Clarion West Workshop Methods

We Seek to Inspire Equity Empowerment Innovation in all of our Writing Workshops

The Clarion West Writers Workshop was founded on the belief that writers from diverse backgrounds need an opportunity to be heard — and to experiment with new forms of storytelling. Clarion West has historically been successful in reaching women writers and LGBTQIA+ writers and many of our graduates are actively publishing in the field.

With more than 600 graduates from the Six-Week Workshop, Clarion West has played a significant role in shaping the careers of speculative fiction writers, and our work continues. As we explore our own efforts at equity and inclusion, we see an ongoing disparity in both the writers we serve and in the greater community of published writers in speculative fiction who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), who are from non-English speaking countries, and who are disabled. As such, we are now seeking to do better at following our mission to help new and emerging voices in speculative fiction through an examination of our workshop techniques, workshop and organizational culture, community programs, and internal processes.

As a result of feedback and community forums with our alumni, Clarion West is in the process of making lasting structural changes that promote a Six-Week Workshop culture distinctive to Clarion West’s mission of equity, empowerment, and innovation — by providing a safe space for participants to explore concepts of race, class, nationality, disability, neurodivergence, gender, and sexual orientation within and beyond the genre of speculative fiction. We hope to expand the focus of this process to every program presented by Clarion West over the next few years.

Workshop Models: Where We Started and Where We're Going

For over 35 years, Clarion West held strictly to the Milford peer workshop model. However, it is clear that a serious examination of traditional peer critique methods has already been taking place in the broader writing and workshopping field. Clarion West has been coming to terms with the fact that not all writers — especially BIPOC and other marginalized writers — have been involved in the conversations around — and represented in — the design of our workshops. (See below for a recommended reading list.)

Over the course of the past year few years, Clarion West began exploring where our assumptions about key components of the Six-Week Workshop, including critiquing methods and social interactions, have limited the experiences of writers from a broad range of underrepresented communities — especially those whose voices are still emerging in prominent speculative fiction outlets and who continue to face barriers to entry into the field.

The Workshop Culture Project

We’ve posted more detailed updates about our process here (November 2020-March 2021) and here (April 2021-April 2022). We ran additional experiential workshops in Spring 2022 (a report is forthcoming) and continue to test new methods, working with experts in the field, and making sure that the results help Clarion West follow through on our mission.

New Workshop Models

You can take a look at the workshop models we tested out in Spring 2022 here. Each of these models has its benefits and drawbacks, but on the whole we feel confident that when students are offered a choice, they have much greater ownership of their workshop experience.

We will be providing further information on this page as it becomes available. Email us directly at workshop@clarionwest.org if you have questions or concerns about the workshop process at Clarion West.

Methods

Organization-wide inventory and student surveys
Establishing an ongoing Workshop Culture Committee
Design workshop models and protocols rooted in Clarion West’s mission and vision
Add models suggested by instructors that meet our needs
Staff and organization-wide training
Documentation and ongoing evaluation

Core Values

We’ve developed a set of core values to guide our workshops. These are:

Centering and Empowering the Author
Equity
Community
Collaboration
Innovation and
Creativity

Through changes to our workshop models, community building goals, staff training in
addressing microaggressions and conflict, and new staff positions like that of workshop
facilitator, we hope to offer students a six-week workshopping experience that is supportive,
inspiring, connecting, and empowering.

Project Consultant and Advisor

Rachelle Cruz

Rachelle was appointed the 2018–2020 Inlandia Literary Laureate. She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things (An Anthology of New Philippine Myths) (Carayan Press, 2015) with Melissa Sipin. Her most recent book, Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing and Creating Comics, was published in Fall 2018. Her work has appeared in As/Us, Yellow Medicine Review, The Lit Pub,The Collagist, Bone Bouquet, PANK, Muzzle Magazine, and Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others. She hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour with Muriel Leung. She is a Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside. An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, and a VONA writer, she lives and writes in Southern California.

rachellecruz.com

Advisory Committee

Georgina Kamsika (CW 12)

Georgina Kamsika is a speculative fiction writer born in Yorkshire, England, to Anglo-Indian immigrant parents, and has spent most of her life explaining her English first name, Polish surname, and South Asian features.

As a second-generation immigrant, her work often utilizes the speculative element to examine power structures that are mirrored in the real world, touching on issues of race, class, and gender.

Her debut novel, Goddess of the North, began as a short story written for Connie Willis during Clarion West 2012. She can be found on Twitter @Gkamsika and at kamsika.com.

Karen Lord

Karen Lord is a Barbadian author, editor, and research consultant. Her debut novel, Redemption in Indigo, won several awards and was nominated for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Her other works include the science fiction novels The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, and the crime-fantasy novel Unraveling. She edited the anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean.

She was a judge for the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2018 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean YA Literature. She has taught at the 2018 Clarion West Writers Workshop and the 2019 Clarion Workshop, and she co-facilitated the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Workshop in Barbados. She has been a featured author at literary festivals from Adelaide to Edinburgh to Berlin, and often appears at the Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad & Tobago.

Nibedita Sen (CW 15)

Nibedita Sen is a Hugo, Nebula, and Astounding Award-nominated queer Bengali writer, editor, and gamer from Calcutta. She acquired several English degrees in India before deciding she wanted an MFA too, and that she was going to move halfway across the world for it. A graduate of Clarion West 2015, her work has appeared in venues like Podcastle, Nightmare, and Fireside. These days, she can be found in NYC, where she helps edit Glittership, an LGBTQ SFF podcast, enjoys the company of puns and potatoes, and is nearly always hungry. Hit her up on Twitter at @her_nibsen.

Additional Advisors

Shweta Adhyam (CW 17 and Clarion West board)
Andy Duncan (CW 94)
Huw Evans (CW 12 and Clarion West board)

Staff

María Alejandra Barrios
Marnee Chua
Amy Hirayama
Stephanie Malia Morris (CW 17)
Rashida J. Smith (CW 05)
Jae Steinbacher (CW 14)