Winter Writing Camp
Winter Writing Camp 2025 will be Saturday, February 22, for writers ages 5 and up, no experience necessary.
Warm up and write at the 8th Annual Winter Writing Camp! The day-long camp offers writing activities led by regional writers and has dedicated tracks for kids, teens, and adults.
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Registration is required for this free event, and includes a delicious lunch catered by El Hefe. Registration is open until all seats are filled. Registration is now closed.
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Please note that children in Kindergarten and First Grade require an adult to be with them all day, and children under the age of 12 require an adult in the building.
Adult campers can select sessions on fiction or poetry writing, and learn more about publishing. This year's workshop leaders are Robert Miltner, Molly Fuller, Allison Pitinii Davis, Cherise Benton, Bob Craven, El Bentivegna, Abby Vandiver, Jen Ashburn, Jason Irwin, Emily Rusu and Joan Reardon.
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Check out these session options!
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Cherise Benton, "Not Not Writing"
Goofing off is an essential, yet woefully overlooked step in the writing process. In this multi-genre generative workshop, participants will surreptitiously invoke the writing muses by doing something else in completely different disciplines.
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Abby Vandiver, "Self-Publishing 101"
Learn the self publishing process from start to finish. Acquire the knowledge you need to get your book ready to publish, how and where to publish and how to market it successfully before and after publication.
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Allison Pitinii Davis, "What Work Is"
In this session, we will discuss poems about labor by Natasha Trethewey and Charles Reznikoff. Then we will write our own poem or prose piece about work.
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El Bentivegna, "The American Sentence"
Allen Ginsberg, inspired by the Japanese haiku, conceived the idea of the "American sentence": a seventeen-syllable sentence capturing a single moment or concept. In this workshop we will read a few American Sentences from Ginsberg and write some of our own.
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Molly Fuller & Robert Miltner, "Submitting Short Work for Publication"
Beginning or emerging writers can benefit by focusing on short works [poems, prose, flash fiction, brief nonfiction, hybrids] because online journals like PC screen-sized writing; plus, short works can be simultaneously submitting, giving short works writers more exposure. Example, exercises and how to locate appropriate venues for submission.
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Jen Ashburn & Jason Irwin, "The Tools of Poetry: Image, Story, Music, Voice"
In this friendly, exploratory workshop, we'll look at four modes of poetry-writing, and play with the tools we have to create meaning and emotional connection through words.
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Joan Reardon, "Generating Story Ideas Through Joy"
In this session, we will focus on concepts that inspire childhood joy that made adult writers fall in love with stories in the first place. After that, we will learn how to turn those joy-filled concepts into ideas for a manuscript.
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Many thanks to our hosts St. John's Episcopal Church & the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County.​