Each session runs about 12 weeks. Each month, students submit a 40-page packet to their mentor. Their mentor returns the packet with editorial notes and has a phone call with the mentee. Concurrently, our mentorship group comes together every few weeks for a discussion around craft, literature, and/or work-in-progress readings. Our final session is a reading and always involves a delivery of yummy goodies!

That’s totally fine. This mentorship is designed for you to work at your own pace with your mentor. All our sessions are recorded. The ongoing meetings are designed to help you feel a part of a writing community, but they are not mandatory.

While we do our best, it is not always possible to work with your first-choice mentor. Sometimes mentors will have more requests than spaces, and sometimes a student will request a mentor who is not the best fit for a variety of reasons. You really don’t want a mentor reading a zombie story if they hate zombie stories, for example. Each of our mentors has been chosen because of the incredible insight and skills they bring to this program. That said, if you have your heart set on a specific mentor, we encourage you to register as early as possible.

Yes, each student is guaranteed a return spot with their mentor. We cannot guarantee that you will be able to have that slot in the session immediately following yours as there is sometimes a waiting list for a specific instructor, but you will receive the next open slot.

Of course! As long as that mentor is appropriate for your genre and has availability. We encourage you to return and try a new faculty member in the same way you would have different advisors in each of your semesters at a residential MFA program.

Your mentor will read 120 pages of your book. Our goal is to help you grow your skills, and that work should carry over into the rest of your novel. Once you have completed your mentorship you may purchase additional reads with your mentor for an additional fee.

Our program is designed to help you grow as a writer, and our focus is on craft and skills. While our mentors will share any insights they may have into the current market, a mentorship is not designed to prepare your book for submission. A mentorship doesn’t guarantee a book acquisition or an agent signing, but it will improve your skills and the quality of your manuscript.

Whale Rock Workshops is committed to bringing you top-tier instructors who have either taught at MFA programs, have MFAs of their own, and/or who are major award-winners. We carefully vet our instructors, and we make sure that they have published more books than our students. Check out our blogs about the decision to get an MFA and how to create your own MFA-like curriculum.

Our grant and scholarship availability varies year to year. We will announce current offerings and details on our grants page here. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like information about payment plans. If you are Canadian, be sure to look into Access Copyright, Canadian Council for the Arts, and provincial granting bodies such as the Ontario Arts Council. A number of Canadian authors have used those programs to participate in our workshops.

Unfortunately, no. While we know the exchange rates are high, the bulk of our instructors are US-based, and we need to pay them in US dollars. We encourage our Canadian friends to look into Canadian grant programs to help offset the costs of our workshops. Our prices are competitive with other US workshop companies, AND we are significantly cheaper than a US-based MFA program.