The Conference
January 16-23, 2021
After much thought, we have made the decision to cancel the in-person Writers in Paradise conference in January 2021. We feel that the risk to the health of our faculty, participants, and guest speakers is simply too high. Though we are disappointed, we look forward to hosting our 2-day virtual event for applicants, which will take place on Sunday and Monday, January 17 and 18.
If you applied, please keep your eye out for communications from us with more details.
To everyone else, as always, our evening readings will continue to be open to the public, and this remains true for the virtual readings as well. In the coming weeks, we will announce our schedule of readings along with instructions for viewing.
Finally, please know that we will move our original 2021 programming to 2022 and send out notices for new deadlines in Spring of next year. If you have any questions or would like to be added to our mailing list, email Coordinator, Marina Pruna at prunami@eckerd.edu. Thank you.
Located on the beautiful waterfront campus of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, this writers’ conference features professional writers at the top of their form spending quality time with motivated and talented participants seeking an intimate, unhurried climate for learning…in paradise.
2021 Workshops
Nonfiction with Emily Bernard
Every essay is a journey. If the writer is successful, we readers end up with new understandings, or at least, new questions to ask of the world and our place in it. In this workshop, we will read and discuss essays designed to disrupt our assumptions and challenge us to imagine alternate ways of thinking and being. Writing exercises will enable you to learn how to take the stuff of your own life and transform it into a story that is bigger than its circumstances.
Personal Essay with Laura Lippman
The personal essay is a highly personal form — and sometimes a maligned one. In this course, I hope to help students realize the optimal versions of the stories they want to tell and to stress the values that personal essays share with all nonfiction — clarity, voice, even rigorous reporting at times.
Memoir with Ann Hood
In this workshop, we will read and discuss published essays every day to examine what makes a good piece of memoir writing. We will then critique pages from your own memoirs and essays with an eye toward revision.
Novel with Andre Dubus III
If I teach nothing in my writing classes, I teach this: do not outline your novel or novella or short story or essay. Do not think out the plot, the narrative arc, the protagonist’s journey, whatever you want to call it. Instead, try to find the story through an honest excavation of the characters’ total experience of the situation in which they find themselves. Do that, and I promise the story will begin to write itself, with little need for the controlling hand of the godly, intelligent, well-read, and ambitious author. But how, precisely, does one go about this “excavation”? And how, technically speaking, can we ignite a story into “writing itself”? Come to this workshop, and I will seek to demystify those writerly tools and skills that time and time again, if they are sharp enough, and if the writer can summon enough daily faith and nerve, can penetrate the mystery of story itself.
Narrative Suspense with Michael Koryta
The workshop is open to both fiction and nonfiction writers who are interested in improving their storytelling and broadening their range of techniques. Focus will be on how the handling of core issues such as character, plot, tension, and emotion are imperative regardless of the form, and demonstrating that fiction writers can benefit from seeing how journalistic techniques can add depth and realism to their own work, while nonfiction writers can benefit from learning how to build scenes, create suspense, and use dialogue.
Novel with Sterling Watson
We will cover as many matters of craft and art (character, theme, point-of-view, language, structure, and setting) as we can fit into the time allotted with special attention to problems and possibilities that arise from our reading of the students’ manuscripts. Using the manuscripts as prompts, I will suspend discussion occasionally for mini-lectures and demonstrations of key ideas. This class will help participants fashion a better synopsis and sample chapter to send out to agents.
Short Story with Ana Menéndez
Writing Backwards: Starting at the Ending. Writing seems like one of the most linear of art forms. It certainly feels that way for most readers, who begin with the first word and proceed, in orderly fashion, to the last. But for the writer, a short story may first take shape with an idea of an ending: an image, a sound, a moment towards which the narrative will eventually drive (even if, as E.L. Doctorow famously suggested, for most of that journey the writer will only see as far as the headlights.) In addition to manuscript critique, we’ll take a light historical trip of our own through various fad-endings, including epiphanies, twists and resolutions. And we’ll study some of the most compelling examples of the form before diving into a short-story workshop that will concentrate on what reporters call “the kicker”: writing an ending that will resonate long after the story’s close.
Poetry with Major Jackson
In addition to manuscript discussion and critique, in this generative workshop, composed of in-class writing exercises and close readings of poems that model risk-taking, we will write exploratory drafts that push us towards next-level thinking and emotional breakthroughs. Students will enter a community of writers whose collective aim is to forward our growth as writers by crafting both our feelings and our language.
Special 3-Day Structure in Prose (Fiction, Nonfiction & Memoir) with Les Standiford (Jan. 21-23)
This workshop will focus on the overall conception and structure of book-length projects–novel, memoir, or general interest non-fiction, either completed or in progress. Discussion will center on the clarity and substance of the project and the efficacy of the opening 25 pp, given the stated intention.
Full manuscript guidelines for submissions will be available on our applications page via Submittable starting August 1.
New for 2021
- Writers in Paradise welcomes Emily Bernard to its faculty! The Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont will lead the Nonfiction Workshop. For more info or to apply, click on Application.
- For the first time at our conference and after the success of her recently published collection of essays, My Life as a Villainess, Laura Lippman will lead a workshop in Personal Essay.
- Writers in Paradise partners with the Residence Inn for participant lodging. For more information about room rate and amenities, click on lodging.
Deadline for Applications to Workshop
Our applications period runs from August 1 to November 1 ( 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time). Apply starting August 1 on Submittable.
For more information on workshop selection, deadlines and conference costs, click on Application.
Co-founded by Dennis Lehane and Sterling Watson, and co-directed by Les Standiford, Writers in Paradise offers an intensive eight-day experience of workshop classes, roundtables, panel discussions, Q&As, readings, book signings, and receptions with our award winning-faculty and guest speakers.
The tranquil seaside landscape sets the tone for this informal gathering of writers, teachers, editors, and literary agents. The size and secluded location of the Eckerd College Writers’ Conference allows you the time and opportunity to share your manuscripts, critique one another’s work, and discuss the craft of writing with experts and peers who can help guide you to the next level.
Why You Should Attend
After eight days of workshopping and engagement with peers and professionals in your field, you will leave with a refreshed understanding of your craft and solid ideas about how to find an agent and get published. At the heart of the conference are six days of workshops led by master faculty in various genres where techniques are discussed and participant manuscripts are closely examined.
Writers in Paradise offers a wide array of Fellowships and Scholarships.
Additional Information
The 17th edition of Writers in Paradise will take place from January 16 through January 23, 2021.* Esteemed faculty and selected participants workshop for three hours in the morning, attend panels and craft talks in the afternoon, and attend evening readings and events (workshop participant capacities will be announced). Participants are actively engaged with our faculty and guests from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
For more information about Writers in Paradise, please visit our FAQ or contact Conference Coordinator, Marina Pruna, at prunami@eckerd.edu.
* The conference will adhere to the latest health advice, college guidelines and CDC policies. Final decisions on whether to hold our event in person in St. Petersburg will be made mid-November.
Testimonials
Mission Statement
Our Mission
Our mission at Writers in Paradise is to provide talented and hardworking writers of all levels and genres the opportunity to learn from and work with other writers under the guidance of masterful and successful authors. For an entire week, we strive to provide an open, inclusive, and nurturing environment where creativity, critical awareness and writing techniques can be exercised, fostered and encouraged. Every year we try to grow our conference to include new voices and ways of looking at writing and what it means to write in today’s market while maintaining a core faculty of proven authors who are both successful in their genres as well as gifted in the classroom. Our central premise has always been to help talented writers reach their intended audiences. We understand the complexities of putting together effective stories, and this understanding and sensitivity makes our workshops popular and coveted. One of our goals is to create community among our participants which is why our workshops are closed to all but those participants who submit manuscripts and are accepted into workshop—one long time faculty member calls it “having skin in the game.”
We believe that keeping workshops small allows for focus, productive criticism and honesty.
Our commitment to providing a week filled with writing education and sanctuary includes poetry. Nearly every year we rotate a nationally-acclaimed, award-winning poet who teaches as part of our core faculty. In addition to the poetry workshop and craft talk(s), we are honored to have as part of our lineup the poet laureates of St. Petersburg and of Florida, Helen Pruitt Wallace and Peter Meinke.
With the help of our St. Petersburg community and Eckerd alumni, we work with an endowment that affords us the opportunity to help many participants financially. We never want money to be the reason that you can’t come be with us for a week. If you’ve got a story that’s burning to be told, we want to help you add to your set of craft-box tools, so you can effectively tell it. While we are competitive and accept writers based on the strength and potential of their writing, we abide by the notion that good writing is good writing and we all stand to learn from one another no matter where we come from, how old we are, or what we may or may not have studied formally. After a week at WIP, we hope you leave with a new and inspired sense of direction, some good friends who you can share writing with throughout the year, and with confidence you can navigate new writing challenges on your own.
Les Standiford, Conference Director
Marina Pruna, Conference Coordinator
