by Byron Turner
3 hours ago
Don't Take the Summer Off: Your 2026 Summer Writing Lineup
Every October, a particular kind of email hits my inbox. A writer tells me they were in a groove back in May. They had a draft that was finally moving, a voice that was starting to sound like theirs. Then June came, and they told themselves the work could rest until after Labor Day. When autumn hits, the draft feels like somebody else's, and getting back in costs more than staying in ever would have.
I've watched this pattern play out with enough writers that I want to say something direct about it at the front of summer rather than commiserate about it in the fall. The culture around us treats June, July, and August as time off. For students and their teachers, that's fair. For writers, not really. We don't have a semester calendar. What we have is a practice, and a practice has no off-season.
Our summer 2026 writing workshops are now enrolling, with new classes in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting, fresh IndieMFA programming, publishing seminars, and open applications for our most intimate retreat of the year in Portland, Oregon. Here is how I'd think about the season.
Is Summer Really the Off-Season for Writers?
The short answer is no, not if you're serious. The longer answer is the one that matters.
When writers step away for a summer, they often step away from the one thing that was carrying them, which is the rhythm of showing up to the page with other people also showing up. This is not a lecture about discipline. Discipline is the easy part. The hard part is the shared container, the class or the retreat or the workshop, that makes the work feel like it belongs to something larger than your own willpower. Lose the container, lose the work.
Amanda Miller Littlejohn came to our Paris retreat with Chloe Caldwell a few years ago. What she left with wasn't only a stronger draft. It was a structure for her writing life that would carry her through the next two years. She stacked that retreat momentum with Courtney Kocak's newsletter seminar (a class that's back on our summer 2026 lineup), then other online workshops, then more. The result is her book, The Rest Revolution, essays in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Forbes, and a 2024 to 2025 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship.
"Think and dream big for my writing. Make a plan, schedule, and structure for writing success. Take myself and my writing seriously and watch the results happen."
Amanda Miller Littlejohn, Writing Workshops alumna
Amanda didn't build that by taking summers off. She built it by stringing together classes and retreats in a sequence where each piece of work fed the next. Summer was not a gap in her practice. It was the connective tissue. Her story is not unusual among our alumni. It is the shape the best writing lives tend to take when a writer decides, at the start of June, that they will still be writing in August.
What's Open for May, June, and July 2026?
The summer catalog is built to meet writers where they are. Some of us want a low-pressure on-ramp. Some of us want to go deep on a project. Some of us need the weekly accountability of a cohort and a deadline. Below is the shape of the season. A fuller list lives on the All Online Classes page.
May: a Soft Opening
May is for single-session seminars, which is the right entry point for anyone whose momentum is still waking up. Courtney Kocak's The Multi-Passionate Writer's Life (May 2) is built for the writer who has more ideas than bandwidth, with a practical framework for moving a single concept across essays, books, podcasts, and newsletters without burning out. Minda Honey's How to Write a Heartbreak (May 13) is a six-week nonfiction workshop that teaches essayists how to turn a specific, personal loss into work readers can hold.
June: the Generative Heart
June is where most of the season's generative work happens. Sarah McColl's Summer Camp for Writers opens June 20 as an eight-week session built on the principle that summer's undoneness is part of its gift. Sarah describes the class as flashlight tag and walks in the woods rather than a productivity sprint, which is precisely why it works. Writers who arrive at Summer Camp burned out by the grind narratives around writing tend to leave it with a renewed practice.
Alongside Sarah's cohort, June brings Amanda Arista's Romancing the Page (a ten-week romance novel intensive) and Carol Goodman's Writing Mystery and Suspense (a six-week Zoom workshop for genre fiction writers). On the publication side, Courtney Kocak returns with Start a Newsletter to Supercharge Your Platform, Network and Business (June 14), which is the single class most responsible for alumni turning rented audiences on social platforms into owned email lists.
July: Focus and Finish
July is for finishing, or at least for pushing a piece of work all the way through. Holly Lyn Walrath's National Flash Fiction Month challenges writers to produce 30 short stories in 30 days, which sounds crazier than it is once you accept that most of them are going to be bad on purpose. That's the point. Volume teaches you what instinct can't.
Ethan Joella's The List-Making Method (July 22) unpacks a technique Ethan traces back to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, where lists of physical objects become a way of rendering character and structuring narrative. Ethan is the author of three Scribner novels, including A Little Hope, a Read with Jenna selection. His seminar is one of our most requested. July also brings Tawny Lara's Just F*%#ing Write, which is exactly what it sounds like, and a literary magazine submissions seminar at the end of the month.
If you'd rather have the full curriculum than build your own summer one class at a time, our IndieMFA programs bundle summer seminars, multi-week workshops, one-on-one mentorship, and retreat access into a single track, at a fraction of a traditional MFA's cost and on your timeline.
See every class on the May, June, and July 2026 calendar.
Browse All Summer ClassesSeptember in Portland, Oregon: Applications Are Open
Summer feeds into fall, and for one week in September we're bringing our most intimate retreat program of the year to Portland, Oregon. Applications are open now for Writing Workshops Portland, September 16 through 21, 2026. Thirty writers. Three cohorts of ten, led by three of the most distinctive voices working in American literature today.
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho leads one of the fiction cohorts. A National Magazine Award finalist and winner of the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction, Antonio's debut collection Barefoot Dogs was named a Best Book by Kirkus Reviews, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Texas Observer, and PRI's The World. Sanibel Lazar leads the second fiction cohort. She turned a self-published debut into a USA Today bestseller through an audience she built on her own terms, and her second novel, Does This Make Me Look Rich?, is forthcoming from Union Square in 2027. Minda Honey leads the nonfiction cohort. Her memoir The Heartbreak Years (Little A, 2023) is a portrait of a woman figuring out who she is and who she wants to be, and her essays have appeared in Harper's Bazaar, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Oxford American, and Longreads.
The week is built around close work. Every writer submits two completed pieces before arrival. The first gets workshopped by the cohort. The second is discussed in a private one-on-one conference with the writer's faculty lead, time set aside just for the work. Daily craft talks are open to everyone. Optional afternoon seminars go deep on specific questions of craft and the writing life. Evenings belong to the group: dinners, a Portland coffee tasting, an Oregon wine tasting, and a final reading on the last night. Tuition is $2,995 and includes five nights at Hotel Lucia, a downtown landmark steps from Powell's Books and the neighborhoods where writers like Ursula K. Le Guin made a literary life. This is not a large conference with name tags on lanyards. It is a small company of writers working side by side for a week in one of America's great literary cities.
Applications close when cohorts fill. Submit yours now.
Apply for Portland 2026Your Summer, Your Writing Practice
If you've been telling yourself you'll get back to the work after Labor Day, I want to gently suggest a different plan. Start with one seminar this month. Sign up for the class that meets you where you are. Apply to Portland if Portland is calling. You don't have to do all of it. You do have to do something.
We would be honored to take part in your writing practice this summer, whatever shape it takes. If you're still deciding, our Meet the Teaching Artists series is a good place to read the instructors in their own words before you pick a class. And if you're ready to enroll, the doors are open.
Summer 2026 classes are now enrolling in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and screenwriting.
Join Us This SummerAbout WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, Tuscany, Portland, Mackinac Island, Santa Fe, and New Orleans. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney's. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us. Alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
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.
