Emma Ginader

     I love writer’s workshops. I have attended writer’s workshops and conferences every summer since the sixth grade, from the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Program in Ohio to the Susquehanna Advanced Writers’ Workshop in Pennsylvania. I have volunteered at the Stillwater Poetry Festival and taught at the Everhart Museum’s Summer Arts Camp for Children. Yes, I really, really love writer’s workshops.

     They afforded me a valuable sense of community in which to share ideas as well as the ability to use prompts to shift the paradigm of how I viewed my writing and perhaps, how I should write. It is a place to meet new ideas and cultivate literary relationships with those ideas. I strongly urge any writer who hasn’t attended a writer’s workshop or conference to apply. One thing to remember is, dear reader, that while every writer’s workshop has a different atmosphere depending on how long it lasts, who sponsors it, and who attends; there will always be a few notorious characters you can never escape.

     At every writer’s workshop I have attended I have encountered the literary idol. The literary idol is usually a teacher at the workshop whom possesses an ego bigger than Shaq’s and a cult following bigger than Joss Whedon’s. His stories are always meta-fictional, his speaking abilities on par with George Clooney’s acting talent, and his life, sensational. In other words, imagine a Bruce Willis using a pen to beat terrorists up instead of his fists. He is a writer whose strategy for defeating writer’s block is to go out to hunt Nazis in his time machine. After he has written his meta-masterpiece about a man stranded in the wilderness until he realizes he is a fictional character and jumps out of the novel and beats up his creator, the literary idol relaxes with a bottle of gin while counting the number of hairs in his beard.