Attending Workshops In-Person

If you register to attend in-person, your workshop(s) will be held at Thurber Center (91 Jefferson Avenue, Columbus, OH 43215), next door to Thurber House. There is free parking on Jefferson Avenue and in our back parking lot, accessible off N. 11th Street.

ABOUT

Scenes are the building blocks of every great story. Using description and sensory detail, scenes bring the reader into the world of the story. No matter what they’re reading, including memoir, readers crave that feeling of being immersed in a scene. But more than that, the most effective scenes use goals, obstacles, and action to establish an external change for the character, as well as an emotional shift, to move the story forward. In this generative workshop, we’ll read a few classic scenes before using exercises to establish setting, characterization, sensual details, and dialogue—all while moving the story forward. Attendees will leave with the beginnings of three scenes for their works-in-progress.

INSTRUCTOR

Shelley Mann Hite is a Columbus, Ohio-based writer and editor. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, HuffPost, Motherwell, Stonecrop Review, and more, and she is working on a memoir manuscript. She is a prose editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine, and co-founder of the Columbus Women’s Writing Group. She got her start in journalism, and previously was an editor at Columbus Crave and Columbus Alive.

ABOUT

Flashbacks—key scenes in a character’s backstory—can give your characters and your story dimension, whether you’re writing memoir or fiction. In this session, we’ll explore when to use and not to use flashbacks, we’ll learn how to create seamless transitions between the current story and the flashback, and we’ll discuss where to best place a flashback in your story. We’ll also explore tension, pacing and insight. This session is for writers at all levels. Come prepared to write and add some sparkle to your story!

INSTRUCTOR

Lisa Lopez Snyder is an essayist and short story writer. Her pieces have been featured in 34th Parallel, Adelaide, Gravel, The Raleigh Review, The Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and other magazines. Her essay, “In Transit,” won The Chattahoochee Review’s 2011 Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction and she was named the 2015 Carl Sandburg Writer-in-Residence. She received her MFA in creative writing at the University of South Carolina and went on to teach first-year writing at Dartmouth College. She is currently working on a memoir-in-essays about being a paper girl in Huber Heights, Ohio.

ABOUT

Novelist and short story writer Andrew Welsh-Huggins will discuss the elements that grab a reader’s attention on page one and don’t let up until the end. Andrew will discuss ways that word choice, sentence structure, plotting techniques, the creation of memorable characters, and compelling settings all contribute to a swift narrative pace. Along the way, he’ll review the styles of some of his favorite page-turning writers, from Lee Child to Ann Patchett to Colson Whitehead. The class will also feature a short writing prompt where students can exercise their “unputdownable” skills in class.

Instructor

Andrew Welsh-Huggins is the Shamus, Derringer, and ITW-award-nominated author of the Andy Hayes Private Eye series, the editor of the Columbus Noir anthology, and author of the standalone crime novel, The End of The Road, which Kirkus called “a crackerjack crime yarn chockablock with miscreants and a supersonic pace.” His stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, and many other publications, and in multiple anthologies including The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021 and 2024. His nonfiction book, No Winners Here Tonight, is the definitive history of the death penalty in Ohio.

ABOUT

This is a supportive, discussion-based class where you can ask your nagging questions about writing. Your thoughts will be wondered over by Nicole (Niki) Gnezda, PhD, a published writer and creativity expert. Inspirational activities will be included. Then, you may share samples of your writing for appreciation and response from Niki and your classmates. This is a welcoming setting for you to present your work, have it heard sensitively, and collect suggestions for your next steps as a writer. Fiction, non-fiction, and poetry are all welcome.

INSTRUCTOR

Nicole Gnezda (Niki) is a writer, artist, speaker, and educator with a Ph.D. in creativity studies. Included in her body of publications is the book, Teaching Difficult Students: Blue Jays in the Classroom (Rowman and Littlefield), professional articles, and poetry published in Ohio Bards Poetry Anthology, Common Threads, Crone Magazine, and Uppercase. Niki makes bobbin lace with her ancestor’s bobbins, paints, cooks, and travels. She believes creativity takes life apart and reassembles it in magnificent ways. It gets us through and sometimes heals us.

ABOUT

Whether you’re a Taylor Swift fan or not, it’s plain to see that Taylor is one of our generation’s most prolific songwriters, and there’s a lot we can take from her approach and incorporate into our own writing. In this generative writing class, we’ll look at the way Taylor uses figurative language in her lyrics and find ways to bring her playful metaphors and her affinity for colors into our own writing. We’ll mimic her approach in three different songs to create our own deeply personal pieces. If you’re not a Swiftie, don’t worry… you might be after this workshop!

INSTRUCTOR

Shelley Mann Hite is a Columbus, Ohio-based writer and editor. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, HuffPost, Motherwell, Stonecrop Review, and more, and she is working on a memoir manuscript. She is a prose editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine, and co-founder of the Columbus Women’s Writing Group. She got her start in journalism, and previously was an editor at Columbus Crave and Columbus Alive.

ABOUT

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed storyteller Lyn Ford is one of the top twenty ghost storytellers in the country. In this workshop, Lyn will lead you on a journey to discover tales, folklore, and ideas from Appalachia's haunted hills and valleys and Ohio's spooky cities and cemeteries. Gather tips, resources, and reflections to use as prompts for your own short stories and verse, developed in the dark shadows of your imagination. This workshop is a shortened version of Lyn Ford's successful series for the John C. Campbell Folk School. Adults and teens are welcome (recommended age 15+).

Bonus: This workshop is part of our Halloween at Thurber House celebration, and registration for the workshop includes free admission to our adult Halloween event and a haunted Thurber House tour from 6-8 pm (for attendees 18+; workshop attendees 15+ can still take a free haunted Thurber House tour).

INSTRUCTOR

Lyn Ford is an internationally respected, fourth-generation Affrilachian storyteller, writer, and workshop presenter. Lyn's folktale adaptations and original stories are rooted in her family’s multicultural Black Appalachian (or Affrilachian) heritage. Lyn has taught and spoken around the world, from Ohio to Australia. Lyn is on the Ohio Arts Council Teaching Artists rosters, with more than thirty years of experience sharing creative narrative with all ages and several award-winning publications. Lyn is a two-time recipient of the National Storytelling Network's ORACLE Circle of Excellence Award, and a 2023 recipient of the National Association of Black Storytellers' Black Appalachian Storytelling Fellowship and NABS' prestigious Zora Neale Hurston Award. Lyn is a member of the Writers Council of the National Writing Project and the National Association of Black Storytellers’ Brother Blue Circle of Elders.

ABOUT

Writing dialogue is one of the trickiest elements of fiction—bad dialogue can sink an otherwise promising story, and good dialogue can make a mediocre story fly. This session will lead you through ten important tips to strengthen your dialogue. We’ll look at dialogue attribution, creating the illusion of real speech, subtext, and the three biggest dialogue “traps” to avoid. (Note: this class is applicable to any kind of writing that contains dialogue, including memoir and nonfiction.)

INSTRUCTOR

Katrina Kittle's latest novel, Morning in This Broken World, was an Amazon First Reads pick for August 2023. She is the author of four other adult books—Traveling Light, Two Truths and a Lie, The Kindness of Strangers, and The Blessings of the Animals—and one tween novel, Reasons to Be Happy. Katrina teaches creative writing at the University of Dayton and through Word’s Worth Writing Connections. Katrina lives south of Dayton with her fella, her anxious cat, her sweet beagle, and her out-of-control garden. You can find out more at www.katrinakittle.com and follow her @katrinakittle on Instagram and @KatrinaKittleAuthor on Facebook.