RBWG Fall 2026 Classes
In-Person, & Online Tutorials
Weekly Calendar
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Register Here Please register first with Maribeth at [email protected] to make sure that the class is running (at times we do not have enough participants to make the class work) or is not already filled. Maribeth will respond to you within a day. Pay Here Because we are committed to keeping our classes small and because we can only continue to do this if participants commit to and pay for all classes, we ask that ONCE WE CONFIRM THE CLASS WILL RUN, you pay for the full class amount up front. If you are interested in a class and cannot pay for it up front, just send Maribeth an email and we’ll work out a payment plan. Please do not pay prior to hearing from Maribeth that the class is running and a seat is available. We are unable to make full refunds if payment is received without confirmation from Maribeth first.
Our Instructors
Click here to read brief biographies for each of our instructors.
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Fiction
In the Cards: Tarot-Inspired Short Stories
Kat Caputo (2 sessions)
When: Wednesdays, October 28, November 4
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $100; Non-Members $120
Have you always been intrigued by the Tarot? Are you interested in developing a short story that is ready for submission? In this workshop, participants will learn the key elements of short story structure and craft a short story of under 5,000 words inspired by a tarot card prompt. The goal is to take your short story from a rough draft to one that is ready to submit.
Graduate School in a Box (or Essentials of Fiction Writing)
Maribeth Fischer (8 sessions)
When: Fridays, September 11, 18, 25, October 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $400; Non-Members $450
This is a class for writers coming to creative writing after years in the business, legal, or academic world. You know how to write; you’ve done it your whole life, but fiction is a different ballgame. Or maybe you’ve written creatively for years but never actually learned the fundamental techniques of fiction writing. This is the class that numerous Guild members have taken to start them writing the novels they have since published!
Each week we’ll explore a key aspect of fiction writing, doing brief exercises that allow participants to better understand how to apply these techniques to their own work. We’ll look at how to create three-dimensional characters who “seem to breathe on the page” (yes, there are specific techniques and rules to guide writers); we’ll discuss what constitutes plot (and no, you don’t have to have it figured out before you begin); we’ll discuss point of view and why it’s essential to all writing, look at how and when to write flashbacks; review the essential ingredients of good dialogue, and more. Each class will cover years of creative writing “lessons” distilled into what is essential for every writer to know.
Kat Caputo (2 sessions)
When: Wednesdays, October 28, November 4
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $100; Non-Members $120
Have you always been intrigued by the Tarot? Are you interested in developing a short story that is ready for submission? In this workshop, participants will learn the key elements of short story structure and craft a short story of under 5,000 words inspired by a tarot card prompt. The goal is to take your short story from a rough draft to one that is ready to submit.
Graduate School in a Box (or Essentials of Fiction Writing)
Maribeth Fischer (8 sessions)
When: Fridays, September 11, 18, 25, October 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $400; Non-Members $450
This is a class for writers coming to creative writing after years in the business, legal, or academic world. You know how to write; you’ve done it your whole life, but fiction is a different ballgame. Or maybe you’ve written creatively for years but never actually learned the fundamental techniques of fiction writing. This is the class that numerous Guild members have taken to start them writing the novels they have since published!
Each week we’ll explore a key aspect of fiction writing, doing brief exercises that allow participants to better understand how to apply these techniques to their own work. We’ll look at how to create three-dimensional characters who “seem to breathe on the page” (yes, there are specific techniques and rules to guide writers); we’ll discuss what constitutes plot (and no, you don’t have to have it figured out before you begin); we’ll discuss point of view and why it’s essential to all writing, look at how and when to write flashbacks; review the essential ingredients of good dialogue, and more. Each class will cover years of creative writing “lessons” distilled into what is essential for every writer to know.
Multigenre
Writing for Children 101: From Idea to Opening
Gina Hagler (5 sessions)
When: Mondays, Sep 14, 21, 28 and Oct 5, 12
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $250; Non-Members $300
If it’s not good enough for adults, it’s not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.
— Madeleine L’Engle
Writing for children is not about dumbing things down or being overly simplistic; it’s about finding the sweet spot between intriguing the reader with information that is geared to their level of understanding and missing the mark completely. In this workshop, we’ll cover what it takes to write for kids in grades 3-9. We’ll also give it a try.
Week 1: Who is your ideal reader
Week 2: Fiction or nonfiction
Week 3: Theme or topic
Week 4: Plot or outline
Week 5: Write your opening
This is an email class. You’ll receive the lesson and assignment for the week each Monday morning, with assignments due on Sunday. Each assignment will receive written feedback, and student questions are encouraged. You can choose whether to focus on fiction or nonfiction or take a try at both. There will also be an optional WhatsApp discussion group.
Writing for Children 201: Perfecting the Plot Arc
Gina Hagler (5 sessions)
When: Mondays, Oct 19, 26 and Nov 2, 9, 16
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $250; Non-Members $300
Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
— Eudora Welty
Writing for kids entails not only capturing their attention with a great opening but also holding it through a satisfactory narrative journey. In this five-week workshop, we’ll plan and write the parts of the plot arc (exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement/resolution). We’ll also study examples — both good and bad — from those who write for kids to see what works and why.
Week 1: Opening/Exposition
Week 2: Inciting incident/Rising action
Week 3: Climax
Week 4: Falling action/Denouement
Week 5: Resolution
This is an email class. You’ll receive the lesson and assignment for the week each Monday morning, with assignments due on Sunday. Each assignment will receive written feedback, and student questions are encouraged. You can choose whether to focus on fiction or nonfiction or take a try at both. There will also be an optional WhatsApp discussion group.
Gina Hagler (5 sessions)
When: Mondays, Sep 14, 21, 28 and Oct 5, 12
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $250; Non-Members $300
If it’s not good enough for adults, it’s not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words.
— Madeleine L’Engle
Writing for children is not about dumbing things down or being overly simplistic; it’s about finding the sweet spot between intriguing the reader with information that is geared to their level of understanding and missing the mark completely. In this workshop, we’ll cover what it takes to write for kids in grades 3-9. We’ll also give it a try.
Week 1: Who is your ideal reader
Week 2: Fiction or nonfiction
Week 3: Theme or topic
Week 4: Plot or outline
Week 5: Write your opening
This is an email class. You’ll receive the lesson and assignment for the week each Monday morning, with assignments due on Sunday. Each assignment will receive written feedback, and student questions are encouraged. You can choose whether to focus on fiction or nonfiction or take a try at both. There will also be an optional WhatsApp discussion group.
Writing for Children 201: Perfecting the Plot Arc
Gina Hagler (5 sessions)
When: Mondays, Oct 19, 26 and Nov 2, 9, 16
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $250; Non-Members $300
Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.
— Eudora Welty
Writing for kids entails not only capturing their attention with a great opening but also holding it through a satisfactory narrative journey. In this five-week workshop, we’ll plan and write the parts of the plot arc (exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement/resolution). We’ll also study examples — both good and bad — from those who write for kids to see what works and why.
Week 1: Opening/Exposition
Week 2: Inciting incident/Rising action
Week 3: Climax
Week 4: Falling action/Denouement
Week 5: Resolution
This is an email class. You’ll receive the lesson and assignment for the week each Monday morning, with assignments due on Sunday. Each assignment will receive written feedback, and student questions are encouraged. You can choose whether to focus on fiction or nonfiction or take a try at both. There will also be an optional WhatsApp discussion group.
Nonfiction
CANCELLED Places in the World: Writing About Our Travels
Elise Seyfried (4 sessions)
When: Wednesdays, September 9, 16, 23, 30
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $200; Non-Members $240
Life is a rich and meaningful journey, as we writers well know. Whether we physically travel the globe, or stay closer to home, the different places in our lives can inspire some wonderful writing! Have you ever revisited the very first place where you lived as a child? Did you make a special connection with Barcelona — or Boston? How have your experiences of the world changed you? You will be challenged to capture your precious impressions on paper, and so to relive those magical places that have lingered in your memory. Each student will receive a personalized assignment for each of the four weeks of class, based on a short bio they’ll share with me. Join me for some terrific armchair (and keyboard) traveling this Fall!
Minecraft: Mining Your Life to Craft Great Personal Essays
Elise Seyfried (4 sessions)
When: Wednesdays, October 7, 14, 21, 28
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $200; Non-Members $240
“When you first start telling stories, you may have more of them. But then you get better at telling them.”
— David Sedaris
Each of our lives contains thousands of true stories. But how to identify the life experiences that make great personal essays? Elise has published five books and over 400 essays in magazines and newspapers. In this four-week online class, Elise will guide you step by step through the process of selecting and crafting the perfect story to launch your stellar personal essay!
Experiments in Creative Nonfiction (Advanced)
Maribeth Fischer (6 sessions)
When: Mondays 12-2 p.m., September 28, October 5, 12, (no class on the 19th) 26; and November 2 & 9
Where: Lutheran Church of Our Savior
Cost: RBWG Members $300; Non-Members $350
In our zeal to set up narratives with momentum, in our urgency to get to the point, I worry that we might be sanding off the edges of our stories, filtering out a certain kind of delicacy or complexity, using our GPS to calculate the most expedient route and preemptively rejecting certain kinds of narrative trajectories as too ambitious, too dangerous, too ridiculous, too bonkers to attempt. What remains to be said? We won’t learn the answer unless we risk flailing, playing the serious game of experimentation.
—Karen Russell, “The Paradoxical Usefulness on nonutilitarian Motion, AKA Play” AWP Keynote Address 2015
This is a class for seasoned writers seeking to take risks in their essay writing, to trust that the linear narrative isn’t the only way to tell a story or maybe not the best way. In this class we’ll be writing an essay written as an index — not by what happens first second third, but by telling the story alphabetically. We’ll write an essay that uses photographs — and all the things NOT in a photograph — to tell a more complex story (of what happens behind the scenes). We’ll try an essay written as a list of facts, and another comprised solely — or almost — of questions. The goal is to start what will, with time, become polished literary essays.
Reimagining the Essay: On Revision and Repair (for Advanced Writers)
Maribeth Fischer (8 sessions)
When: Tuesdays 1-3 p.m., September 22, 29, October 6, 13, 20, 27 and November 3 &10
Where: Lutheran Church of Our Savior
Cost: RBWG Members $400; Non-Members $450
Writers were not people who hung around on misty mountain tops. We were not divine wind chimes waiting for the right breeze to blow. Writers worked — like sculptors hacking and chipping away at slabs of marble; like jewelers selecting the proper metals and polishing the best gems; like plumbers or HVAC guys, going into the unlovely guts of a building, unscrewing rusty pipes, cleaning dusty vents, fixing and building from the inside out….and revising, revising, revising.
— Jennifer Weiner Hungry Heart
We will begin this class by studying and discussing beautiful complex long-form essays and then explore what it means to revise our own essays with the goal of turning them into gorgeous literary works ready for publication. In this eight-week class, participants will be asked to bring in (at different times during the course) 2-3 essay starts or drafts that they want to develop into completed works. While editing might be part of this, the bulk of the class will be spent developing and expanding the essay in terms of character, setting, metaphor and theme. Because some of our revisions might get long (in terms of word count) there will be take-home reading of each other’s work.
Elise Seyfried (4 sessions)
When: Wednesdays, September 9, 16, 23, 30
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $200; Non-Members $240
Life is a rich and meaningful journey, as we writers well know. Whether we physically travel the globe, or stay closer to home, the different places in our lives can inspire some wonderful writing! Have you ever revisited the very first place where you lived as a child? Did you make a special connection with Barcelona — or Boston? How have your experiences of the world changed you? You will be challenged to capture your precious impressions on paper, and so to relive those magical places that have lingered in your memory. Each student will receive a personalized assignment for each of the four weeks of class, based on a short bio they’ll share with me. Join me for some terrific armchair (and keyboard) traveling this Fall!
Minecraft: Mining Your Life to Craft Great Personal Essays
Elise Seyfried (4 sessions)
When: Wednesdays, October 7, 14, 21, 28
Where: Online via Email
Cost: RBWG Members $200; Non-Members $240
“When you first start telling stories, you may have more of them. But then you get better at telling them.”
— David Sedaris
Each of our lives contains thousands of true stories. But how to identify the life experiences that make great personal essays? Elise has published five books and over 400 essays in magazines and newspapers. In this four-week online class, Elise will guide you step by step through the process of selecting and crafting the perfect story to launch your stellar personal essay!
Experiments in Creative Nonfiction (Advanced)
Maribeth Fischer (6 sessions)
When: Mondays 12-2 p.m., September 28, October 5, 12, (no class on the 19th) 26; and November 2 & 9
Where: Lutheran Church of Our Savior
Cost: RBWG Members $300; Non-Members $350
In our zeal to set up narratives with momentum, in our urgency to get to the point, I worry that we might be sanding off the edges of our stories, filtering out a certain kind of delicacy or complexity, using our GPS to calculate the most expedient route and preemptively rejecting certain kinds of narrative trajectories as too ambitious, too dangerous, too ridiculous, too bonkers to attempt. What remains to be said? We won’t learn the answer unless we risk flailing, playing the serious game of experimentation.
—Karen Russell, “The Paradoxical Usefulness on nonutilitarian Motion, AKA Play” AWP Keynote Address 2015
This is a class for seasoned writers seeking to take risks in their essay writing, to trust that the linear narrative isn’t the only way to tell a story or maybe not the best way. In this class we’ll be writing an essay written as an index — not by what happens first second third, but by telling the story alphabetically. We’ll write an essay that uses photographs — and all the things NOT in a photograph — to tell a more complex story (of what happens behind the scenes). We’ll try an essay written as a list of facts, and another comprised solely — or almost — of questions. The goal is to start what will, with time, become polished literary essays.
Reimagining the Essay: On Revision and Repair (for Advanced Writers)
Maribeth Fischer (8 sessions)
When: Tuesdays 1-3 p.m., September 22, 29, October 6, 13, 20, 27 and November 3 &10
Where: Lutheran Church of Our Savior
Cost: RBWG Members $400; Non-Members $450
Writers were not people who hung around on misty mountain tops. We were not divine wind chimes waiting for the right breeze to blow. Writers worked — like sculptors hacking and chipping away at slabs of marble; like jewelers selecting the proper metals and polishing the best gems; like plumbers or HVAC guys, going into the unlovely guts of a building, unscrewing rusty pipes, cleaning dusty vents, fixing and building from the inside out….and revising, revising, revising.
— Jennifer Weiner Hungry Heart
We will begin this class by studying and discussing beautiful complex long-form essays and then explore what it means to revise our own essays with the goal of turning them into gorgeous literary works ready for publication. In this eight-week class, participants will be asked to bring in (at different times during the course) 2-3 essay starts or drafts that they want to develop into completed works. While editing might be part of this, the bulk of the class will be spent developing and expanding the essay in terms of character, setting, metaphor and theme. Because some of our revisions might get long (in terms of word count) there will be take-home reading of each other’s work.
Poetry
Where to Submit Your Poems (and How to Keep Track of Them)
Gail Comorat (1 session)
When: Thursday, 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. October 1
Where: Lutheran Church of Our Savior
Cost: RBWG Members $65; Non-Members $75
This is a class for poets who are new to submitting their work. Whether you’re considering sending off a few poems or entering a contest for your first chapbook, you should know how to write a cover letter and how to use a system to track those submissions (without knowing how to work a spreadsheet). We’ll look at journals, chapbooks and talk about small presses. We’ll go beyond the how to — this is also a good manners class where we’ll discuss simultaneous submissions and what to do when a poem is taken.
ALL SEATS FILLED The River: A Focus on Craft in Poetry
Gail Braune Comorat (5 sessions)
You know a dream is like a river/ Ever changin’ as it flows /And the dreamer’s just a vessel /That must follow where it goes /Trying to learn from what’s behind you /And never knowing what’s in store
— Garth Brooks, “The River”
When: Thursdays, 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. October 22, 29 and November 5, 12, 19
Where: Lutheran Church of Our Savior
Cost: RBWG Members $250; Non-Members $300
In this class designed for beginning and practiced writers, we will look at specific craft techniques that poets use to write about their lives. We’ll talk about what’s behind us and what’s ahead, focusing on aging, nostalgia, and humor. By studying how poets begin and land poems, how they incorporate dialogue and extra white space, and how they use extended metaphor we can learn how to make our poems stronger.
Assignments will be given weekly. Your “poems in progress” will be gently critiqued in class as we talk about revisions at our group meetings.
Gail Comorat (1 session)
When: Thursday, 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. October 1
Where: Lutheran Church of Our Savior
Cost: RBWG Members $65; Non-Members $75
This is a class for poets who are new to submitting their work. Whether you’re considering sending off a few poems or entering a contest for your first chapbook, you should know how to write a cover letter and how to use a system to track those submissions (without knowing how to work a spreadsheet). We’ll look at journals, chapbooks and talk about small presses. We’ll go beyond the how to — this is also a good manners class where we’ll discuss simultaneous submissions and what to do when a poem is taken.
ALL SEATS FILLED The River: A Focus on Craft in Poetry
Gail Braune Comorat (5 sessions)
You know a dream is like a river/ Ever changin’ as it flows /And the dreamer’s just a vessel /That must follow where it goes /Trying to learn from what’s behind you /And never knowing what’s in store
— Garth Brooks, “The River”
When: Thursdays, 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. October 22, 29 and November 5, 12, 19
Where: Lutheran Church of Our Savior
Cost: RBWG Members $250; Non-Members $300
In this class designed for beginning and practiced writers, we will look at specific craft techniques that poets use to write about their lives. We’ll talk about what’s behind us and what’s ahead, focusing on aging, nostalgia, and humor. By studying how poets begin and land poems, how they incorporate dialogue and extra white space, and how they use extended metaphor we can learn how to make our poems stronger.
Assignments will be given weekly. Your “poems in progress” will be gently critiqued in class as we talk about revisions at our group meetings.
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