Clarion West is searching for an artist to create artwork for our 2025 featured artwork. Clarion West seeks to commission one custom illustration with unlimited global rights. Please share this call with the artists you know that might be a great fit, and see below for details. What we’re looking for Each year, we seek…
Tanisha Tekriwal is this year’s Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient This scholarship has been donated annually since 2007 by the Carl Brandon Society to writers of color attending Clarion and Clarion West. Octavia attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970 and taught at Clarion San Diego and Clarion West for many years;…
News of the allegations against Neil Gaiman began breaking as this year’s six-week workshop hurtled into its third week. As we emerge from the workshop and have time to process this news, our board and staff want to take a moment to recognize that a culture of silence and protecting prominent authors has been widespread…
The workshop had a bit of a shake-up this week. Due to the CrowdStrike airline disruptions, our Week Six Instructor, Carmen Maria Machado, was unable to join us in person. The class adjusted to a hybrid format easily, which involved an all-seeing and all-hearing owl. Very on-brand. While we missed Carmen’s presence on-site, she was…
The Clarion West Six-Week workshop will be virtual in 2025, with a new format designed to give students more time to write, additional lecture time with instructors, and more experimentation with workshopping models. If you’re interested in learning more about our housing situation and our decision to alternate virtual and in-person workshop years, click here….
Our Week 5 instructor, Ruoxi Chen, brought her deep knowledge of markets and vast experience as an in-house acquiring editor to the classroom this week. Among lightning feedback rounds and deep dives into comps and influences, Ruoxi encouraged the class to imagine the markets to which they might eventually send their work. Actively considering the…
Our Week four instructor, Sarah Pinsker, brought energy to a week traditionally considered to be one of the toughest, with the students’ energy levels crashing and stories taking strange turns. But strange is where fiction gets good, and Sarah encouraged the students to lean into the weird. A singer and songwriter known for her nontraditional…
Our second alumnus-turned-teacher this year, Week Three instructor Cadwell Turnbull, inspired the class with a project idea: the craft dictionary. The art of the writer’s craft is discovering how an effect is accomplished — whether it’s physically moving characters from setting A to setting B or using unexpected perspectives to surprising effect — and the…
The Six-Week Workshop students started workshopping stories in Week Two. Their instructor, Brenda Peynado, ran the workshop like a writer’s room, asking them to identify the bivalve heart of the story before diving into the discussion. The collaborative structure of the writer’s room method made for a free-flowing conversation peppered with possibility. Three of the…
In the Six-Week Workshop, our Week One instructor, Usman T. Malik, continued the proud tradition of Clarion West students coming full circle. He returned to the six-week fold with insight sharpened by his experience in the 2013 cohort. From Day One, he offered the cohort invaluable advice for thriving over the next six weeks, from…