Master Skills Workshop with Esteemed Editor Patti Gauch and Noted Author Gary D. Schmidt
ONLINE: Sunday, October 19– Saturday, October 25, 2025
Gary Schmidt and Patti Gauch team up for two novel workshops given from the coziness of your home AND by the glorious shores of Lake Huron. Writers will come together for a week of workshops, craft talks, one-on-one editing and mentoring sessions, and readings.
The heart of our days will be good writerly work. In large group sessions, we'll talk about the major elements of fiction and how those might be used in your stories. In small group sessions, we'll focus on your writing, workshopping it and testing it for voice, for meaning, for alternate perspectives and for point of view. You'll learn to hone your writing skills as we workshop and come away, we hope, with a stronger sense of writerly gifts, with a new community of writers, and with pieces that might be sent out into the world to reach young audiences.
This class is for experienced writers ready to work hard! You will write and learn from morning until night. You will be given on the spot prompts and writing assignments with short turn around times, and you will be expected to make revisions and edits as well. If you are someone who does not like writing under pressure, this is not the workshop for you, and we encourage you to explore our mentorship and retreat programs which are more self-driven.
“The morning sessions with Gary and Patti doing one long one shorter presentation was pure gold! Patti and Gary get deeper into the writing process and give perspectives I’ve never heard anywhere else. Every session was a pure delight and such a revelation. ”