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30 emails.

Hundreds of ways to kick-start your writing.

Southeast Review’s Writer’s Regimen is for poets, essayists, and fiction writers who want to produce a body of work by introducing structure to their writing life and, at the same time, find new and innovative ways to approach their craft. Rather than spending hours searching for craft advice and writing prompts on your own, find all the inspiration you need in one place.

WRITER'SREGIMEN

JUNE 1 - JUNE 30, 2023


Your one-stop source for writing inspiration

featuring
EXCLUSIVE CRAFT TALKS
from...

ANA PORTNOY BRIMMER

Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a poet and organizer from Puerto Rico. She holds a BA and an MA in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, and is an alumna of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. To Love an Island, her debut poetry collection, was the winner of YesYes Books’s 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. The Spanish edition is forthcoming from La Impresora. Ana is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest 2020, and was named one of Poets & Writers's 2021 Debut Poets. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Gulf Coast, Society and Space, Sixth Finch, Sx Salon, The Breakbeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, and Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and after the Storm, among others. Ana is the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants, resides in Puerto Rico, and finds hope in the poetics of dance parties and revolution.

   “I gleaned mind-blowing inspiration from these exercises, coming up with voices and situations I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of.”

—Past Participant

     "I NEVER would do that in my own writing, but it activated such a different part of my psyche that I only can applaud you all for its inception! It truly was a journey of looking at yourself, which was so much harder and surprising for me."

—2022 Participant

    "Your regimen was such a great experience. As challenging as it was, it helped me generate a tremendous amount of work and recharge my creativity. I really appreciate how your program supports the life of a writer."

                           —Past Participant

   “I loved the variety of prompts that make you focus on your writing from different angles.”

           2022 Participant

When you sign up for the Writer’s Regimen,

you will receive the following:

  • Daily writing prompts, applicable for any genre, emailed directly to you for 30 days! Use these to write a poem a day for 30 days, to create 30 short-short stories, or to give flesh to stories, personal essays, novels, & memoirs

  • Exclusive, original craft essays from Malcolm Tariq (poetry), Ashley Marie Farmer (nonfiction), Ana Portnoy Brimmer (poetry), and fiction writer TBA!

  • In-depth submission insights, tips, and advice from our Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction Editors

  • Exclusive author readings

  • A Regimen-only contest ($50 prize) and potential publication in Southeast Review

  • Inspirational quotes from famous writers, riff words, links to craft podcasts & essays we’ve curated as highly useful

  • And more!

$15 registration

. . . and introducing . . .

Workshops with Southeast Review Editors

6 weeks, on zoom

$200 including full Writer's Regimen

Scholarships available—more details below!

POETRY
Tell Your Story
with Gbenga Adesina
Thursdays, 5-7 pm | Starting June 1

A poem is both song and story. In fact, ancient Italians called their poems, sonata, little song. A poem is the voice of our most intimate self. Poetry is the private history of the heart. Have you ever thought of telling your life’s story through a poem? 

 

In this class, we will interrogate and praise memory. We will study poems of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, and others. And using prompts that will include favorite songs from your childhood, or different aspects of your lives, family photographs, cherished objects (what kind of poems and memories can your coffee mug inspire? you’d be surprised!), and even photographs of your pets, we’ll work on crafting poems that evoke memories and images while telling your truth and story. Together, we will create an atmosphere of community, joyful laughter, togetherness, and a space for vulnerability. Come join us.  

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Gbenga Adesina is an award-winning poet of the 2020 Narrative Prize and the Palette Spotlight Poetry award, among others. His works speak with tenderness and urgency at the intersections of human migrations, lineage, and memory, and have been published by the Harvard Review, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, American Academy of Poets's Poem-A-Day, Yale Review, The Poetry Review UK, and The New York Times, where the editor praised his poetry for its "clarity of observation and empathetic insight into the suffering of another." He was the Olive B. O'Connor Poetry Fellow at Colgate University, where he taught a popular poetry class called "Song of the Human." He has been invited to lecture, read, and perform his work at the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, DC, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in poetry from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. He is Interviews Editor at Southeast Review.

POETRY
Finding & Developing Your Voice as a Poet

with Olga Mexina
Thursdays, 6-8 pm | Starting June 22

This workshop focuses on connecting with yourself and finding and/or enriching and/or stretching your voice. What is voice in poetry? How do we access/find and develop/enrich it? We will write and talk about writing. The workshop consists of both theoretical and applied elements with a strong studio/writing component. We will talk/discuss/write about our consciousness, mind, the multiplicity of language, connection, speech registers, imported voice, polyvocality, inner space, the senses, and other elements/phenomena as creative tools in the process of voice creation/construction. Each topic/theme will be paired with corresponding reading material. It’s useful for both beginner and advanced poets.

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Olga Mexina is a PhD student in Poetry at FSU. She was born in Leningrad, USSR, and grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and New York. She has a BA in Media Studies from NYU and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston. She is a writer and translator. She is also the Interviews Editor at Southeast Review. Olga lives with her daughter, Elsa, and son, Huckleberry, in Tallahassee, Florida.

OPEN GENRE
Myths, Histories, and Literary Lineages:

An Adaptation Workshop
with Maggie Nye
Wednesdays, 6-8 pm | Starting June 14

The literary world is obsessed with notions of “originality.” We only need to look at the language of criticism to see evidence of this. When we want to commend a work, we call it “unprecedented” or better yet “inimitable,” as though it has no lineage at all and will produce none. But why should a work unable to bear literary progeny be so valued while imitable (fertile) work is judged unfavorably?

 

In our workshop, we will flip the script. We will read and write works that are generous and generative: works that do not deny their predecessors and in turn offer themselves up for endless adaptation. Our sources of inspiration? Myth, history, literary legacy, earth other!

 

Some works we might consider are The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, Sons of Achilles by Nabila Lovelace, Wake Siren: Ovid Resung by Nina MacLaughlin, Coming through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, “Madame Bovary’s Greyhound,” by Karen Russell, “A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin” by Kevin Brockmeier, and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” by Jorge Luis Borges. This is an open-genre workshop.

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Maggie Nye is the author of the forthcoming novel The Curators (Curbstone, 2024) and current Online Editor for Southeast Review. She has also published short work in Pleiades Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Passages North, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, MacDowell, and the Saint Albans Writer-in-Residence program. She is a PhD student at FSU hard at work on her second novel: a strange, modern retelling of the Medusa myth.

POETRY
Process, the Cliché, & Some Critical Theory

with Haley Laningham
Wednesdays, 7-9 pm | Starting June 7 (skipping 7/5)

If you’ve ever struggled with your creative process, constantly imagining you’d arrive at your best subject matter by squeezing your mind like a lemon, this workshop could be for you. This course’s design is to cause generation, but also to build more critical and expansive generative habits. We read poetry and critical works which ask us to tear down inherited brackets on how we perceive, and then workshop every poem as though its “final” iteration is inside of it already. We read on the subject of the cliché as an emblematic example of how thoughts, images, and feelings not really our own sneak into the ways we express and organize our realities and our imaginations.

 

The premise of the class can sound a little “heady,” but I argue much contemporary work often sneaks a particular “heady” genius through what at first seems given about it. I think the best way to let our poems rise is to challenge how we’re trained to perceive while giving diverse craft choices the attention they deserve as the objective bounds of the poem.

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Haley Laningham is a poet from Fresno, California, who holds an MFA from the University of Oregon. She is currently a PhD student at Florida State University and acts as the Art Editor for Southeast Review.

NONFICTION
Complexifying and
De-Sentimentalizing Nature Writing

with Liesel Hamilton
Wednesdays, 6-8 pm | Starting June 21

Rachel Carson said, “there are countless ways to think and write about what we call ‘nature,’ many of them urgent, but nature writing, as defined by publishers and historical precedent, ignores all but a few.”

In Vesper Flights, Helen MacDonald advocates for more nature writing, something she says will draw more attention to what is happening to our natural world: “We need literature more than ever; we need to communicate what losses mean […] the landscapes around us grow emptier and quieter each passing year.

In this workshop, these two quotes will be our guiding principles as we dig into writing about the natural world. We will think about the way we can expand our definition of what constitutes “nature writing.” We will also look for ways to push against the sentimentality that is often braided into nature narratives, searching instead for authentic emotion and narratives that surprise us. This workshop is intended for the nonfiction writer.

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Liesel Hamilton is the co-author of the book Wild South Carolina (Hub City Press, 2016). She has been published in Audubon, Catapult, and The Normal School, among other publications. She is currently a regular contributor to WFSU’s award winning ecology blog. Her work has been supported by the Adam M. Johnson Endowed Award for Excellence in Creative Writing and the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, among other awards and fellowships. She has taught creative writing to people of all ages, from the UVA Young Writer’s Workshop to college students at George Mason University and Florida State University. She is currently at work on an essay collection about birds and mental illness. She is Nonfiction Editor at Southeast Review.

FICTION
Delving into the Novel

with Laura Biagi
Tuesdays, 5-7 pm | Starting June 13 (skipping 7/4)

Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” This perhaps aptly describes the process of writing a novel—a long, difficult, and often fraught task—but it also underscores the exciting potential novels have to portray great swaths of our complex lives and experiences.

 

In this class, we will take a deep dive into workshopping your novels and the complex lives and experiences they reveal. We will address how to revise and deepen character, setting, voice, and language, and we will undertake a nuts-and-bolts approach to structure, plot, and tension. Craft issues that emerge within your work will guide writing exercises and the published material we read. We will also spend some time discussing the publishing process and what agents and editors are looking for.

 

Be prepared to bring in a novel synopsis and to workshop the first 15-20 pages of your novel-in-progress.

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A former literary agent of New York Times bestselling novelists with over 13 years of experience editing fiction and nonfiction, Laura Biagi started her career in publishing at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc., before pursuing her own writing in an MFA at the University of Houston and PhD at Florida State University. Her work has been published in TriQuarterly and won a Kentucky Emerging Artist Award and the Society for Humanistic Anthropology Fiction Award. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Southeast Review

Your registration for a workshop includes the full 30-day Writer's Regimen, as long as you sign up by May 31. Enrollments will be limited for each workshop to ensure that all fill. After all workshops reach our first enrollment thresholds, thresholds will increase—so please check back later if you're interested in a workshop but it's full! When a workshop is entirely sold out, we will make a note here.

Scholarships are available! For those with financial burdens, please apply for a scholarship by sending in a 5-page writing sample and a 250-word essay describing the kind of writer you are and how a scholarship would help you benefit from the workshop. Please include which workshop you would like to sign up for. To apply, email southeastreview@gmail.com with the subject line "Writer's Regimen Workshop Scholarship Application." The deadline to apply for scholarships is May 1.

It is not possible to switch into a different workshop after registering for one. Writer's Regimen and workshop registrations are nonrefundable.

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