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About the Workshop

If you've filled plenty of notebooks with your very best work and are ready for the next steps, this workshop is for you.

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This workshop will be a comprehensive overview of the multitude of publishing outlets that exist for aspiring writers — literary journals, commercial magazines, column and opinion writing, blogging, and travel writing.

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We’ll cover submission protocols for each, dos and don’ts of submitting and talking to editors, how to write a cover letter, handling rejection, and the very real value of persistence.

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Plus, included in the cost of the workshop is the offer to have one PITCH or COVER LETTER edited by the instructor, including suggestions for revision if necessary

and ideas for where to pitch/submit, to be redeemed within one month of taking the workshop.

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Led by Dana Shavin​

I grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. After college–a tricky educational adventure that included one expulsion, one hospitalization for anorexia, and three transfers to three colleges (one of which I attended twice, but not consecutively)–I moved to Tifton, Georgia to work in a halfway house for recovering addicts. A year later I returned to school for a graduate degree in clinical psychology. For 15 years I worked as a therapist, a behavior specialist with developmentally disabled adults, and as a psychological examiner.

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In 1997, I left mental health to pursue art and writing full-time. In 2002, I landed a gig as a monthly columnist for the Lifestyle section of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, which has brought me great joy, a loyal following, and recognition from the Green Eyeshade awards, recognizing excellence in journalists across the southeast, and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. My columns appear every third Sunday of the month. I’ve also been happy to find homes for a whole bunch of essays and articles about such diverse topics as recovery, fulfillment, work, home, life coaching, and all things dog, and have been nominated for Best American Essays and a Pushcart Prize. 

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My essays and articles have appeared in Garden and Gun, Oxford American, The Sun, Psychology Today, Today.com, Next Avenue, PBS, AARP’s The Ethel, Travel + Leisure, The Writer, Writersdigest.com, Bark, Parade.com, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fourth Genre, Third Coast, Hawaii Pacific Review, Gravy (the newsletter of the Southern Food Alliance), Edge business journal, and numerous alternative health, arts, and entertainment newspapers. I have been a panelist and workshop presenter at Pennsylvania’s Keystone College literary conference, The Gathering, at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga State, and at the Meacham Writers Workshop, and have spoken and read about recovery and issues of self-acceptance for the Eating Disorders Information Network (EDIN), the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the Unitarian Universalist Church, Unity Church, the Jewish Cultural Center, and at various book clubs, writers groups, performance venues, and fundraisers.

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My first book is The Body Tourist: A Memoir of Hunger and the Search for Home. It is about the intersection of my anorexia with my mental health career, and about how the illness invaded every aspect of my life, even after my supposed recovery. 

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My most recent book is Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs. It’s a collection of twenty years’ worth of my most popular Chattanooga Times Free Press columns.