Such a Helpful Resource for Writing Endings. Thank you, Jenny Shank and Catapult!
Congratulations, Erika Shimahara!
What a pleasure to help Erika with this beautiful, moving essay. Happy Mother’s Day to Erika’s mom and all the moms!
Five Cottages, Five Writers, 300 Acres
Stay tuned for details of mentored writing retreats in this heavenly place: Dorland Mountain Arts. Fall of 2021. (Post-Covid, we hope.)
Back by popular demand: Playa Summer Lake opens a Second Modern Love Retreat in October
WHAT WE WRITE ABOUT WHEN WE WRITE ABOUT LOVE | OCTOBER 21-24
October 21 @ 4:00 pm – October 24 @ 10:00 am
$575
Over the last fifteen years, the reader-submitted essays in the The New York Times Modern Love column have elevated many writers’ careers, leading some to agents, book deals, and even film adaptations. The column has led to a Modern Love Podcast (2015) and, most recently, a web-based anthology series on Amazon (2019), evidence of its continued popularity. With all that it has spawned, the column has become something of a cultural phenomenon. With 2.6 million readers, there is no greater exposure for a writer than The New York Times. This three-day retreat will provide plenty of time for immersion in the Modern Love column, while also giving participants unstructured time to work on their ideas and drafts. In our first class, we will study essays published in the column, analyzing them to discover their range of topics, writing styles, and narrative strategies. Each of us has within us the material for an essay appropriate to the column. (More likely, we all have several.) Once we’ve become more knowledgeable about essays that found their way into print, we’ll devote our second class to generating ideas through in-class exercises to discover our own Modern Love material. The love we explore can be romantic, platonic, unrequited, or familial. With feedback from peers and guidance from instructor, we will get started on a first draft. On our last evening together, before and after a shared dinner, we will have read-aloud workshops of essays-in-progress.
Open to writers of all levels. Some familiarity with the Modern Love column is assumed.
$575 includes instruction, lodging, welcoming Meet&Greet, one dinner, one lunch. (All cabins have kitchens and participants bring provisions for other meals.)
Rest, Write and Reboot in Your Private Cabin
Shed Worries from Home on These Walking Paths
Find Your Muse by the Pond
Learn more and register here.
CONGRATULATIONS to Stanford Continuing Studies student, Roan Raymundo!
Three Upcoming Retreats at Playa Summer Lake in Oregon
Modern Love Weekend Retreat: October 11th through 13th. [SOLD OUT!]
“What We Write About When We Write About Love”
5-Day Memoir Retreat: October 14th through 19th.
“Finding and Shaping Your Original Material”
3-Day Modern Love Retreat: October 21st through 24th. Because the first Modern Love retreat had a waiting list, Playa opened a second one. Details here.
Click above for details and registration links.
Find my Modern Love essay, from November of 2018 here: “I Would Have Driven Her Anywhere.”
And an interview from 2014, by Vela Magazine editor Amanda Giracca: “Crafting Memoir and Doing Grief.” Amanda studied memoir with me at Prescott College.
Find Your Muse by the Pond.
Rest, Write, and Reboot in your Private Cabin.
Shed your Worries from Home on These Walking Paths.
HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!
MELANIE
What We Write About When We Write About Love
Writing the Modern Love Essay
Stanford Continuing Studies
July 13 and 20, 2019
On Campus
Course Description:
Many writers who have had their essay accepted for The New York Times ’s “Modern Love” column have said that the experience changed their lives: Agents and publishers were calling, essays were optioned for films, and the experience was oddly more exciting than having a first book published. There are few greater exposures for writers—the Sunday New York Times has 2.6 million readers, and “Modern Love” is one of its most popular columns. In this two-day intensive, we will first discuss and analyze readings from Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion, the anthology of “Modern Love” essays collected by column editor Daniel Jones. Students will complete exercises to unearth their own best “Modern Love” material—romantic or familial love—and get feedback on which ideas pique classmates’ interest. Students will leave the first class with the beginnings of an essay, which they will develop over the next week. For the second week, we will read and discuss drafts-in-progress. This workshop, open to new and experienced writers, can help strengthen your skills and confidence in writing short personal essays, regardless of where you ultimately seek to publish. Each student will leave with a working draft, encouragement, suggestions for revision, how-to-submit info, and an expanded awareness of this thing called love.
ENROLLMENT LIMITED TO 21. REGISTER HERE:
Melanie Bishop, Faculty Emeritus, Creative Writing, Prescott College
Melanie Bishop’s “Modern Love” essay I Would Have Driven Her Anywhere appeared in The New York Times in 2018. Her novel My So-Called Ruined Life was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Huffington Post, Vela, Glimmer Train, The Georgetown Review, Valley Guide, and elsewhere. After teaching college writing for twenty-two years, Bishop now offers instruction, editing, and coaching through Lexi Services.
Featured in “The Writer’s Spotlight,” Stanford Continuing Studies
“The bit that ended up published in ‘Modern Love’ was originally part of a much longer essay about my mother, titled ‘Final Instructions for Princesses.’ I started it during a month-long residency at Djerassi1 in spring of 2016 and finished a draft in the spring of 2018, holed up in a studio at Arcosanti2. It was long and unwieldy, and I knew it needed more pruning than I’d already done, but I was too close to the material to do the necessary cutting. So I hired an excellent editor, Dawn Raffel. Her comments were enormously helpful, and one thing she said was, “I feel like the mother/daughter car wants to be an essay of its own.” Read more…
Stanford Continuing Studies
Writing the Modern Love Essay
Two-day workshop on campus, consecutive Saturdays, July 13th and 20th.
Catalog available May 6th, and registration opens on May 20th.
Course limited to 21 participants.
Melanie Bishop 