Jenny Pritchett: Ready, Set, Blog!

5 Saturdays, February 25 – March 25, 10:30am-1pm
$275 members/$295 non-members
Testimonials for Jenny

Anyone, anywhere can publish a blog—and that means you. “All you need is an idea and an internet connection,” says instructor Jenny Pritchett. “And I can help you with the idea.”

Whether you want to write about a lifelong passion (for cooking, traveling, reading), riff on a fresh idea (about politics, parenting, design), offer a unique perspective (on teaching, fashion, gardening), or chronicle a major life event or transition, this five-week class will help you zone in on a premise and think about the important stuff: How do I get started, and how do I keep this up?

We’ll practice the skills most needed for a successful blog: writing well, and committing to a regular writing practice. We’ll ask ourselves the hard questions: What topic interests me enough that I could sustain a regular blog? How will the format of a blog help me tell my story? What are the typical roadblocks two or three months down the road? How am I going to make time for my writing?

We’ll start with in-class writing exercises and brainstorming sessions to get our ideas on paper. After that, we’ll do a weekly check-in about our progress and—choosing one idea or experimenting with many—write real blog posts and workshop them for feedback and ideas.

Throughout the class, we’ll touch on writing for an internet audience (length of posts, basic HTML, and how to use links, images, and video), blog communities (who else is doing what I’m doing?), platforms (WordPress or Blogger? Medium or Tumblr?), copyright (if I use a free service, do I own what I write?), and promotion (how do I get people to read my blog?). Finally, we’ll look at examples of live blogs for what makes them work (and how we think they could be better) and by the end—gasp—we’ll have a pathway to launch.

Jenny Pritchett has taught creative writing classes since 2006 and writes the popular blog Jenny True: An Excruciatingly Personal Food Blog. Her debut story collection, At or Near the Surface (Fourteen Hills Press), won the 2008 Michael Rubin Book Award, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Guernica, Salon, Southwest Review, Northwest Review, Boulevard, Best of the Web 2008 (Dzanc Books), and elsewhere. She holds a degree in magazine journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. The former managing editor of Fourteen Hills, she has taught or lectured at SFSU, California College of the Arts, Ex’pression College for Digital Arts, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.