don’t belong here.”
I mean, I was a great teacher, but I never used the word pedagogy. Eventually, people were like, “This woman’s running these workshops in her home where she feeds you too much coffee.” After eight years of teaching four nights a week in my home, I started hiring instructors. And I really did want to create a space for all writers. And you know, I was very lucky to be in New York, where some of the greatest writers I’ve ever worked with were, like, MTA workers and stay-at-home parents and lawyers. A lot of lawyers. And copywriters and elementary school teachers. There was just such a wealth of excited, motivated writers, and I guess I created the community that I needed, and then it sort of outgrew me. Many of the Sackett writers started publishing and winning awards, like there’s been one or two National Book Award winners. A lot of our students go on to get MFAs, and a lot of them are teaching now in MFA programs.
Kimzey
What about you, Rebecca?
Rebecca Makkai
For both me and G. E., we didn’t start the organizations, so maybe a slightly different answer to the origin story. It’s not like I saw some need and then created a thing. StoryStudio is twenty-one years old and started a lot like Sackett Street, actually. It was originally for-profit and Jill Pollack, who’s our founder, was doing writing groups, and it expanded from there. I started teaching there in 2012, after my first book came out. I don’t have an MFA. I have an MA in literature. So, you know, certainly not anti-MFA, but very aware that that’s not the only way that you get a writing education. As I started teaching kind of ad hoc at other writing centers, I would do a class, say, at Hugo House or GrubStreet or Loft, and I started coming to Jill with all these ideas of what I thought we could be doing in Chicago. She was starting to focus on some other things, so there was this moment, I think it was 2017, where basically she decided she wanted to take it to nonprofit. She wanted to step back and be the chair of the board, put me in as artistic director, and someone else as executive director. So that’s what we’ve been doing since then. The problem is the paperwork takes so long to transition to nonprofit.
I love to teach. I taught Montessori elementary school for twelve years before my first book came out. I was really sad and lonely the first year after I stopped teaching. I hadn’t realized how social of a thing that was, how much it filled my days. Then I started to teach not only at StoryStudio, but I also teach in academia. I teach in three different graduate programs, and I realized, you know, I really just simply love teaching. This was a really natural fit for me.
Kimzey
What about you, G. E.?
G. E. Patterson
As Rebecca said, I am not the founder of the Loft, but the Loft has been part of this community and, I think, the national literary community for more than fifty years. That’s a long time. The great thing for me is that I grew up with the Loft. The founders are and were the writers whose work I was reading as a little kid. They’re the writers I admired. They’re the people who sort of helped me understand that it was something you could do outside of school. I think both Julia and Rebecca mentioned this, and I will say the mission of the Loft has changed over time. It now reads, “The Loft advances the power of writers and readers to craft and share stories to create and celebrate connections and to build just, life-sustaining communities.” That feels true to the Loft’s origin for me. That was part of how I came to the Loft. It was as someone who loved to read. I think so many writers begin as readers. Almost every writer I know who makes anything close to a career of writing is still a devoted, committed reader. Reading more probably in terms of minutes a day than they are writing. Creating and celebrating connections. That’s part of how language works for me. That’s part of how language works for the community of writers and teachers that are here at the Loft. And then building life-sustaining communities. I think that’s the motivation, right? That’s the action plan. The power of language to have a positive impact. And sometimes that’s the stories that were unheard, right? Letting people know that they’re not alone.
The Loft began in the seventies by people who are part of a community working for things that they valued that were not fully supported in the community. It began in the loft space of a bookstore. That’s the origin story of our name. It was Marly Rusoff’s bookstore and poets were meeting upstairs for free.
Makkai
I didn’t know that. That’s so cool.
Patterson
You know, it was offered for free and then at one point, yeah, the bookstore could use some more funding, so do you think the people who are gathering would like to contribute a dollar? The story was recently told in a book called Sowing Seeds.
Kimzey
That’s so great. I’m also curious, as we’re talking about personal histories, how your perspective on traditional graduate education has evolved. What have you kept or rejected as you’re building out these craft programs? Some of our students at WritingWorkshops.com, for example, have MFAs. They’re looking for the publishing component that was left out in their MFA track. There’s the debate on Substack that we see every week about MFA writing, so having that experience with high-level graduate education yourselves, how does that impact your artistic direction for nontraditional students?
Makkai
I think one thing that we’ve seen throughout all kinds of education over time is that alternative education springs from traditional education, but it then in turn influences traditional education. Teaching Montessori for so long, I saw how Montessori techniques were creeping in great ways into traditional education. Outside of academia, you have so many more opportunities for different lengths of class, different format of class, different style of class, different genres. Different ages. You can have the youth class mixed in there. Some of the changes that we’ve seen within more open-minded academic programs in the past twenty, twenty-five years have been the inclusion of what we might have called genre work in the past, nods to genre, playing with genre.
In traditional education, we’ve seen the breakdown of that very old-fashioned kind of mandated workshop model of the author’s going to sit there silently and we’re all going to talk about them as if they aren’t there. That’s still an option at many places, but not the only option at many places anymore. We’ve seen some traditional programs start to acknowledge the existence of publishing, which is a huge win. And start to maybe talk a little bit about how to prepare for that world. Certainly not all of them. I’ve seen some of the more traditional programs make nods toward pedagogy, the idea that MFA students should study how to teach, because ideally they’re going to be doing this. We’ve also seen [change] not only in the format of the classes that are offered, but the tone. The idea that the instructor doesn’t know everything. The idea that we can’t just come in from our own cultural background with claws out into someone’s work and assume that we know what we’re doing.
This is largely coming from people of color, queer people, and women. Really challenging those very traditional received models. You know, the people who have had to sit there in silence as a workshop mispronounces the name of every character. And doesn’t understand the cultural context or the subject matter. It’s these writers stepping back and saying, “There must be other ways to do workshop, this wasn’t helpful to me, this actually harmed my work.”
Like I said, just experimenting with lengths of class. What would happen if we ran a four-week class? What would happen if we ran a yearlong class? How could we, for instance, study the novel? Which is something that still rarely gets taught in MFA programs. Because you’re stuck in this semester-long model, everyone gets workshopped twice. It’s got to be a short story because if you don’t do a short story, your feedback is all, “I wish we knew more about the uncle.” And you’re going, “He would have learned about the uncle if he’d read chapter 2,” and it’s not helpful to anybody. These kinds of nontraditional programs are incredible testing grounds for that. We have yearlong novel workshops. Lighthouse has a two-year novel program. There are novel mentorships out there. There are novel cohorts out there. For us, we discovered it’s like a yearlong course on drafting the novel, a bridge program where people keep drafting because it takes longer than a year to write a novel, a yearlong class where the cohort is editing novels, and then we have this monthlong publishing course every February online. So, like, can we hold your hand through all these different stages of it?
And we’re able to test out what works. Try something one year and if it doesn’t work, try something else the next year. We haven’t, you know, hired a professor on a tenure track to do that forever. We can just kind of throw spaghetti at the wall and most of it sticks, some of it doesn’t, but that’s the joy of being able to do this. We can afford to try out a program and then a few months later say that people didn’t really like that. We got to do something else. And you can’t turn things around that fast in academia.
Kimzey
Yeah, that’s perfect. I love how fleet of foot these programs are.
Patterson
Thank you, Rebecca. I wanted to piggyback and say that part of what the Loft does is that most of our classes come from proposals. These are teaching artists who come to us and say, “I have this idea for a class.” And we listen to feedback. What does the teaching artist want to do differently when it runs again? I think that is the nimbleness that Rebecca was speaking of, but it’s also this more open communication loop.
Makkai
Yeah, that’s so helpful. It’s instructors pitching what they truly want to teach. There’s also students making requests. We get all the time, “Hey, when are you guys going to offer a class on sci-fi?” or “I’m just looking for a writing group. How do I get a writing group?” And then how do we make those things happen? I don’t think you’re normally polling your MFA students and saying, “What do you hope we offer next semester?” It’s just there. It’s not there.
Kimzey
Yeah. Julia, what do you want to add?
Fierro
I feel like Sackett Street is very different. I think I’m going to get elitist about my anti-elitism here.
Kimzey
Oh, please tell us more.
Fierro
I think that for me the greatest thing that we can give writers is the ability to have self-reliance, right? And you know, sort of ironically, community. I love what G. E. said about not feeling alone. Probably in a primal way, that’s why they come to us. They’re like, “I’m doing this thing. I have no idea what I’m doing. I have this urge to create or tell stories or I don’t even know. I have these ideas in my head. These characters help, you know, and I want to be around people who are in that same kind of chaotic state, have that same desire, who see the world in a way that they have to write about it to make sense of it.”
In my own classes, I do the silent writer thing, which is funny because I’m getting a lot of pushback, especially from Gen Z. They’re like, “What’s happening?” But for me, workshop is most beneficial—and maybe the only way that it’s really beneficial—is to help writers become more confident readers. So analyzing other people’s craft, other people’s choices, technical choices, so that when they’re at home alone, they can see the good in their own work.
So I really do push. I teach very advanced writers. Some of the writers in my classes have published books. We have a core group that is very serious, and to get them to see the good or the potential in someone’s work is sometimes like pulling teeth. It’s like the antithesis of the MFA program, right? I’m like, “Come on, you can do it. If you can’t see the good in somebody else’s work or the potential, then you’re not going to see it in your own. There’s moments in your writing life where you have to be your own editor, your own publicist, your own cheerleader, your own critic.”
I don’t come from an educated background. So when I got my acceptance to Iowa twenty-four, twenty-five years ago, my parents were really disappointed. They were like, “What?” They were like, “Are you kidding me? Like you’re going to writing school?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I applied. I got in.” Had no idea what it was. I went there, there were people there who had wanted to go there since they were children and I was like, “What?” I wanted to be on Broadway or something fun, you know?
So when I got there, I was shocked. I mean, I just didn’t know that there was this whole world of prestige. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was so exciting and intense and terrifying, but I was really shocked by the lack of generosity. I feel like hiring famous writers to teach is a big problem. I hire the teachers that are just hungry to teach. You can talk to somebody for five minutes and know if they’re going to be generous and if they’re excited and they’re passionate and they need to teach.
The reason I’m here right now is because there’s nothing I love more than teaching, you know? It’s like my church. The workshop is a place where I can make the world better. I can make people feel good, but also help them develop at the same time. We can learn things from each other and share humanity. But I get so many emails from students who are going to these amazing MFA programs, top-ranked schools, and they’re like, “I’m so disappointed, like I don’t know if my teachers are even there, I don’t get any feedback.”
Kimzey
Speaking of our students, can one of you talk about the kind of writers who find a home in the classes that our organizations offer?
Makkai
I’d love to. Our favorite stories are the ones where someone starts as a beginning student. I’ll tell you the story without the name and then I’ll tell you the name.
Fierro
Yes.
Makkai
This is years ago. She hadn’t taken a creative writing class since high school or college, was getting ready to figure out what she was going to do with her life, like mid-twenties, law school or whatever. She came in, took an intro class, loved it, took another class, took another class. This one, actually, she left and got her MFA and then published a book, published another book. She started teaching for us, teaching again, teaching more and more. This is a wonderful writer named Julia Fine. She’s just fantastic. She’s the other Julia F. in my heart. I didn’t know for a while she’d started as a student.
And there are quite a few stories like that. There are other people who pop in, take a class, we learn, like Gillian Flynn, who wrote Gone Girl. I was having lunch with her last year and said something about StoryStudio. She was like, “Oh yeah, I used to be a student there.” I’m sorry, what? We were not aware of this information, and we would really like to use this information.
But we also have plenty of students where it’s, you know, eventually they’ll get there and I always believe it, but they start and they go slow and they’re just going to take classes every year. They’re just going to constantly keep coming in that door. Maybe early on they don’t even know what they’re writing. They find their genre eventually.
A really common type of student for us is someone who’s about fifty-seven years old who loved to write in high school and college and then their parents made them go to law school.
Fierro
Oh my god.
Kimzey
Yeah.
Makkai
And they’ve worked their ass off as a lawyer and they had kids and they made partner and they’re miserable and then they look around and they’re like, “Oh my god, I’m fifty-seven and I never wrote my novel.” And then they’re like, “Is it too late?” And of course it’s not too late. We love those students.
Fierro
A lot of people in that club. I mean, when I started Sackett Street, I was twenty-five. I knew nothing.
Makkai
You were so young. Yeah.
Fierro
All these lawyers were coming in and taking classes.
Makkai
Yes. All the lawyers.
Fierro
I was like, “What’s going on, guys?” And there were a lot of lawyers in my MFA program too, and they were all smarter and older.
And [my lawyer students] would email me on a Saturday and they’d be like, “Well, I’m at the office.” And I was like, “Dude, you need to get a different job because this is cutting into your writing time, your life.” And they were like, “I just have to do it for another, like, twelve years.” And I was like, “Wow.”
And the number of those lawyers that have been published is incredible.
Patterson
The self-reliance is key. Writers need to be self-motivating. Writers also need—and perhaps more now than when I published my first book—they need to be their own marketing people. They need to have those skills. So having that array of programming is part of what is key to these organizations.
And every writer that I know well, certainly the ones that I taught, certainly most of the ones that I’ve taught with, the ones who taught me, they’re pretty self-critical, you know? I used to hand out a two-page sheet that said, “Notes on Writing Workshops,” and it said in almost every other area of life we don’t judge the thing that’s just coming into being. You don’t go visit your friend who just had a baby and say, “That’s an ugly baby.”
Fierro
That’s great. I’m gonna use that.
Patterson
You know, you find the life. You find where there’s promise, right? And not for every writer. I’ve certainly worked with writers, as a colleague, who were interested in what they thought of as the critical attention. They wanted to be told where the ugliness was or where the weakness was. And depending on the dynamic, that could happen. But I think this approach that Rebecca and Julia and your question, Blake, have been discussing is, How do you build the motivation for the long game?
For me, part of it is the professionalization of young people. These stories about people who are coming in midlife returning to writing or trying writing for the first time. I think that’s also a signal of the professionalization of young people’s lives. One of the things I love about the Loft is we offer a yearlong program, and many of the people who pay to be part of the yearlong program have MFAs. Some MFA programs produce people who have been asked to be so attentive to polish or finish that they are working on their MFA thesis manuscript for years after they finished the program. As opposed to [writing] something new and [trusting] it will be better. [They] have more skills than when [they] began the MFA thesis work. You know, something new might also generate interest.
Some of the instructors who teach at the Loft, some of our teaching artists, they’re only interested in teaching the generative class. They don’t want someone bringing in work that they’ve been working on for three months, five months, three years, and being praised for it. They think that sets up a dynamic that they’re not interested in. So, they’re just like, “Everybody comes in. We’re only going to focus on the work that’s produced in the time we have together.” I think of Borges and we are all always beginning. That sense of promise. That sense of opportunity.
I think of the other creative arts. I think of the sculptors who say that every work is a failure and the fact that it didn’t meet my intention is why I make the next work.
Makkai
Thank you. I just want to add something really fast. We’re all in major cities and there’s another component here, which is simply forming writing communities and communities of like-minded creative people. We have write-ins, we have write-outs, where we’ll go to a brew pub. Part of it is very serious writers finding each other, finding support and community.
But there are always going to be people, too, whose writing is not their main thing. They’re taking a writing class right now. They’re also taking a ukulele class and then it’s going to be flower arranging, and they’re taking it in the way that I might take a photography class, which is not to be a professional photographer. And there are so many different reasons why someone would want that community. Basically, whether they are hobbyists who are having a blast, very serious writing professionals, anywhere in between, they’re finding social connection, social groups, support, friends. That’s something that happens in the classroom. We also think about how we get out into different neighborhoods within Chicago. We think a lot about how we find people before they even know that they’re writers. And that has a lot to do with our commitment to Chicago as a city, and just investing in community. And Chicago is a huge city with many, many completely underserved swaths of neighborhood. And we can’t just be content to stay in our little area and let people come to us. It [connects to] everything from civic responsibility to political action to giving people a voice to vent political outrage, giving people a place to tell abortion stories, giving people a place to tell immigrant stories, giving students a chance to tell stories in front of their peers for the first time.
There’s the classroom. Come to us. The classroom can come to you. Not just online, but literally, can we get into local libraries, schools, organizations, and then beyond the classroom?
Fierro
Blake, you have to talk about your program too, at some point.
Kimzey
That’s very nice of you. But you all have been doing this for a lot longer than I have, and there’s such wisdom in this conversation, and you’re getting at the idea of [how] every independent writing school is really trying to build community versus navigating those academic hierarchies. I got an MFA, but before that, I went to community college and took the same class, Introduction to Fiction, three semesters in a row, and I found myself on the other side of my MFA, trying to get back to the joy that I found of writing in that community college class that I took three semesters in a row.
And looking at all these programs, that’s what we’re trying to do with students who come in, look at craft, have the joy of writing, and push their work forward in new and interesting ways.
Fierro
Yeah. I wish I had that experience, because I feel like because I went straight from like barely writing to an MFA program, I feel like I’m finding that joy now after publishing four books.
Makkai
Yeah.
Patterson
Yeah. I keep hearing connections in the way that the four of us think about the work of writing and the work of writing education, or the possibilities of writing education. And one is about privilege and permission, and recognizing that some people have the privilege of thinking of themselves as a writer at a different stage, and that’s not privilege that I think is inherited.
I don’t think it’s a family privilege. I knew people who called themselves poets when all of these people who were writing beautifully were just like, “Oh, I can’t take that title now.” Like, “You have to wait until this event before you can be a poet or a novelist or a memoirist.” Also, the permission to identify as a writer, which I feel when I’m around teenagers or even preteens—I am so excited about the fact they don’t need permission to name themselves as writers.
Makkai
Yeah.
Patterson
One of the other things that I keep hearing as a thread is this recognition, and really the affirmation, of the individual velocity of each writer’s movement into writing, [and toward] publication. If [a timeline] is a way of motivating yourself to do the work, [it’s] less useful as a way of judging yourself.
Fierro
That’s great. That really damaged me as a writer personally because so many people around me were getting published at such a young age. I remember turning thirty and being like, “Well, I failed” because I hadn’t published a book yet, you know?
Patterson
Each of us has spoken about the people who take classes repeatedly. And I think that is also part of this idea of velocity. You know, it’s also about community. And I just want to call that out that if they are building their own cohort over time, you know, perhaps for each of our organizations, they’re also working independently. [Eventually] meeting independently, meeting outside of our classes, no longer paying for the experience of working together.
Kimzey
That’s one of the things I love about the independent creative writing community. A lot of times people will argue that [an] MFA program’s primary value lies in their alumni networks and their faculty connections, and I feel like, if you want to call what we’re doing alternative models, just looking at the alumni publication pages on all of our organizations, that’s happening at an accelerated clip for each of these organizations without this kind of quote unquote “institutional support” of the MFA. I mean, the community is happening largely because we are building community. We’re not navigating these academic hierarchies, and there’s such enthusiasm for the work, the joy of the writer trying to find the new path forward.
I think we also need to talk about the cost of MFA programs versus our own programs and accessibility and all that stuff. We don’t have to rehash the debate here about going into debt for an MFA, but I think a lot of people are interested in economic accessibility that our programs offer. How do you balance that accessibility for the people who want to come write with you in your organizations with making sure that the teaching artist is compensated?
Makkai
Yeah. So I’ll tell you something funny. We’ve always been trying to thread that needle. You find that balance between paying instructors enough, charging students not too much. I was the first teacher—this is before I was artistic director—at StoryStudio to do Novel in a Year, which is our yearlong novel class. And I was really adamant even then, and then remained so as I came into this position, that the cost of that class should remain low, because when it did, we got so many more applicants, and we got better applicants. And I would see sometimes similar classes out there where they might have gotten fourteen applications for twelve spots, and as the instructor, you’re going to try to pour your heart and soul into helping this novel and this writer get better for a full year, and it’s not doing anyone any favors if I can’t get into your novel because you’re not ready for this class. So it really started just completely selfishly. Every time we would talk about raising the class cost, I was like, “I need to keep it at like forty, fifty applications for twelve spots. I need to be able to pick the projects that I can wholeheartedly work on. Also have a balance in the class of age, gender, background, genre, all those things.” Of course, just on principle we want those costs low, and we’ve been able to keep them significantly lower than any other program, which is something I feel really proud of and really happy about.
Also, when we transitioned over to being nonprofit, we were much better able to fundraise for specific scholarships. We try to prioritize youth scholarships over others, but still have plenty for adults. We found that there are certain kinds of class, usually online ones, that we’re able to give a lot of scholarships for because we don’t have the overhead of being in a physical space. So, Pub Crawl, which is our February publishing intensive, we give a lot of scholarships away. Basically, if someone says they need a scholarship, we believe them. We’re able to do those for a lot of master classes that are online.
Kimzey
What about y’all? G. E. and Julia?
Patterson
The Loft is similar in some ways. We do offer access funds, and those are available for almost all of our programming. What we’ve done more recently is you can apply for access funds and then you get to be in the pool of recipients for three years. And if you’re there for one year and you wish to continue, you can continue with our yearlong program. We’ve tried a few different models, but we’ve long offered a significantly reduced space. Sometimes there’s been more than one. Our yearlong programs are generally capped at twelve. That’s a really intense ninety-six hours over a year.
The funding is a little harder now than it was a few years ago. I mean, things have changed.
Kimzey
Yeah.
Patterson
Things are changing for MFA programs. Education, the arts in general. But I’m so excited about the Loft continuing to offer support and opportunity to writers who are asking for it. And that’s the other thing. We don’t require proof, you know, and that was a change that our executive and artistic director made.
Makkai
Right.
Patterson
It’s just like, you no longer need to submit these records.
Makkai
I’m thinking back to when I was young and completely broke and had no time and was bad at paperwork. I just never could have proved that I was broke.
Patterson
And isn’t that part of the barrier? One of the barriers for higher education in this country is the paperwork.
Fierro
I’m really direct these days with writers about MFA programs. When they get in someplace that’s really expensive, I just ask them, “Do you have a lot of money?” And occasionally there’s someone that’s like, “Yeah, it’s not a problem.”
But I’m really at the point where I’m like, “It’s about the experience. Don’t pay a lot of money.” I’m just like, “Don’t do it.” I mean, the financial stuff is really hard for us to keep the classes in person. Our online classes definitely are not as expensive, because I interact with every student. You know, it is in a lot of ways more personal. It’s more curated. So that way we can have that discussion together about whether or not they can afford a class.
Let’s talk about Catapult. Remember Catapult was the institution in New York? Everyone knows who that was. And I remember when they closed there was an article about it and they were a start-up. Very different. And the people who were funding it were related to the Koch brothers in some way, and [they] realized, well, this just isn’t making money, and I remember being like, duh. Like, we’re not here for that.
Makkai
That was the heart of it.
Fierro
I needed Sackett Street. I needed the writers. I needed that community. It’s something that in many ways only crazy people would do. Like, you have to really love it. But that doesn’t stop me from saying to my students, especially my online students who live in places that aren’t major cities, “You can make it happen. You can start a reading series. Let’s say there’s four people at your first reading, and they’re all related to you. That’s still four people, you know, or you can have people come over and have a workshop in your home. If you really need it, you’ll make it work. “
It’s really exciting when someone follows Sackett Street on Instagram and I click on it and I’m like, oh my gosh, it’s a new workshop in Baltimore or it’s this or that.
Kimzey
As somebody who went to an agricultural mechanical university, worked in engineering firms for years, this is kind of what keeps me human. As we wrap up, what’s one thing coming up that you’re really excited about with your individual organizations that you want people to know about?
Makkai
There are like seventeen things, but one is a weeklong application-based summer intensive, the conference you apply to, and you work one-on-one with some really amazing persons from out of town. We started that one in 2020, so that was an interesting start and it happened online. Prior to that, we’d started a festival, which was this weekend, open to everyone, a keynote, and the pipe dream forever was to combine them. So you’d have the weeklong conference followed by the weekend festival. We’re bringing in five out-of-town big deal writers. We have Maggie Smith for poetry. We have Deesha Philyaw for fiction. We have amazing people that are going to stay, and we have like five keynotes for the festival, and we’re able to do it this year for the first time, in part because we’re partnering with the Newberry Library in Chicago, which is this amazing public research library, and they have this incredible space.
Fierro
Congratulations!
Makkai
So, we’re doing it, but they’ve come together and our marketing team made this little wedding graphic of the two things getting married. The conference was always called StoryBoard, and so it’s now called the StoryBoard Conference & Festival.
Fierro
For Sackett, fall is a very exciting time. It’s like a real back-to-school kind of energy. Part of that is because one group of our Sackett community is the writers who are applying for MFA programs. So, we have a lot of workshops at that time in person and online for those writers who are really trying to polish something and send it out. We don’t have as many classes as you guys do, but we’ve been able to add a few more specialty classes like writing speculative and fantastical fiction, which is really amazing. We also just added autofiction classes. So yeah, we’re just doing our regular thing.
Kimzey
Yeah, the what? Twenty-third year or twenty-sixth. So that’s good to be doing the regular thing, right?
Fierro
Yeah. I would like to someday do something bigger like the retreats you do, Blake. That looks like so much fun. You know, go to beautiful places and talk about writing and stuff. Yep.
Kimzey
You know, I was a bicycle tour guide in my twenties in Paris, so that’s how those came to be. What about you, G. E.?
Patterson
Also excited about a few things. Our classes run seasonally, so the fall classes will begin. They’re available on our website. If people aren’t finding what they need at StoryStudio Chicago, at Sackett Street, at WritingWorkshops.com, I hope they’ll consider the Loft as an opportunity. Our next round of yearlongs begins in January, and I’m excited about the three writers who are leading those and the cohort that they’ll be building. That includes Peter Geye, Sun Yung Shin, and Kelly Sundberg is also going to teach with us beginning in January.
And because we offer awards programs too, fall is also often our awards application season. So for the writers who live in Minnesota, who’ve lived here for a year, who are going to stay in Minnesota for the coming year, there are some awards that are available to them. And the writers who are part of the closing cohort will also be presenting their work.
Kimzey
Awesome.
Makkai
I really feel like, if you live in a certain city, find your community. Plant there. If you’re in Minneapolis, stay with the Loft. But people living elsewhere, I think you should just follow all the different writing studios that do this kind of thing, keep those emails coming into your inbox so you can see the class that’s exactly right for you, the schedule, the subject, the instructor. And you know, I would love to say like, “No, just come to us and be loyal to us,” but really, you know, if you live in Kansas, my god, just follow everything and see what’s up and maybe you’ll imprint on something or maybe you’ll just, you know, keep sampling from everywhere.
Fierro
When I was applying to MFA programs, there was no internet. I had to send a check to AWP to get this green book that didn’t even have an image on it. It just said “AWP Writing Programs” and it just had information and that’s how you applied. Now there’s just such a wealth of possibility. And community. I recently had a student explain to me what fan fiction was, and I was like, “God, the internet.” I was like, “Usually I hate it, but that’s amazing.” And she’s like, “I’ve been writing like thousands of words every day since I was a kid, like on the internet.” And I was like, “That’s why you’re such a good writer, you know.”
Patterson
And maybe that’s the point I haven’t mentioned, how the hybridity, the cross-pollination of genre, it feels like a broadening and opening that I’m so happy to witness in the literary community.
Julia Fierro is the author of four novels. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Fierro founded the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002, now a creative home to over ten thousand writers and named “New York City’s best writing class” by Time Out New York, the L Magazine, and Brooklyn Magazine, and a “top alternative to MFA programs” by Poets & Writers. Workshops are offered throughout NYC and online. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Glamour, Psychology Today, and other publications, and she has been profiled in The Observer and The Economist. Fierro has been an editor and writing coach since 2003, providing in-depth developmental feedback for authors of literary and commercial fiction. Books that she has worked on include titles published by Penguin Random House, Riverhead, Simon & Schuster, Viking, Scribner, HarperCollins, Little A, Houghton Mifflin, and more. She has traveled nationwide to give talks about writing, the teaching of writing, crafting creative communities, and publishing. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and her father/gardening partner. She is at work on a memoir and her fifth novel, a literary genre bender set in Southern Italy during the WWII liberation.
Blake Kimzey is the founder and executive director of WritingWorkshops.com. His collection of short tales, Families Among Us, was published by Black Lawrence Press, and his work has been adapted for broadcast on NPR and published by Tin House, McSweeney’s, Short Fiction, Longform, VICE, and over seventy other literary journals. Kimzey is a graduate of the MFA program at UC Irvine and received a generous Emerging Writer Grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He also cowrote, with Kyle Minor, a dramatic WWII movie about the wartime actions of Polish underground hero Jan Karski, set for production in 2026. A movie adaptation of his short story “A Family Among Us,” originally published by Roxane Gay, is currently in development. Kimzey has been awarded fellowships from the Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as a generous grant from Americans for the Arts Foundation. He has taught in the creative writing programs at SMU, UT Dallas, and UC Irvine.
Rebecca Makkai is the author of the 2023 New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions for You, as well as the novels The Great Believers, The Borrower, and The Hundred-Year House, and the story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers, one of the New York Times’ “100 Books of the 21st Century,” was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. A 2022 Guggenheim fellow, Makkai teaches graduate fiction writing at Northwestern University, Bennington College, and Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, and she is artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Vermont.
As the Loft Literary Center’s senior director of craft, G. E. Patterson oversees the organization’s craft offerings for writers, including education, awards, and partnerships. Patterson has more than twenty years of experience in nonprofit, academic, and philanthropic organizations. A poet, essayist, and public artist, Patterson has taught and published widely.