Work with Me
Cream City Creative Writing Workshop
Develop your writing and further your career in this six-week creative writing workshop. In this course, you will have the opportunity to receive in-depth feedback and advice on your work from supportive fellow writers and your workshop leader, novelist Luke Geddes, whose work has been published by Simon & Schuster, named one of the year’s best by NPR’s Weekend Edition, optioned for television by Fox 21 Studios, and praised by famed cultural critic Roxane Gay.
Limited class size means more attention on you, your work, and your specific goals. Students will submit a discrete prose work for review twice; each submission can be up to 5,000 words and in any prose form (e.g. short story, novel excerpt, memoir, narrative essay, etc.).
At the end of the 6-week session, you will meet with the workshop leader for a one-on-one session to discuss your body of work, ongoing creative practice, and further plans for your writing career.
Meets Wednesdays 7 – 9PM starting July 17, 2024.
COST: $299
Complete the form at the bottom of this page to begin the registration process. I will get back to you ASAP to answer any question you might have and give instructions for securing your spot.
Questions? Concerns? Scheduling issues? Etc.? Use the same form to get in touch!
Individual Editing & Development
Do you have a completed writing project that would benefit from a set of experienced eyes? Are you in the middle of a project and need help pushing through to the end? Whatever the state of your work, I will help you—via extensive written feedback and one-on-one conversation—shape your manuscript, anything from a short story or article to a full book, into the finished form that fits your ambitions and goals.
I will guide you through big picture concerns like plot, character, and structure, as well as apply my gimlet eye in line editing your prose. Upon the completion of our work together, you will feel confident in taking the next step toward publication, whether you’re taking the independent route or aiming at securing an agent and a contract from a major publisher.
Base rate is $0.03 per word, which includes line editing (where applicable), significant margin commentary, an editorial letter describing in detail my overall suggestions for your manuscript, and a 1-hour one-on-one meeting to discuss the work further (can take place in-person, on the phone, or via Zoom).
Upon request, I can share with you some past examples of the feedback and editorial letters I have written. That way you can get an idea of what to expect before signing up. Nevertheless, there is no “one size fits all” to this service; I won’t begin working on your manuscript until I have a solid grasp of what YOU want it to be and what kind of assistance YOU want from me.
Query Coaching
I am the only writer I know who landed a literary agent (and subsequently publication with a Big 5 press) through the “cold” querying process. What I mean by “cold” is that I had no interpersonal or professional connection to any agents, had no one in the industry to put a good word in for me, to give me a leg-up in getting an agent’s interest in my novel manuscript or my career as a writer. Instead, I crafted a query letter and sent it to relevant agents who accepted unsolicited submissions, and eventually, found one for whom my query appealed enough that they wanted to read my book and take me on as a client.
I can help you do the same for your completed manuscript. For a base rate of $80, I will work with you (through multiple drafts if necessary) to craft the query letter that best represents your manuscript, avoids common query missteps, and is most likely to appeal to agents. I also offer an additional service for helping you select which agents to submit to and how best to plan your querying “attack.”
Application Preparation
As a reader, I’m especially interested in the work of writers who follow their own particular and peculiar paths. I firmly believe that MFAs and formal schooling in general are NOT necessary to become a successful writer. However, if you do choose to take the route of formal education, there is nothing more difficult or less comfortable, in my experience, than having to write a personal statement for an application to graduate school (or a creative writing conference, a residency, etc., etc.). I’ve been on both sides of the admission process and can help you through multiple drafts of not just the personal statement but your application materials as a whole. Not sure where to apply or what to look for in a program? I can help you with that, too!
Rates start at $80.
Why work with me?
I have experience in many different realms of the creative writing world. I’ve had a novel (Heart of Junk) published by a Big 5 press that got a fair amount of acclaim and media coverage. Prior to that, my short story collection, I Am a Magical Teenage Princess, was published by a small, independent press, but was nevertheless cited by Roxane Gay as “her favorite book that no one has ever heard of” in the New York Times. My short fiction and nonfiction have been published in a variety of places, and I also maintain an interest in the D.I.Y. world of zines. I have a Ph.D. in creative writing and comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Wichita State University. I’ve formally taught creative writing for over ten years to everyone from high school students to undergraduates to those in doctoral programs.
That said, I don’t consider myself a “natural” writer. I wasn’t a big reader in elementary school or high school, preferring to play video games and watch TV. When I came to literature in college, I felt behind and naïve and hopeless. I would read the author bios on the back covers of the books I loved and feel like the distance between the writers I admired and myself was insurmountable; I grew up in small unknown city in Wisconsin, had never been to New York (the center of the publishing world) attended an unremarkable state school, had never met a professional writer, and didn’t even know until shortly before I applied what an “M.F.A. in creative writing” even was!
Even now, after having accomplished so much that I could only dream of when I was young and aspiring, writing to me is as challenging as it ever was—perhaps even more so. My process is very slow. When writing, I rarely enter a state where everything just “flows” or I feel like I’m carried away by my own imagination and I’m merely transcribing a dream. I laboriously squeeze out one sentence or word at a time and even during my most productive periods average at most 250 - 300 words a day. One of the most profound things one of my own teachers ever said to me was that I was wrong in my belief that the better I got at writing, the easier it would be; “No,” she said, “it’s more difficult, because you’re aware of the potential of every word you write.” For me, getting better at writing has been mostly about increasing my tolerance for discomfort of not knowing: what comes next, or if the piece I’m working on will turn out the way I want it to, or if I’ll be able to finish the piece at all.
Why am I saying all this? I suppose just to show you that I’m not some savant for whom writing comes easy. The fact that it’s so hard for me makes me, I hope, the ideal collaborator; if I could help myself accomplish all that I’ve accomplished as a writer, I can do the same for you, no matter your circumstances.