Stinging Fly Workshops

Our workshop programme includes our annual summer school and a six-month fiction fiction workshop, both of which are run in association with the Irish Writers Centre.

The principal aim of our workshop programme is to allow writers to develop their writing practice through engagement with groups of like-minded, similarly motivated individuals.

The 2019 Stinging Fly Summer School took place from July 1st to the 5th 2019 with workshops in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. The 2020 Summer School will run from June 29th to July 3rd 2020. We will accept applications in April 2020.

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2019-2020 Fiction Workshop

We are currently accepting applications for places on our 6-month workshop with short-story writer and novelist Sean O’Reilly. The workshop runs from late September 2019 until the end of March 2020.

During the 6-month workshop, participants meet once a week on Monday evenings at the Irish Writers Centre (6.30-8.30pm). At each evening workshop, two participants present their work in progress (a draft of a short story or novel excerpt) to the rest of the group for close scrutiny.

Note that there will be no attempt to impose a rationalised schema of creative writing exercises. The writing up for discussion each week is the raw material; any questions of writing technique or prose style will arise naturally from the work itself.

Over the course of the six months, each writer can look forward to having their work on the table on four occasions. In this way, the group will witness and contribute to the development of all the novels/collections in progress. The ultimate aim is for each participant to complete a strong first draft of his/her novel or collection.

– Places on the workshop are offered based on work submitted. Writers are asked to submit a short story (up to 6000 words) or a novel extract (up to 15 pages).

– The submission form and the full application guidelines are on our Submittable page. All applications for the six-month workshop must be made through Submittable. The closing date for receipt of applications is Wednesday August 14th 2019.

– No more than ten places are offered.

– An introductory session will be held at the Irish Writers Centre on Monday September 23rd with the workshop proper beginning on Monday September 30th.

– During the workshop, each writer presents work-in-progress to the group for discussion.

– All work is shared in advance and is closely read by the workshop leader and the other participants.

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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 in 2017. Sean has a wealth of experience facilitating fiction workshops and has been Writer-in-Residence with Fingal County Council, Dublin City Council and IADT/Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council amongst others. He is a member of Aosdána.

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Alongside the weekly Monday workshops, on four Saturdays during the period, we organise a series of specialist talks on issues around the process of writing and the imagination. Previous guest speakers have included Jan Carson, Evelyn Conlon, Gavin Corbett, Mia Gallagher, Neil Hegarty, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Claire Keegan, Ferdia Mac Anna, Lisa McInerney, John MacKenna, Danielle McLaughlin, Martin Malone, Thomas Morris, Nuala O’Connor, Conor O’Callaghan, Keith Ridgway and Sally Rooney.

The proposed dates for the Saturday sessions (11am-4.30pm) for the 2019-2020 workshop are October 19th, November 21st, February 22nd and March 21st.

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Cost of the 6-month workshop: €1500 | €1450 for existing IWC members

A €200 deposit will be payable once a place on the workshop has been offered and accepted. The balance will be payable in two instalments in September 2019 and in January 2020. The fee includes free membership of the Irish Writers Centre for one year.

Thanks to a donation received from a previous workshop participant, we are in a position to waive the workshop fee for one writer who is either unwaged or on a low income. To be considered for the fee waiver, all you need to do is tick the box on the submission form.

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Some praise for the Stinging Fly Fiction Workshop:

“I highly recommend this workshop. The act of submitting and reading participants’ work interwoven with Sean’s ruminations on narrative voice, dramatic tension, character triangles, scene setting and action created a unique blend of the practical and theoretical. I found the interaction and peer learning on the course challenging but valuable, elevating my writing from the personal to the public. The one-to-one was frank and informative. The workshop is not for the faint-hearted. It shouldn’t be.”
—Dermot Blighe

“The Stinging Fly 6-month fiction workshop is a game-changer; challenging, exhilarating, and unforgettable, it completely alters the way you read and write fiction, and from personal experience of undertaking many courses, this was far superior and more intense than a Masters in Creative Writing. Sean O’Reilly is a brilliant teacher, he gives forensic care to the text, pushing participants to demand more from their story, to plough deeper into the potential of language, structure and meaning. At the end of the course I had completed a short story collection I was proud of that went on to be critically acclaimed. If I could Groundhog Day this course, I’d do it again and again for every book. Magic.”
—June Caldwell

“I had no experience at all of creative writing courses. I wondered if the six-month Fiction Workshop would involve high formalist dissection of technique or individuals opining on their ‘art’. No: I found it to be people round a table, talking about stories for two hours a week. It was, however, talking about stories with Sean O’Reilly in charge, which meant that the interrogation of work was careful and stringent, and the discussion frank, engaging and often totally exhilarating. All writing, whatever the form or genre, was treated with absolute seriousness. Sean’s remarkable generosity and unfailing ability to identify precisely why a story did or (more frequently) didn’t work meant that my own writing got a lot better. Simple as that. Was it the best six months I can remember? Yeah, probably.”
—Wendy Erskine

I did the six-month Stinging Fly workshop in 2017/2018 and the teaching was fantastic. Sean has a unique way of engaging with each piece of work. He is totally committed to the text, drawing on his own instincts and a wealth of literary references as he encourages students to investigate—and push—their writing. The course helped me to see my work afresh.”
—Joanne Hayden

“I thought the workshop was life-changing. I started (typically, I suspect) thinking that I was grappling with some intractable technical problem. I was preoccupied with isolated images and sentences. By the end of the course I was dealing with voice, drama, form—all the things that I’d been afraid of tackling. Sean is a remarkable teacher and a brilliant reader. He has the gift of finding what is best in his student’s work and encouraging it.”
—Daniel Shiryan