If you're a writer of short fiction looking to spend six weeks making friends with your peers, meeting amazing authors, and receiving invaluable feedback on your writing, then I cannot encourage you enough to submit your stories to the Clarion West Writers Workshop.
Here's this summer's awesome instructor line-up.
Paul Park was one of my instructors at Clarion West in 2011, and he is the perfect week one instructor. After lunch he read to us, and it helped me transition from the Outside World, full of work and not much love for literature, to Clarion Space, where your brain is steeped so long in words that you begin to see your stories differently.
I also studied with Kij Johnson last summer at her Beginning Novel Workshop at the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas (which you should apply to if you're writing a novel!). Kij is not only amazingly fun to be around, but she also has a way of teasing out the heart of your writing and helping you knit that heart back into a more solid whole.
And though I haven't studied with the other instructors, I know they are just as wonderful, because the workshop administrators know how to put together just the right combination of instructors to push you to write your hardest and cajole you into having fun.
Go here for more information on how to apply to this year's workshop. The deadline is March 1st. Good luck!
