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To arrange an event or speaking engagement, please reach out through Leslie Shipman at The Shipman Agency.

For other events, including workshops or book club visits, please contact Anna here.

Craft Seminar: Investigative Literature

1 session: 1-3pm ET, September 28, 2025

Virtual
$100 / three full scholarships available
Details / registration here: https://www.theshipmanagency.com/classes/craft-seminar-investigative-literature-anna-clark

We will begin by exploring the porous boundaries of investigative literature, from Gwendolyn Brooks in Montgomery to Lynn Nottage in Reading, Pennsylvania, to Patrick Radden Keefe in Northern Ireland. Writers working in this tradition interrogate the public realm in imaginative ways, excavating new details, bringing a fresh vantage to profound questions, and twining the personal and political – all with the force of immersive storytelling.

We'll then explore specific ways of bringing investigative muscle to our own work, no matter what genre we’re writing in. In walking through ten unsung strategies for digging deep, we’ll spotlight surprising documents, archival resources and the narrative possibilities buried in public records. We’ll show how they can level-up your words with bracing detail, structure, intimacy and revelation. We’ll hold room for navigating misinformation and disinformation. And there’ll be time for your questions, too. Participants will receive a rich reading list and a tip sheet full of brass-tacks tools and resources.

Workshop Highlights:

  • Explore the techniques of classic works of investigative literature

  • Learn ten specific investigative strategies for bringing depth and detail to creative work in any genre

  • Strengthen your ability to vet disinformation and misinformation in your research

This class has 3 full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, September 19.

Craft Seminar: How to Write About Goodness and Happiness

1 session: 2-4pm ET, October 12, 2025

Virtual
$100 / three full scholarships available
Details / registration here: https://www.theshipmanagency.com/classes/craft-seminar-unsung-strategies-muscular-storytelling-anna-clark

Goodness and happiness are difficult to write about in more than a glancing way, as if writers believe they are not real or multidimensional enough to be the stuff of stories. This craft seminar will explore what is possible when we take the light as seriously as the dark.

While this session is prose-centered, we will explore techniques of writers across genre, as well as practitioners of the solutions journalism movement. Moral force, kindness, delight, problem-solving, and play—we will consider strategies for writing about how they are felt and observed, and also how they function in community (that is, in story, or plot). We will practice some of those strategies ourselves, in prompts. We will discuss how to handle perception, conflict, tension, and truth while working in the major key. Along the way, we will watch for how to avoid glibness, superficiality, or falling into the traps of hero narratives. Participants will receive a reading list to accompany them on their own writerly adventures.

Workshop Highlights:

  • Explore ways of finding the story-rich nuance in goodness and happiness

  • Recognize the traps of superficiality -- and how to avoid them

  • Practice techniques for squarely facing experiences of kindness, delight and moral force with the intentionality they deserve

This class has 3 full scholarships and 2 half scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, October 3.