News of the allegations against Neil Gaiman began breaking as this year’s six-week workshop hurtled into its third week. As we emerge from the workshop and have time to process this news, our board and staff want to take a moment to recognize that a culture of silence and protecting prominent authors has been widespread…
The workshop had a bit of a shake-up this week. Due to the CrowdStrike airline disruptions, our Week Six Instructor, Carmen Maria Machado, was unable to join us in person. The class adjusted to a hybrid format easily, which involved an all-seeing and all-hearing owl. Very on-brand. While we missed Carmen’s presence on-site, she was…
The Clarion West Six-Week workshop will be virtual in 2025, with a new format designed to give students more time to write, additional lecture time with instructors, and more experimentation with workshopping models. If you’re interested in learning more about our housing situation and our decision to alternate virtual and in-person workshop years, click here….
Our Week 5 instructor, Ruoxi Chen, brought her deep knowledge of markets and vast experience as an in-house acquiring editor to the classroom this week. Among lightning feedback rounds and deep dives into comps and influences, Ruoxi encouraged the class to imagine the markets to which they might eventually send their work. Actively considering the…
Our Week four instructor, Sarah Pinsker, brought energy to a week traditionally considered to be one of the toughest, with the students’ energy levels crashing and stories taking strange turns. But strange is where fiction gets good, and Sarah encouraged the students to lean into the weird. A singer and songwriter known for her nontraditional…
Our second alumnus-turned-teacher this year, Week Three instructor Cadwell Turnbull, inspired the class with a project idea: the craft dictionary. The art of the writer’s craft is discovering how an effect is accomplished — whether it’s physically moving characters from setting A to setting B or using unexpected perspectives to surprising effect — and the…
The Six-Week Workshop students started workshopping stories in Week Two. Their instructor, Brenda Peynado, ran the workshop like a writer’s room, asking them to identify the bivalve heart of the story before diving into the discussion. The collaborative structure of the writer’s room method made for a free-flowing conversation peppered with possibility. Three of the…
In the Six-Week Workshop, our Week One instructor, Usman T. Malik, continued the proud tradition of Clarion West students coming full circle. He returned to the six-week fold with insight sharpened by his experience in the 2013 cohort. From Day One, he offered the cohort invaluable advice for thriving over the next six weeks, from…
Meet Carolina Rodríguez Fuenmayor Each year, Clarion West works with a new artist to create an image that is used across the Write-a-thon, on our website, and for the Summer of Science Fiction & Fantasy reading series poster. The poster illustration is custom designed by the artist with their personal interpretation of speculative fiction. In…
M.T. Khan is the recipient of the $1,000 Salam Award Scholarship for a student of Pakistani origin attending Clarion West’s Six-Week Workshop. The award is sponsored by the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which promotes science fiction and related genres of writing in Pakistan and supports writers of the Pakistani diaspora. Khan will join the…