Children’s Book Week was first celebrated in 1919. This week we celebrate it for the ninety-fourth time! What happens during Children’s Book Week you ask? Well: Official events like author talks, celebrity visits, dinners with writers, and all-star story hours are hosted in fifty cities across America A Children’s Choice Book Awards Gala is held to celebrate children’s
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Chicago River Day 2013 dawned a bit chilly but seemed to be a good day to join thousands of people around the city who convened on the river banks to pick up garbage, pull out invasive plants, and generally take care of our one our most precious–and abused– resources.»
By Colton Gigot For our April “Gives Back” effort, we’re partnering with Edgewater’s Community Glue Workshop, an organization that specializes in repairing and rehabilitating items that might otherwise end up in the landfill. On April 21st, StoryStudio Chicago will host a Community Glue repair clinic right here in our Chicago studio!» Read More
by Shara Zaval I felt a bit like a know-it-all on my first day of Creative Writing I at StoryStudio. During our ten minute break, a student gripped the bathroom key, attached to a spatula with a paperclip, and read the sign taped nearby with a look of horror: Women’s: Across
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by Lara Levitan We’re excited to welcome award-winning novelist Christopher Castellani on March 26 to teach Ready for Your Close-Up: Manipulating Narrative Distance. Castellani is the author of three novels, including All This Talk of Love (2013), The Saint of Lost Things (2005) and A Kiss from Maddalena (2003).» Read More
by Colton Gigot 2013 marks StoryStudio’s tenth anniversary, and to celebrate, we’ve decided to give back. Each month, we’ll donate our time, skills, energy, and community spirit to a different local organization or charity. This month we will team up with our neighbors at Ravenswood Community Services, the organization behind our local
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Deborah Siegel’s class on Saturday, January 26, Rejuvenate Your Writing Life! A Mini Retreat For Writing Mamas, was so successful that StoryStudio has already decided to offer this day long therapeutic experience again in the spring. And to spread the word, Deborah took the time to answer our questions about her class and about
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by Rosanne Bane If you think doing two or three things at once will save you time, think again. Oh sure, your cerebellum can keep you walking, talking and chewing gum at the same time, but only because you have practiced these physical activities so much that they are automatic.» Read More
2013 marks StoryStudio’s tenth anniversary, and to celebrate, we’ve decided to give back. Each month, we’ll donate our time, skills, energy, and community spirit to a different local organization or charity. To kick off our year of giving back, we’ll be collecting pet food and supplies for the Care For Real
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StoryStudio is lucky to have Annette Gendler on its teaching team. She’s a seasoned memoirist with work published in Bellevue Literary Review, Under the Sun, South Loop Review, Washington Review of Books, and on flashquake.com, and is forthcoming in Natural Bridge, and Kaleidoscope.» Read More
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by Jennifer Ann Coffeen Last Friday I had a pretty typical writing day: I spent the morning editing a short story I wrote a few years ago, went over my notes, reworked a few sections, polished it up, and read aloud it in front of forty paying audience members.» Read More
Anna Scott is teaching Voice Matters at StoryStudio beginning January 24. The class will focus on injecting stories with compelling and distinct voice. Through writing prompts and in-class writing time she’ll show you how much voice really matters. She took a moment to tell us a little bit about her plans
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StoryStudio will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2013, and we couldn’t be more excited. Time has flown by, and like proud parents, the staff is in awe of the progress that the studio and its students have made. For founder Jill Pollack, the momentous double-digit birthday seems surreal.» Read More
by Juliet Bond In 2003, my dad had two heart attacks, one of my best friends went into a coma, and my marriage fell into chaos. I felt like all of the happy endings I’d banked on — another holiday with my dad, talking music, marriage, and parenting with my friend,
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by Robert Quinlivan Some say that creative writing “can’t be taught.” To the extent that voice and inspiration can’t be transferred from one brain to another, I agree with this statement. Creative writing can’t be taught the way algebra or bass fishing or spelunking can be taught.» Read More
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As the possibility of attending an MFA program fades further into economic impossibility for some of us, alternatives like residencies, StoryStudio classes, or writing conferences are rising in the ranks of go-to resources for budding writers. With that in mind, the Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) is now accepting
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by Kelsie Huff
As a stand-up comedian you say yes to jobs. A lot. You say yes to bridal shower roasts in the burbs, you agree to host corporate events located in loud Mexican restaurants, and you accept gigs in dingy bars with stages conveniently placed outside the men’s urinals.»
The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will hold its third annual ceremony on November 30, showcasing Chicago’s longstanding literary prowess. Chicago is among the greatest literary cities in the world, once home to the likes of Sherwood Anderson, Carolyn Rogers, and Langston Hughes.» Read More
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StoryStudio non-fiction instructor Ellen Blum Barish recently published a piece in Literary Mama entitled, “Exposed.” In it, she described an experience watching her daughter perform an original one-girl play centering on a conversation with her mother. Although the scenario was fiction, Ellen was certain that her daughter was sending a
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by Lara Levitan I’m writing a novel. Which means I spend hours alone in my office, wrapped up in an imaginary world of my own making, conversing with no one but the voices in my head. To counteract the mental cabin fever this activity can incite, I signed up for Live
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by Robert Duffer Blog is an ugly word. Not like the words prohibited to children, just plain ugly sounding. Like slacks. Or moist. Blog sounds like something you do in an outhouse. My creative writing students at Columbia College think it’s antiquated when I suggest they use the blog as a
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by Deborah Siegel This summer I moved from Brooklyn to Chicago with my husband and toddler twins. I thought the change in locale might help slow me down. The opposite happened instead. The pace of a writing life has little to do, sometimes, with the city outside one’s head.» Read More
It’s quite clear reading veteran StoryStudio instructor Annette Gendler’s new piece in the Washington Independent Review of Books, “The Privilege of Teaching Memoir,” that this is a writer who knows memoir inside and out. She reminds us that the stuff of great memoir is not necessarily fodder for headline news,
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Jackie Loewe is a member of StoryStudio’s Words at Work faculty, lending great support to the program with a wealth of experience as a networking professional. As founding partner of Sheridan Park Consulting, Loewe specializes in networking training and business development consulting with 25 years of experience as a sales and marketing
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Literature has been an essential component to the environmental movement since the 60s when Rachael Carson asked us to examine the human impact on nature in her seminal text Silent Spring. Periodically we are forced to face that fragility, as we are now, in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which
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Ever since the City’s new Cultural Plan went public, journalists have been mulling it over, providing commentary, and listing its omissions and shortcomings, as well as glimmers of potential. Gapers Block, for example, took a well-measured, thoughtful look at the version of the plan released earlier this summer.» Read
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Most anyone will tell you that even big multi-million dollar publishing houses no longer do a whole lot of promotion for their authors’ books. With so many self-promotional tools available online, writers are increasingly responsible for getting their names and books titles out there for the reading masses.» Read
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The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame has rallied the efforts of Brick-by-Brick, Chicago Quarterly Review, and StoryStudio Chicago to sponsor a creative writing contest for Chicago public school kids. Three winners will be awarded a share of two thousand dollars, including gift certificates to classes here at StoryStudio.» Read More
Writer Rayme Water recently discussed her post-publishing experience in a Publishers Weekly article entitled “Promote, Promote, Promote: A first-time novelist signs with a small house, learns fast, and shares her tips on guerrilla marketing.” Having signed with small publisher Winter Goose, it didn’t come as much of a surprise to Rayme that
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by Lara Levitan “From what I can tell, our project is the biggest and most ambitious that any newspaper is doing in the United States,” said Doug Seibold, president of the Evanston-based publisher Agate. Seibold’s referring to the recent collaboration between Agate and The Chicago Tribune to release a series of ebooks created from the
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by Mark Baechtel A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904 Does the serious literary novel still matter? To many writers, this might seem a ludicrous question. Still, it’s one that comes up fairly often these days, when myriad threats appear to be
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Abby Geni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Iowa Fellowship. Her stories have won first place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and the Chautauqua Contest and have appeared in numerous journals. She is an experienced writing instructor and taught most recently at the School
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Richard Thomas has published over sixty stories and four Pushcart Prize nominations in 2011. He will have two short story collections out in 2012 entitled, Staring Into the Abyss and Herniated Roots. As if that’s not enough, this neo-noir specialist is teaching a one-nighter at StoryStudio on October 22 (just in time for Halloween!) called
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Jennifer Ann Coffeen is is a romance novelist and freelance writer in Chicago. Her novel Priceless Deception and novella Lover’s Gamble, both published last year, are available now from The Wild Rose Press. Her forthcoming holiday short story Five Golden Suitors will be available from Musa Publishing December 7.» Read More
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Robyn Okrant is a Chicago author, freelance writer, actress and yoga teacher. Her book, LIVING OPRAH: My One Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk, was published in the US, UK, Australia and Portugal. She also created the long-running play Frodo-A-Go-Go: The Rings Recycled based on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the critically-acclaimed,
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Kelly O’ConnorMcNees taught a class at StoryStudio called Fact in Fiction, and has published two books since then. Carrie Brown of the Washington Post said of McNees’s first novel, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott: “Devotees of ‘Little Women’ will flock to this story with pleasure.” Her second novel, In Need
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by Keith Ecker A little more than a year ago, I was sitting in the Book Cellar Café talking to my writing and performance buddy Monte. I had been going through one of my periodic identify crises in which I feel all my writing is cliché and that my voice stands
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The OpEd Project, a StoryStudio partner, works to increase the number of female thought leaders contributing to media commentary. In collaboration with top universities, foundations, nonprofits, corporations and community organizations, the project seeks under-represented voices and gets them ready to become leaders in their fields through developing writing skills. » Read More
Margaret Hawkins is the author of two novels – A Year of Cats and Dogs and How to Survive a Natural Disaster, both published by Permanent Press – and a memoir about her sister, After Schizophrenia. For many years she wrote the “Galleries” column for the Chicago Sun-Times, and currently she teaches writing in the New
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