Welcome, friends, to the Oxfurred Comma Writing Workshop! Thank you so much for applying and working with me on this.

I'll be your host, Maddy, and I'm looking forward to working with you over email and during the workshop itself. Starting...well, now, you will be receiving some reading assignments to begin with. The first reading assignment will be the short story "Coyote Woman Sings the Blues", which you can read for free here: https://zooscape-zine.com/coyote-woman/ The second reading assignment will be the stories that you submitted for the application process. This means that you will each have three stories to read, so I suggest starting now to ensure that you have time to do so comfortably and let them sink in. Our slots are at 1PM Pacific on Saturday and Sunday and will take place over voice and video on Discord (If we need an alternate solution, I have a private Jitsi instance we can use).

The goal with these assignments is to read critically. We're not here to pick every nit and grammar/spelling are off the table for our purposes. We're reading to get a sense of the plot structure, the characters and their individual arcs. Make notes (in the text, preferably, so that you can refer to individual sentences during discussion) about the following questions:

* What works for you, what doesn't? Why?
* What was inspiring and made you think about your own writing?
* Did anything remind you of another text (story, book, film, podcast, etc)?

Be prepared to summarize the story (we'll be summarizing "Coyote Woman" together and then each of you will summarize another's story) as well as your overall impressions.

Remember that our goal is to be respectful and constructive. We may come across a story/something in a story that we don't like, but that need not be anything other than a conversation starter.

On Friday evening, you'll be given a short writing assignment: 500-1000 words completed based on a prompt that I'll provide via email. This is to be completed by Saturday evening so that submissions can be emailed to everyone to read overnight for the Sunday session. This short duration gives us two opportunities. First, it lets us work on our velocity while writing (the writing should be self-contained, even if it's just a vignette or opening chapter), and second, it lets us critique something much earlier in the writing process. It's a good chance to get feedback on something that still has a lot of room to grow. As such, I will not be accepting any apologies along the lines of "sorry it's so rough." We know it'll be rough, we can work with that!

Finally, this is a reminder that this workshop is being given as part of my MFA degree and, as such, generic emails like this will be included in my packet of materials with contact info redacted. Additionally, the sessions will be recorded and those recordings shared with my mentor and no one else. If you run into any concerns along these lines, please don't hesitate to reach out. At the end, I'll be providing you with a brief questionnaire about how you feel the workshop went.

Please feel free to email each other and me, or if a chat setting is preferable, I can set up a telegram or discord chat for us.

I'm really looking forward to this, and I hope you all are as well!

Madison Scott-Clary
(she/her)


