Announcing the Online Seminar Series 2025

Please Note: tickets for the 2025 Online Seminar Series will go on sale on Thursday January 9th at 1pm (Irish time). Tickets are limited and we expect them to sell quickly.

Taking place on Tuesday evenings from 7pm to 8.30pm in January and February 2025, our online seminar series will explore 5 topics related to writing practice and craft. Each guest writer will focus on one topic for their seminar and a suggested reading list will be shared in advance of each session.

• Tuesday 28th January: K Patrick on Writing and Desire

• Tuesday 4th February: Akhil Sharma on Writing and Understanding Oneself

• Tuesday 11th February: Susannah Dickey on Writing and Shame

• Tuesday 18th February: Sarah Moss on Times and Voices: Writing Multiple Narratives

• Tuesday 25th February: Ross Raisin on Managing Your Writing Project

The Seminars:

Writing and Desire, K Patrick, Tuesday 28th January, 7pm to 8.30pm

In this seminar we’ll be talking about the use of desire in fiction, the ways in which text can both hold onto, and release, the body. Working from poets and authors such as Carl Phillips, Lauren Berlant, Anne Carson and Robert Gluck, we will focus on the power of desirous detail and how that might open up your writing practice. 

Writing and Understanding Oneself, Akhil Sharma, Tuesday 4th February, 7pm to 8.30pm

We misunderstand ourselves constantly. We are rarely able to see the currents that swing us this way or that. There are some quick and dirty ways to peer into our motivations. These same methods can be used to begin constructing characters. While the first goal of the seminar is to help one become better at generating characters, the longer-term benefit is that by getting to know ourselves, we will be better able to develop a convincing point-of-view.

Writing and Shame, Susannah Dickey, Tuesday 11th February, 7pm to 8.30pm

Over the course of the 20th century, lyric poetry underwent a kind of crisis of identity, sparked by the American academy’s incremental disdain for what were termed ‘epiphany poems’. As a consequence of this scathing diagnosis, much lyric poetry became more self-aware, more self-critical, and more ashamed of itself. This is a legacy that continues to make itself apparent today. However, for those artists who have spent their careers writing on the fringes, shame is not a new feature, for shame has always had been a tool to shape form, voice, and content, to produce work more ambitious and daring for its writer’s uncertainty of self. At a historical moment in which we have much to feel ashamed of, it is vital that our writing reflect the messy contradictions of existence. In this workshop, writers will read and discuss work most emblematic of the shame movement, including work by Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson, thinking about how to harness negative affect in ways that render our writing more powerful.

Times and Voices: Writing Multiple Narratives, Sarah Moss, Tuesday 18th February, 7pm to 8.30pm

Writing across timeframes and points of view can be a form of realism. Events overlap, memories interrupt the present, hope and sorrow cut across each other. There are several voices in the room, or house, or nation. For many of us, thinking is choral, but narrative prose isn’t. How can we represent multiplicity in a medium that is innately linear, one word in front of another, top left to bottom right, beginning to end? We’ll explore the possibilities of interruption and dissonance in fiction.

Managing Your Writing Project, Ross Raisin, Tuesday 25th February, 7pm to 8.30pm

Every writer does it their own way. That is as true of style and content as it is the method by which a writer arrives at that style and content. And one of the fundamental enjoyments of discovering who you are as a writer is figuring out how you work best; how you can organise your skills and your schedule to produce the creativity, purpose and rigour that will do your work justice. This, then, is a session that will explore how you, as a writer, can individuate your process – to take the initial seed of an idea all the way through to a completed narrative.

 

Prices:

Ticket for All Sessions
Full price: €135 / Unwaged and low income price: €90 

Tickets for Individual Sessions
Full price: €30 / Unwaged and low income price: €20

The seminars will be conducted through Zoom with a maximum of 40 participants per group. Places are available on a first-come, first-served basis. We are unable to refund tickets once purchased. If you cannot attend a session, and you wish to transfer your ticket, please contact: admin [at] stingingfly [dot] org

Participants will receive an email prior to the start date with a recommended reading list and a link to join the seminar. Please keep an eye on your spam or junk mail folder if you have not received the list before the seminar date.

Please note: The seminars are live events and will not be recorded.

 

Guest writers:

K Patrick is a writer based in Scotland. Their poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry Review, Granta and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021, the same year that K was also shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize. In 2023 they were shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Their debut novel, Mrs S, published by Fourth Estate (UK) and Europa (US) was selected as an Observer Best Debut of the Year, and K was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelists for 2023. Their debut poetry collection, Three Births, was published by Granta Poetry in March 2024.

Akhil Sharma is the author of Family Life, winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, and An Obedient Father. His short stories are frequently published in The New Yorker. He is a professor at Duke University.

Susannah Dickey is a poet and novelist from Derry. Her debut poetry collection, ISDAL, was published in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was the winner of the PEN Heaney Prize for Poetry. Her third novel, to pieces, will be published in 2026 by Bloomsbury. 

Sarah Moss has written eight novels, including Ghost Wall, Summerwater and The Fell, and two memoirs. She also writes essays, travel writing and a column in The Irish Times. She was born in Scotland, grew up in northern England and after moving between Oxford, Canterbury, Reykjavik and West Cornwall now lives in Dublin.