Five Sundays, April 18th-May 16th, 2-4:30 p.m.     Berkeley
$185 members/$215 non-members

Special Package Deal: Take this Berkeley class together with the Berkeley “Starting Your Novel” class (5 weeks plus 5 weeks, back to back) for the price of one 9-week class.  This discount applies only if you choose the Intro to Fiction/Starting Your Novel ‘Combo‘ when you register. If you take Intro to Fiction first, then decide to take novel writing when it is over, the discount does not apply.

We writers too often need others to tell us that our writing is good,” says instructor Junse Kim. “And this is where it all goes horribly wrong. We become impatient for praise, obsessed with completing a story before learning the basic skills we need to write it. It’s the equivalent of, say, an aspiring carpenter who has committed to building a beautiful house, yet doesn’t know how to hammer in a nail or saw a piece of wood.”

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9 Tuesdays, April 27-June 29 (9 weeks, skip May 25), 7-9:30 p.m. Berkeley
$335 members/$365 non-members

This class will help you plunge into the personal themes that make your real life stories uniquely yours.  For the first four weeks, instructor Alison Luterman will lead carefully crafted writing exercises designed to elicit the undertones and overtones that give events resonance and elevate anecdotes into the realm of art. The latter weeks will be dedicated to refining and then workshopping the pieces you have begun, bringing them to the next level of craft.

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Five Mondays, May 17-June 21 (5 weeks, skip Memorial Day), 7-9:30 p.m  Berkeley
$185 members/$215 non-members

Have you started working on a nonfiction book or memoir (or already completed one?). Have you written your book proposal yet? If not, you’re going to need one. Typically, a proposal is written before the book, but if you’ve already written the book, you’ll still need one. The proposal is the document you send to literary agents and/or editors. It’s essentially a sales pitch, making a case for why the book needs to be written, why now, and why you’re the best person for the job.

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Hello Jane,

I am writing to tell you about the wonderful fiction workshop I took with Jamey Genna through the Writing Salon. I found Jamey to be an experienced and thoughtful teacher, structuring the class to cover basic, and later advanced, writing issues, bringing well-written and interesting stories into class for group analysis and discussion of writing craft. She brought many new writers to my attention in this way. Jamey’s classes introduced basic craft lessons for the beginning student and reinforced the skills of the advanced writers.

In the second part of the evening we shared our work with each other. Jamey’s class attracted a great circle of writers. The other students in the fiction workshop were helpful, insightful, friendly, never competitive. We all checked our egos at the door and got some real work done, giving and receiving constructive feedback on our writing.

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