Stinging Fly Fiction Workshops
We run intensive workshops each summer and a six-month workshop from October to March each year. Our workshop programme is led by short-story writer and novelist Sean O’Reilly.
Introducing the Stinging Fly Summer School in association with the Irish Writers Centre
We’re delighted to announce the expansion of our summer workshop programme this year.
The inaugural Stinging Fly Summer School will take place at the Irish Writers Centre from Monday July 2nd until Friday July 6th 2018.
The summer school will include three intensive workshops, one in poetry, two in fiction, all running concurrently. The workshops will run each day Monday to Friday from 10.30am until 4.30pm. Participants will be expected to attend every session.
Workshop leaders: Martina Evans (poetry) | Thomas Morris and Sean O’Reilly (fiction)
These workshops are aimed at any writer who has reached a stage where they are seriously engaged with a writing project – be that a collection of poems, of stories, or a novel – and believe they will benefit from sharing their work with a group of like-minded and similarly motivated fellow writers. It is an opportunity to confront and resolve problems in the work through close reading and discussion of individual texts.
During the workshops, each writer’s work-in-progress will be up for in-depth discussion twice. All the work will have been shared and read in advance. Also included in the week are sessions on aspects of writing craft by guest speakers, including the editors of The Stinging Fly.
Up to twelve writers will be offered a place on each of the workshops based on work they have submitted by the application deadline. All submissions will be read by the workshop leaders.
(Note: We will decide on the best format for the two fiction workshops based on what we believe will best suit the needs of the selected participants.)
The tuition fee for each workshop is €350 (€325 for Irish Writers Centre members).
This will be payable only when a place has been offered and accepted. Participants will themselves be responsible for any accommodation or travel expenses they incur while attending the workshop.
We are accepting submissions via our Submittable page.
Closing Date for Applications: Friday May 4th 2018
We will aim to send out offers by Friday May 18th. Participants will be asked to confirm their places asap and will have until May 28th to pay the tuition fee.
Workshop leaders:
Martina Evans is an award-winning poet and novelist, the author of eleven books of prose and poetry. Burnfort Las Vegas was a finalist for the Poetry Now Award in 2015 and her latest book of poems Now We Can Talk Openly About Men is published by Carcanet in May 2018. She has taught poetry at Birkbeck University, London Metropolitan University and University of East London as well as holding several fellowships at Queen Mary, University of London. A regular contributor to The Irish Times, she is a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and lives in London with her daughter Liadain.
Thomas Morris’s debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing (Faber and Faber) won the 2016 Wales Book of the Year, the Rhys Davies Fiction Trust Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. He devised and edited Dubliners 100 (Tramp Press), which won the Best Irish-published book at the Irish Book Awards. He has worked with The Stinging Fly since 2011, and was editor of the magazine between 2014-16. He’s the current Writer in Residence at University College, Cork, where he teaches on the Creative Writing MA. This summer, a pamphlet of his stories will be published by Rough Trade as part of the inaugural Rough Trade Editions series.
Sean O’Reilly’s published work includes Curfew and Other Stories and the novels Love and Sleep, The Swing of Things and Watermark. Levitation, his second collection of stories, was published last year. Sean has a wealth of experience facilitating fiction workshops, as Writer-in-Residence with Fingal County Council, Dublin City Council and IADT/Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council amongst others. He currently teaches on the MFA Programme at the American College Dublin and in the Irish Writers Centre.
Some praise for our workshops:
“It’s the best writing course I’ve done, and I’ve done a few, including a Masters. The group worked because of the quality of the criticism and there were no door-size egos. Without doubt everybody’s work improved during the course and the work was good to start with. The one-to-one sessions were instrumental and in-depth. The guest speakers were unholy and brilliant. The course is definitely a leg up (or a kick in the arse) on the finicky road to completing the first novel.”
“What is outstanding about this course is the generosity, both in terms of time and close attention, with which every submission was discussed by Sean and the rest of the group. Sean’s instincts were unerring, his suggestions helpful, and the energy with which he engaged with each participant was remarkable. An atmosphere was soon established in which as much could be learned by critically engaging with the work of every other member as from feedback on one’s own work.”