Writing Workshops 2026
Learn from Award Winning Authors & Boost your craft
You’ve heard it before: your writing is great, your ideas are fresh, and you have a passion for putting words on the page. So why aren’t your pieces being accepted for publication? Here at the Open Doors Review, we read hundreds of submissions a year and have seen great writers making the same mistakes over and over. A slight adjustment to how you craft or submit your pieces can make the difference between a piece with potential and a piece that gets published.
Writing issues that these workshops address
- How to turn a travel experience into a polished essay or piece of prose
- How to craft your prose with a poets ear
- How and where to submit your work to get published in literary magazines like this one
- Point of View in writing is a powerful tool. Are you using it correctly?
Who are these workshops for?
These workshops are for anyone interested in honing their craft and learning from internationally published authors.
What language are these workshops in?
The first workshops will be offered in English. We are working on a series of Italian workshops for the fall of 2026.
We are excited to share a series of workshops in 2026 offered online to reach all the members of our global community. Workshops will be offered online (with a recording if you cannot attend).
Individual workshops will be $35 each. Buy the bundle of 4 for $100 and save over 25%.
Writing Workshops 2026: Part One (Feb-May)
Writing Travel Essays
with Mark Anthony Jarman
Saturday, February 21st at 5:00pm-6:30pm Italy time
Turn a travel experience into a story worth telling. Join award-winning author Mark Anthony Jarman for a one-hour workshop on transforming your travel experiences into compelling essays. Participants will explore practical techniques for mining journal entries and raw observations for the narrative threads that matter, shaping fragmented notes into polished prose that captures both place and personal transformation. Through discussion of concrete strategies and examples, attendees will learn how to identify the moments that resonate, craft a distinctive voice, and structure travel experiences into essays that move beyond mere description to reveal character, meaning, and the mystery of encounter. Whether you’re working with notebooks full of half-finished ideas or wondering how to turn a trip into a story worth telling, this workshop will provide the tools to bridge the gap between experience and finished essay.
What you will learn
- structure travel experiences into essays
- how to mine journal entries and raw observations for the narrative threads that have an impact
- shaping fragmented notes into polished prose
- identify the moments that resonate
Your Instructor: Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Burn Man: Selected Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and praised as containing some of the most electric short fiction produced in Canada over the past four decades. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Yaddo fellow, he has won a Gold National Magazine Award in nonfiction and the ReLit Award. Jarman has served as fiction editor of The Fiddlehead literary journal since 1999 and co-edits the literary journal CAMEL. He is also the author of two acclaimed travel books, Ireland’s Eye and Touch Anywhere to Begin. Author A.S. Byatt praised his collection 19 Knives in The Guardian as “brilliant. The writing is extraordinary, the stories are gripping, it is something new.” Jarman’s “Twa Corbies” appeared in Open Doors issue 6.
The Language of Time
with Kevin Craft
Saturday, March 28 16:00-17:30pm Italy time
Join us for a workshop designed for all writers of lyrical prose in which poet and professor Kevin Craft will dive into how to write about time.
This workshop explores how writers can engage time as a creative material, examining anachronism, overlap, and coincidence as engines for lyric and narrative work. Participants will experiment with shifting temporal scales—condensing centuries into a single line, or expanding a fleeting instant across pages of prose or verse. Kevin Craft is particularly interested in how lyric forms bend chronology, allowing writers to move freely between compression and expansion. Another key focus is temporal layering: the act of placing one historical moment in dialogue with another, as seen in works like The School of Athens, where classical and Renaissance thought coexist in a single frame, or the Medici figures embedded within the Journey of the Magi. Drawing examples from fiction, poetry, visual art, and even deep time in geology, the workshop offers generative exercises that help writers activate the fourth dimension and incorporate temporal play directly into their creative practice.
Submission Strategies
with Monica Sharp
Saturday, April 11th 17:00-18:30pm Italy time
Want to see your work in print? This workshop focuses on one of the most accessible paths into publishing: literary magazines and journals. We’ll explore the landscape of contemporary publications, from established journals to smaller niche magazines online, and discuss how to find the right home for your writing.
We’ll cover how to prepare strong submissions, what to expect from editorial processes, and how to handle rejection (because there will be rejection). We’ll also talk about building a publication record over time, connecting with the literary community, and using early acceptances to create momentum for what comes next.
The goal? A practical, sustainable approach to getting published, one poem, story, or essay at a time.
What You’ll Learn:
- Where to begin: Overcome your fears and anxieties and get unstuck about submitting!
- Persistence pays: How to interpret editorial feedback and transform rejection into a sustainable part of a professional writing practice.
- Map the Market: How to navigate the diverse landscape of literary journals—from prestigious “top-tier” publications to niche digital platforms—to find the perfect home for your work.
- The Professional Submission: Practical strategies for preparing “submission-ready” manuscripts and understanding the standard editorial cycles and timelines of contemporary journals.
- Strategic Career Building: Techniques for leveraging early acceptances into a cohesive publication record that builds momentum.
Your instructor: Monica Sharp lives in Florence, Italy. She is the poetry editor for the Open Doors Review. Her work has been published globally in Pure Slush: Great Cities Volume I – Paris (Volume II – London forthcoming), Tiny Molecules, Aayo Magazine, Fiction on the Web, Impspired, Across the Margin, Writer’s Block – Amsterdam, Mediterranean Poetry, and the Bosphorus Review of Books. Her short story “Chiaroscuro” was shortlisted for the 2025 Gilmer Prize. She edits submissions for Open Doors Review. See sharpmonica.com and find her on Substack at https://monicasharp.substack.com/.
Point of View in Narrative Writing
with Morgan Chiarella & Giaime Maccioni
May Date tbd 17:00-18:30pm Italy time
Try to imagine The Catcher in the Rye written in the third person. Or The Lord of the Rings told by Gollum. If it weren’t Nick, Gatsby’s friend, narrating Gatsby’s exploits but Gatsby himself, would it be the same? The answer, of course, is no. They would be completely different stories. Point of view is not an important element of a story. Point of view is the story.
In this one-hour workshop on Point of View in Narrative Writing, we’ll explore how the choice of narrative perspective fundamentally shapes a story: from first to second to third person and the use of different verb tenses, you’ll learn why the same events feel profoundly different when told through different eyes. We’ll discuss the strengths and limitations of conventional and unconventional narrators and look at brief examples from well-known authors to see how they use point of view to shape meaning, voice, and reader engagement, with opportunities to practice identifying and experimenting with perspectives in your own writing.
Your instructor: Morgan Chiarella is the Italian editor for the Open Doors Review. A director and screenwriter, Chiarella published his first novel with Marsilio in 2005. He is a professional translator and teaches English at Università Roma Tre. He works as a writing coach and is among the founders of eventoscatenante.com, which offers coverage and coaching services for screenwriters.
Your instructor: Giaime Maccioni writes fiction and screenplays. A prizewinner in literary competitions, some of his short stories have been published in magazines, e-books, and anthologies.
He works as an editor, story editor, and writing coach.
Writing Workshops 2026: Part Two (Sep – Dec)
Part two workshops are in the works! Stay tuned for the potential to meet an agent, attend a poetry workshop and get your work published in Italy.