John Minichillo and Katrina Gray (mini-bios below) are co-founders and co-instructors of
the Nashville Fiction Workshop. While most writing workshops are run
by a single "master writer," the Nashville Fiction Workshop is unique
in that this couple will respond to stories and conduct classes as a
team. Workshop participants benefit from the experience and feedback
of two instructors, in addition to feedback from fellow participants.
Workshops meet once a week for 2 1/2 hour sessions. Tuition is $200 per six week session, and classes are noncredit. Students are welcome to return for additional workshop sessions at a reduced rate.
The workshop method involves in-depth discussion of student-generated work by the group and written feedback from the group that includes editorial marks as well as reader's comments. in addition to straight workshopping we intend to give short lessons on topics like epiphany, setting, basics of dialogue, the golden rules of storytelling, etc. The kinds of things we mostly learned on our own and really wished someone had just told us.
The goal of the workshop is publication. Publishing trends, publication opportunities, and the submissions process will all be discussed. With feedback from fellow writers, workshop participants will learn how educated readers see their work, with the intention of revising toward publishable quality.
***************** John Minichillo is an assistant professor in the English Department at Middle Tennessee State University,
where he teaches fiction writing, literature, and research writing.
His short stories have appeared in literary journals both in print and
on the Web, and most recently in the short fiction anthology Next Stop Hollywood (St. Martin's Press, 2007), a collection of stories
selected for their adaptability to the screen. He earned a Ph.D in
Creative Writing from The Center for Writers at The University of
Southern Mississippi and an MFA in Creative Writing from Western
Michigan University. He has worked as a college professor at various
institutions, as a high school English teacher, and as a submissions
reader for a literary journal. He lives in Nashville, happily, with
Katrina and their dogs, and serves as an advisor for Fictionaut.
Katrina Gray is a graduate of the Belmont University Graduate English program. In April 2007 she received the department's Graduate Writing Award for an in-depth literary analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved. She is currently working on Thirty, her first short story collection. She's a Nashville native with a New York editor's brain.
