Building Your Collection: Writing & Submitting Your Poetry Chapbook in Only 30 Days

An Online Poetry Manuscript Workshop with John Sibley Williams
Mondays March 2, 9, 16, 23
6:00 – 8:00pm Pacific Time
Registration: $240 or $215 for Fishtrappers

Is the registration fee an obstacle for you to attend this workshop? Fishtrap offers a limited number of scholarships to help with the cost. Contact Program Director Mike Midlo for more information. mike@fishtrap.org

Join award-winning poet, teacher, editor, and literary agent John Sibley Williams for this intensive four-session workshop that will take you all the way from inspiration to publication! This workshop is for poets ready to organize their work into a collection, as well as working toward journal and book publication.

Expect to view manuscript samples and discuss techniques that can be applied to the process. We will explore all the ins-and-outs of organization and publishing a collection, from writing toward a given theme to setting and keeping to creative deadlines to learning how to submit smarter, not harder. Poets will be guided through a series of lessons and hands-on activities that each focus on a different aspect of creating, structuring, and finally publishing a new collection.

Workbook chapters include:

• How to Create and Maintain a Writing Schedule
• How to Create and Maintain a Poetry Journal
• Possible Structures
• Building Your Collection from Previously Written Work
• Finding the Threads
• Ordering Your Manuscript
• Polishing Your Manuscript
• Choosing the Right Title
• Epigraphs
• Formatting Your Manuscript
• Breaking Writer’s Block
• Submitting to Magazines
• How to Submit and Pitch to a Traditional Publisher
• Traditional Publishing
• Self-Publishing
• Checklists and Resources

Learn how to:

• Set writing goals and make creative action plans
• Make your work stand out
• Get more acceptances…and faster
• Submit smarter, not harder, to both journals and presses
• Discover the thematic threads in your writing and how to weave them across a collection
• Reshape previous poems to fit the themes and style of your collection
• Order poems within a manuscript for cohesion and flow
• Write powerful introductory and closing poems for your collection
• Choose the right book title, poem titles, and epigraphs

John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.