Blog
Meet the Teaching Artist: Sara Reish Desmond on Finding the Hidden Architecture of Your Collection
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 days ago
Sara Reish Desmond talks with us about assembling short story and essay collections, the craft of sequencing, and why reading widely is the best education a writer can get. Her Assembling Your Short Story or Essay Collection 4-Week Zoom Workshop begins on Wednesday, July 8th, 2026.
A short story collection is not a greatest hits album. It is an argument, a conversation, a carefully constructed architecture of echo and contrast. But how do you find that architecture when you are sitting with a stack of individual pieces, each one written in its own weather? Sara Reish Desmond has a bracingly honest answer: readers will consume your stories however they please. The stories you painstakingly arranged to complement and contrast with one another may be read out of order, or sampled at random, or opened in the middle. "You'll have to get comfortable with that," Sara says. And yet the care you put into sequencing is never wasted. It changes the book at a structural level, even when readers take their own path through it.
Sara brings hard-won authority to this subject. Her debut collection, What We Might Become (Cornerstone Press, 2024), won the Storytrade Award in Short Fiction and a bronze Independent Publishers Award. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts, has published in the Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Front Porch, and is currently the Gish Jen Fellow at the Writer's Room of Boston. In her upcoming Assembling Your Short Story or Essay Collection workshop at WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature, Sara will guide a small group of no more than 12 writers through the process of discovering the patterns, rhythms, and gravitational center of their collections. Over four weeks, students will learn to sequence with intention, distill their thematic core, and draft a query letter grounded in the identity of their book.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Sara:
The Interview
Writing Workshops: Hi, Sara. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Sara Reish Desmond: I am currently at work on a novel set in rural Pennsylvania, loosely drawn on the town in which I was raised. Alongside that project, I'm writing new stories, all of which seem to have something to do with violence in America.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Sara Reish Desmond: Once your work is released to the public to read and consume, the writer has very little influence on how it is interpreted, lived and experienced. The stories you painstakingly sequenced in such a way to compliment and contrast with one another may be read out of order by the consumer. You'll have to get comfortable with that, but you'll also have to know that the care you put into sequencing and ordering your stories will not be in vain.
"Once your work is released to the public to read and consume, the writer has very little influence on how it is interpreted, lived and experienced. The stories you painstakingly sequenced in such a way to compliment and contrast with one another may be read out of order by the consumer. You'll have to get comfortable with that, but you'll also have to know that the care you put into sequencing and ordering your stories will not be in vain."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Sara Reish Desmond: Participants will leave this class with a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of their work—its patterns, contrasts, rhythms and conversations.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it?
Sara Reish Desmond: "Your wound is your bow." Edmund Wilson, critic. [From The Wound and the Bow.]
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, but a small, specific technique.
Sara Reish Desmond: I'm reading Lauren Groff's Brawler at the moment. She, like Karen Russell, is wonderful at taking a noun and making it into a verb. I'm working on that more and more at the moment—to be more inventive with language, to reconceive it.
Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Sara Reish Desmond: Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind. It's a comprehensive historical overview of the development of psychedelic drugs, their uses and the government's abrupt termination of research grants and funding starting in the early 60s. Major research hospitals (Hopkins, Harvard, NYU, etc.) continue to run studies and research to this day about the benefits of many psychedelics for uses as broad as smoking cessation, end of life care, and trauma therapy. Pollan assigns himself the task of engaging with all of the major psychedelics and reports about his experience. It's profound.
Sara's workshop helps you find the patterns, contrasts, and gravitational center of your collection. Limited to 12 writers.
Enroll in Assembling Your Collection →Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Sara Reish Desmond: Write what you know.
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Sara Reish Desmond: You don't need an MFA. You need to read everything. That's your MFA.
"You don't need an MFA. You need to read everything. That's your MFA."
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Sara Reish Desmond: Philip Roth—American Pastoral—and William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness.
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence?
Sara Reish Desmond: Take risks, have fun, participate, ask questions. Learning and being in (writing) community is about participation.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Sara Reish Desmond: Even with a book in the world and publishing credits to my name, I still feel like an imposter. I might always feel that way.
Join Sara's Workshop
Sara's willingness to name the impostor feeling out loud, even with a prize-winning collection to her credit, tells you something about the kind of teacher she is: honest, generous, and uninterested in pretense. That same directness runs through her approach to assembling a collection. If you are sitting with a stack of stories or essays and sensing that a book is taking shape somewhere inside them, Sara's four-week workshop will help you find its center, its sequence, and its voice. Seats are limited to 12 writers, so the feedback will be specific and the conversation will be real.
Give your collection the shape it deserves. Sara's 4-week Zoom workshop begins July 8th, 2026.
Save Your Seat in Assembling Your Collection →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
