A Year of Writing Dangerously: The Workshop
Transform your writing practice.
Dear Readers,
As you may have seen mentioned at the end of my recent posts, I’m trying something new this year. In addition to the Essay Series and two planned free sessions of Essay Camp, I’m also teaching a year-long writing workshop called A Year of Writing Dangerously. You can think of it like Essay Camp meets The Artist’s Way meets a miniature low-residency MFA. If you’re not interested in reading about a workshop, feel free to skip this email! I won’t be spamming you about it. Many of you have already signed up to recieve updates, so if you’re getting this information twice, my apologies! I want to make sure that everyone who wants to do so has the opportunity to sign up.
A Year of Writing Dangerously will consist of five sessions totaling 32 weeks, or 224 days of writing. The goal is to write a little bit every day during these sessions, which will be held from February 1st – March 15th, April 1st – May 15th, June 1st – July 15th, September 1st – October 15th, and November 1st – December 15th. If you are not available during any of these dates, you can still participate by tailoring the schedule to suit your own needs.
By committing to a simple and manageable daily writing practice during these 32 weeks, the goal will be to trick yourself into a year of writing abundance. At the end of this year, participants who wish to do so will have completed the rough draft of either a memoir or an essay collection.
Each session will come with its own beautifully-designed workbook in PDF format, and be accompanied by a live video seminar with a question and answer period. Each session will have its own themes and areas of focus, designed to maximize the potential of your evolving writing practice. The talks will be recorded and made available online for those who cannot attend or who wish to revisit the material at a later date. Participants can take part in daily private accountability chat threads, and will have access to an hour-long, one-on-one consultation with the instructor (that’s me 👋), to be scheduled after the second session.
You can think of this workshop as a metaphorical container that you can use to put your year of writing in. By creating this space, and holding each other gently accountable, we’ll seek to achieve together what we could not accomplish alone.
Based on my popular Essay Camp workshop series, and the lessons I learned during my own experiment of setting out to write every day for one year, I am tailoring this workshop to suit a variety of writer personalities and individual needs. Every writer will be encouraged to allow five “oops days” per session for when they forget to do their daily writing. As the year progresses, we’ll begin to explore emergent themes in our writing, and look for ways to structure and refine the material from our raw first drafts.
Due to a higher than expected demand for this workshop, I’m going to have to cap the enrollment soon, to ensure that it will still be possible to meet with everyone individually over the course of the year. As of now, there are still spaces available! If you already know that you want to participate, I recommend that you enroll as soon as possible. The cost is €275, or $300, for all five sessions, including the one-on-one meeting. I will be processing scholarship requests in the next few days. If you’ve already contacted me about the workshop, you can expect to hear back very soon.
If you think you qualify for a needs-based scholarship, you can send your request to summerbrennan@substack.com. Please put “Year of Writing Dangerously” in the subject line. You do not have to explain your situation, as this is based on the honor system. If you can afford the class fee but just don’t want to pay, please reserve that space for those who genuinely need it. I will try to accommodate as many requests as I can.
Thanks for reading about my workshop. I already know that it’s going to be a great group of dedicated writers. The first session begins on February 1st, and I’m looking forward to seeing what we will create together.
xo
Summer
Enjoy my writing and want to support it? Become a paid subscriber today. You’ll get full access to craft talks, essays, notebook entries, sketchbook pages, and the popular semiannual write-along workshop Essay Camp. You can also buy my books The Oyster War and High Heel, “like” my posts by tapping the heart icon, share them on Substack Notes or other social media, and/or send them to a friend.
PS. Many of you have asked about the scheduling of the live Zoom workshops. At the moment I am planning to schedule them on Sundays at around 7pm CET, which means about 1pm on the East Coast and 10am on the West Coast in the U.S. Most of the participants so far are in the U.S. or Europe, so I think this will ensure that the maximum amount of people can attend live. If Australian participants (or Hawaiians??) reach critical mass, we can look into doing secondary catch-up sessions, but for now I'm just planning to have the one per session, with recordings available the next day xo
Hello Summer, I’ve enrolled, thank you, so excited to be beginning a year of writing dangerously. I’ll be joining you all the way from a little Island at the bottom of the world called Tasmania in Australia.