The Conference

January 13 – 20, 2024

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.

• 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.

• Nonfiction with Madeleine Blais
  Whether you are working on a personal story, an historical account, a biography, or some combination, your work is going to need a narrative arc, which can be challenging in nonfiction. Our group will work on ways to create an engine for your prose—-on how to turn a situation into a story (especially tricky in memoir). We will spend time devising strategies to create lively prose. A special emphasis will be placed on publication options and on generating future subject matter so that you leave the conference armed with new ideas and enthusiasm. Your 25 sample pages can be the opening chapter of a longer work or a self-contained article-sized piece of 25 pages or less (plus a 1-p synopsis).

• Novel with Andre Dubus III
  If I teach nothing else 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.

• Novel with Luis Alberto Urrea
  In this workshop, we will not only share our work, we will explore what remains elusive and even hidden to many writers. Your story is not only what is on the page — or on the screen — your story is in the shadows you cast and in the sky you have lit above it. I’m going to show you the Big River of Story and we’re gonna find what’s underneath your page. Expect handouts and even a couple of gifts. Bring your best. You will share.

• Short Story with Stewart O’Nan
  The class will be primarily a workshop. Students will read one another’s stories, interrogating character, action, language, ideas and setting with an eye toward revision. Participants admitted to this workshop are asked to read The Art of Revision by Peter Ho Davies as part of preparation for workshop (a limited number of copies will be available for purchase at the conference during the evening readings).

• Crime Fiction with Laura Lippman
  Looking for the formula for writing great crime fiction? Alas, it doesn’t exist. But this workshop can help writers with novels in which a crime is the engine that moves the story forward. Counter-intuitively, the emphasis will be on character, not plotting. Crime novels work best when characters are true to themselves. Then again, per Raymond Chandler, it never hurts to send a man through the door with a gun.

• Suspense in Storytelling with Michael Koryta
  The workshop is open to 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. (A properly formatted screenplay opening of up to 25 pp will also be considered.)

• Poetry with Denise Duhamel
  This workshop will focus on the poetry of its participants–with great care and attention to form (freeverse or fixed or invented), sound, and imagery. In addition to revision suggestions, we will try our hand at prompts and generative writing in order to create new poems and seedlings for poems. Please bring one or two family photographs (family of origin or family made of friends) for one such writing exercise.

• Special 3-Day Short Story with Ana Menéndez (Jan. 14-16, $495)
  From Anecdote to Story in Three Days
  That image you can’t get out of your mind. That anecdote you’ve been telling for the last 10 years. That thing that happened in 2003 that changed everything – all these can be the beginning of a moving and well-crafted work of fiction. In the three days we’ll be together, we’ll spend half the time workshopping your stories and the other half starting a new work of fiction based on an anecdote from your own life. We’ll discuss the difference between anecdote and short story, learn the most basic of story structures, and discuss motif, binary constructions, and other details that will help you deepen subsequent drafts. You’ll leave the three days with at least a rough draft and some basic tools that will allow you to continue shaping the story long after you return home. 

• Special 3-Day Structure in Fiction, Nonfiction & Memoir with Les Standiford (Jan. 18-20, $495)
  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 a summary of the project and the efficacy of the opening 25 pp, given the stated intention.

Full submission guidelines are available on our Submittable page starting August 1.

Manuscript Consultation with Sterling Watson ($450)

During our meeting, the participant and I will discuss the manuscript including my thoughts on what I think works and doesn’t work.  I will give the participant a brief report on the manuscript, which will be the basis for my spoken comments.  Additionally, I will provide the participant with a line-edited copy of the manuscript (participants may decline line-edits if they wish to).  Finally, we will address any questions that the participant prepares for the meeting.

• by application only via Submittable from August 1 – November 1
• novels in progress, up to 35pp plus synopsis
• one-hour consult
• may be combined with a 3-day workshop or stand-alone only
• may not be combined with a full week workshop due to scheduling conflict
• accepted manuscript consultees will be considered full participants and thus be eligible to attend all conference events (except workshops)
• meeting must take place during the conference week (January 13-20)
• participant will work directly with Sterling Watson to arrange meeting time and location

• Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer-prize finalist and “literary badass” (NPR), joins the Workshop Faculty at Writers in Paradise for the first time.
• Newly minted St. Petersburg Poet Laureate and winner of the Poetry Gold Medal Florida Book Awards, Gloria Muñoz, returns to Eckerd College as this year’s Emerging Artist in Poetry.
•  NYT Editor’s Choice and “Best Books to Read in 2023” by Today, author of the short story collection, When Trying to Return Home, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, will read and lecture at Writers in Paradise as this year’s Emerging Artist in Fiction.
• Writers in Paradise welcomes back Poet, Collaborator, Professor and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist (Blowout), Denise Duhamel, as Faculty to lead the Poetry Workshop.
• Mitchell Kaplan, Founder and Owner of Books & Books, co-founder of the Miami Book Fair, Podcast host of The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan, and Producer (The Mazur Kaplan Company), joins the publishing panel at Writers in Paradise.
• International best-selling debut sensation whose short story collection, If I Survive You, has garnered countless accolades including the PEN/Faulkner Award and National Book Award short lists, Jonathan Escoffery, will close our 2024 conference.