2020 Odyssey Writing Workshop Scholarship Opportunities

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN SCHOLARSHIP AND OTHER FINANCIAL AID FOR THOSE ATTENDING THE ODYSSEY WRITING WORKSHOP

The Odyssey Writing Workshop is an acclaimed, six-week program for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror held each summer in New Hampshire. Write rs apply from all over the world; only fifteen are admitted. For those attending, Odyssey is pleased to announce that five scholarships and one work/study position are available.

Financial aid and scholarships are made available by supporters, alumni, various organizations, and Odyssey itself. We are very grateful for those who have donated to reduce the financial burden on students. Scholarships are awarded based on financial need, merit, or the specific criteria listed below. They range in size from several hundred dollars to over $4000.

NOTE: Several of the scholarships below require that you fill out the Odyssey Financial Need Statement. Contact Director Jeanne Cavelos for the form, which is due April 1.

The Miskatonic Scholarship

Bestselling author George R. R. Martin is funding a scholarship for a horror writer attending Odyssey. The Miskatonic Scholarship will be awarded to a promising new writer of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. It will cover full tuition and housing. To be considered, you must complete the Odyssey Financial Need Statement by April 1 and indicate on the form that you are interested in the Miskatonic Scholarship. A panel of three judges will select the winner from among the applicants who have demonstrated financial need, using the short story or novel excerpts sent with the workshop applications. As George notes, “we are not looking for Lovecraft pastiches, nor even Cthulhu Mythos stories. References to Arkham, Azathoth, shoggoths, the Necronomicon, and the fungi from Yuggoth are by no means obligatory…though if some candidates choose to include them, that’s fine as well. What we want is the sort of originality that H. P. Lovecraft displayed in his day, something that goes beyond the tired tropes of werewolves, vampires and zombies, into places strange and terrifying and never seen before. What we want are nightmares new and resonant and profound, comic terrors that will haunt our dreams for years to come.” Scholarship monies will be applied directly to tuition and housing for the 2020 workshop.

The Walter & Kattie Metcalf Singing Spider Scholarship

Funded by Pam Metcalf Harrington, Odyssey class of 2001, the Walter & Kattie Metcalf Singing Spider Scholarship is offered in honor of Pam’s parents, who encouraged a lifelong passion for reading and writing fantasy. The scholarship is also named for the infamous singing spiders, fictional characters who appeared in a novel excerpt submitted at Odyssey 2001. The scholarship will be awarded to a fantasy writer whose novel excerpt shows great skill and promise. A successful fantasy novelist spins a web of wonder, adventure, and intrigue that captivates readers and holds them spellbound through the lyrical flow of the prose. The novelist is, in essence, a ‘singing spider.’ To be considered for this scholarship, you must complete the Odyssey Financial Need Statement by April 1 and indicate on the form that you are interested in the Walter & Kattie Metcalf Singing Spider Scholarship. You must also use a novel excerpt as the writing sample for your Odyssey workshop application. A panel of three judges will select the winner using those novel excerpts. The scholarship covers full tuition.

The Fresh Voices Scholarship

Funded anonymously by an Odyssey graduate, this scholarship provides support to an outstanding writer of color each year. Those eligible include African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and others. The Fresh Voices Scholarship seeks to offer opportunities for underrepresented racial and ethnic minority writers to learn at Odyssey and enrich the fantasy, science fiction, and horror genres as a result. To be considered, you must complete the Odyssey Financial Need Statement by April 1, indicate on the form that you are interested in the Fresh Voices Scholarship, and provide your race/ethnicity. A panel of three judges will select the winner using the short story or novel excerpts sent with the workshop applications. The scholarship awards $2,000 toward Odyssey tuition.

The Enchanted Bond Scholarship

Funded anonymously by an Odyssey supporter, this scholarship provides support to an outstanding fantasy writer each year. When readers are immersed in a fresh, vivid, believable fantasy world; engaged with compelling characters; involved in a suspenseful situation; and living, moment by moment, through an experience that could never occur in reality, the author has succeeded in creating an enchanted bond between reader and story. To be considered for this scholarship, you must complete the Odyssey Financial Need Statement by April 1 and indicate on the form that you are interested in the Enchanted Bond Scholarship. A panel of three judges will select the winner using the short story or novel excerpts sent with the workshop applications. The scholarship awards $1,000 toward Odyssey tuition.

The Quantum Entanglement Scholarship

Funded anonymously by an Odyssey graduate, this scholarship provides support to an outstanding writer of science fiction each year. According to quantum mechanics, when a pair of particles interact, they become entangled. Entangled particles remain connected so that the state of one determines the state of the other, even when the particles are far apart. Albert Einstein famously referred to this as “spooky action at a distance.” Powerful science fiction not only presents a compelling novum (new idea) based on science and builds a world consistent with that novum; it draws readers in past the science to a moving human story with characters that readers can care about and a conflict in which every twist and turn has an impact on readers’ emotions. When that happens, the author has succeeded in entangling readers and story, an effect that may last long after the story is finished and put away. To be considered for this scholarship, you must complete the Odyssey Financial Need Statement by April 1 and indicate on the form that you are interested in the Quantum Entanglement Scholarship. A panel of three judges will select the winner using the short story or novel excerpts sent with the workshop applications. The scholarship awards $1,000 toward Odyssey tuition.

The Chris Kelworth Memorial Scholarship

The Chris Kelworth Memorial Scholarship will be offered to a Canadian writer admitted to Odyssey. Chris, a 2013 Odyssey graduate, was an inspiration to many Odyssey alumni and a strong believer in creating systems and participating in events to increase his productivity, such as setting goals, attending workshops, and participating in NaNoWriMo. This scholarship, funded by alumni and friends of Chris, will cover $900 of tuition. A separate application is required and due April 1. Contact Director Jeanne Cavelos for the Chris Kenworthy Memorial Scholarship application. A panel of three judges will select the winner using the information in the scholarship applications and the short story or novel excerpts sent with the workshop applications.

Wollheim Memorial Scholarship Fund

Applicants from the New York Metropolitan Area (including New Jersey) who are accepted into Odyssey are eligible to apply for a scholarship from the Donald A. and Elsie B. Wollheim Memorial Scholarship Fund. This fund was created in 1989 by the New York Science Fiction Society–the Lunarians, one of New York’s oldest and largest science fiction and fantasy clubs, to help developing writers attend major science fiction/fantasy writing programs affiliated with higher institutions of learning. The amount of the scholarship is variable depending on need and the availability of funds. Scholarship monies will be applied directly to tuition for the 2020 workshop. If you are accepted into Odyssey and would like to pursue this possibility, contact Director Jeanne Cavelos for the special application form immediately upon your acceptance.

Horror Writers Association

If you write horror, you are eligible for one or both of the scholarships offered by the Horror Writers Association, each worth $2,500, which can be applied toward Odyssey tuition and housing. Applications open on May 1.

Kurt Brown Prizes

Since Odyssey is a member of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, those accepted into Odyssey can apply for AWP’s three Kurt Brown Prizes, scholarships of $500 each for emerging writers. Applications are accepted from December 1 to March 30.

Work/Study Position

One work/study position is also available. The work/study student spends about six hours per week performing duties for Odyssey, such as photocopying, sending stories to guests, distributing mail to students, and preparing for guest visits. Odyssey reimburses $800 of the work/study student’s tuition, half at the end of Week 3 of the workshop and half at the end of the workshop.

The work/study student will be expected to fulfill the regular requirements of Odyssey in addition to these duties. This will make for a very demanding six weeks, but for a student who needs the financial assistance, the work/study position offers a good opportunity. Contact Director Jeanne Cavelos for more details and a work/study application. Work/study applications are due April 30.

Interview: Guest Lecturer Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop. His debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards. Its sequels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, were Hugo finalists. Lee’s middle grade space opera, Dragon Pearl, was a New York Times bestseller. His short fiction has appeared in venues such as Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. He lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

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As a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop, you’ll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

Keep trying. Nobody is born knowing how to write. Like math, or ice-skating, or putting on eyeliner, it’s something you learn by practice.

Interview: Guest Lecturer JG Faherty

JG Faherty will be a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop. A life-long resident of New York’s haunted Hudson Valley, JG is the author of seven novels, ten novellas, and more than seventy-five short stories, and he’s been a finalist for both the Bram Stoker Award (The Cure, Ghosts of Coronado Bay) and ITW Thriller Award (The Burning Time). He writes adult and YA horror, science fiction, dark fantasy, and paranormal romance, and his works range from quiet, dark suspense to over-the-top comic gruesomeness.

Since 2011, JG has been a Board Trustee for the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and a Mentor. He launched their Young Adult program, and also their Library & Literacy program, which he still runs. Recently, he co-founded the HWA’s Summer Scares reading initiative in conjunction with Becky Spratford and several library organization, and he teaches local teen writing programs at libraries. In 2019, he was recognized with the Mentor of the Year Award by the HWA.

As a child, his favorite playground was a seventeenth-century cemetery, which many people feel explains a lot. You can follow him at www.twitter.com/jgfaherty, www.facebook.com/jgfaherty, and www.jgfaherty.com.

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As a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop, you’ll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

The focus of my lecture will be how horror is the most basic and integral genre, and how it affects and entwines with all the other genres, such as science fiction, thrillers, romance, etc. But in terms of what I can personally offer outside of that, I always try to impart on my students the idea that no story is finished until it’s officially in print. That means there’s ample opportunity during the writing and editing processes to pursue alternate plot lines and endings, add and delete scenes, and even cut characters who don’t drive the plot forward. My advice is, always be willing to try different things with a story and remember that it’s okay to ‘kill your babies.’

“Make Your Big Moments Sing!” by Barbara Ashford

Award-winning novelist and librettist Barbara Ashford will be teaching the Odyssey Online class “The Heart of the Matter: Bringing Emotional Resonance to Your Storytelling” this winter (application deadline: December 7, 2019). Barbara has been praised by reviewers and readers alike for her compelling characters and her “emotional, heartfelt” storytelling. Her background as a professional actress, lyricist, and librettist has helped her delve deeply into character and explore the complexities of human nature on the stage as well as on the page. Her musical adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd has been optioned for Broadway.

Barbara’s first published series was the dark fantasy trilogy Trickster’s Game (written as Barbara Campbell). Published by DAW Books, Trickster’s Game was a finalist for the Mythopoeic Society’s 2010 Fantasy Award for adult literature.

She drew on her musical theatre roots for her second novel series, the award-winning Spellcast and its sequel Spellcrossed, set in a magical summer stock theatre. DAW Books released the two novels in an omnibus edition: Spells at the Crossroads.

A graduate of the Odyssey workshop, Barbara has taught seven previous online courses for Odyssey and has served on the staff of the Odyssey Critique Service for more than a decade. You can visit her dual selves at barbara-campbell.com and barbara-ashford.com.

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Before I began writing fiction, I worked as an actress in musical theatre. Those years not only gave me the inspiration for my novel Spellcast, but taught me a lot about creating memorable moments in fiction.

Director’s Corner: Uncovering the Mysteries of Flow in the Opening of Stephen King’s 11/22/63

Jeanne Cavelos is the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust. She was a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, where she worked for eight years, editing the fantasy/science fiction program, the Abyss horror line, and other fiction and nonfiction. Jeanne is also the bestselling author of seven books and numerous short stories and articles. She has won the World Fantasy Award and twice been nominated for the Stoker Award.

Find out more about Jeanne here and more about the Odyssey Writing Workshop here.

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Flow remains shrouded in mystery. I’ve rarely seen writers explain it or analyze it. When you read a story by someone else, you probably sense when it flows, but you may not know why. When you read your own work, it’s likely harder to sense the degree of flow. Even if critiquers tell you that flow is a problem, they may have a hard time explaining why or offering suggestions to improve the flow. As the director of the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust, I’m constantly critiquing fiction in our online classes or in-person workshops, and I’ve come to realize how important flow is to a story. A story may have an exciting plot, compelling characters, a fascinating world, and a clear style, but without flow, we’ll be struggling to reach the end.

Graduate Essay: Linden A. Lewis, “How to Create a Novel from a Short Story”

Linden A. Lewis is a queer writer and world wanderer currently living in Madrid with three American cats who have little kitty passports. Tall and tattooed, Linden exists only because they’ve stopped burning witches. Linden graduated the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2016, and their first novel, The First Sister, will be released by Skybound Books in Spring 2020.

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I was in the query trenches for over a year when I realized I needed to focus on something else. The novel I had poured my heart and soul into brought only rejection after rejection—or even worse, silence—and I was falling deeper into what I thought of as “writer’s depression,” or the belief that I would never write something good enough.

Interview: Graduate Erin Roberts

Odyssey graduate Erin Roberts is a speculative fiction writer who tells stories across formats: her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 4,The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2019, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, The Dark, and THEN AGAIN: Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty Writers; her interactive fiction has been published in Sub-Q Magazine and is forthcoming from Choice of Games; and her non-fiction essays and reviews have appeared on Tor.com and in Cascadia Subduction Zone, People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy, and Strange Horizons, among others.

Erin is a 2015 graduate of the Odyssey Writers Workshop. She later earned an MFA from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine and was the recipient of a 2019 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2017 Diverse Worlds and Diverse Writers awards.

To learn more about her work or read her musings on writing and life, follow her on Twitter at @nirele, support her on Patreon at patreon.com/nirele, or visit her website at writingwonder.com.

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You attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2015. What made you decide to attend Odyssey?

The cocktail party version of my decision is that I met Odyssey Director Jeanne Cavelos at the Boston SFF convention Boskone and fell under her brilliant spell. The longer version is that I was in the right place at the right time at a moment when I was just figuring out I could call myself a writer. I was a bit of a writing late bloomer overall—I studied playwriting in college, but aside from a few NaNoWriMos, a soap opera writing class, and one general creative writing class, I didn’t write much of anything until my early 30s when I took a class in science fiction and fantasy writing at Gotham Writers’ Center with the wonderful Paul Witcover.

I immediately realized that I really enjoyed writing SFF and that it seemed like something I might be able to get better at. It was also clear that I had a long way to go. Luckily, that Gotham class introduced me to some writing buddies, including my future Odyssey classmate Golden Baker. He found out about Odyssey, applied early, got in, and then invited me on a trip to Boskone to get a sense of the broader SFF community. We went to a kaffeeklatsch Jeanne held to talk about the program and I was immediately hooked—she obviously knew her stuff and I immediately wanted to know/learn more. I applied as soon as I got home and the rest is history.

How do you feel your writing and writing process changed as a result of having attended Odyssey? What insights did you gain into your own work?

One of the reasons I enjoy writing about memory is that I have a pretty bad one myself, so it’s hard for me to pinpoint a specific writing trick or tip that I learned at Odyssey. And yet my work leveled up 1000%. It’s as if we were so immersed in the learning and writing and critiquing process of being at Odyssey that I became a better writer by osmosis. But of course, it was more than that—it was that we were taught by Jeanne how the craft of writing worked, got to put those craft lessons into practice immediately in our own writing and see how they were incorporated into our classmates’ stories, and meet and talk to expert writers who had put them into practice in unique and masterful ways. And we were able to talk to our friends and roommates about the process every step of the way. It’s hard, if not impossible, to get that kind of 360-degree perspective on craft anywhere else. It can’t help but make you better.

Can you describe your Odyssey experience? What surprised you most about Odyssey?

Odyssey was…

• having long conversations with new old friends about writing…

• and dancing at 4 AM to stay awake while finishing a story…

• and the moment when you completely get what someone was trying to do with their story or they do the same with yours…

• and learning how the pieces of the writing puzzle that you put together instinctively but sloppily can work for you with purpose and power…

• and meeting experienced writers whose work you to this day recommend to everyone you can…

• and hugs and late-night convos about life and the occasional singalong…

• and realizing that deciding to make this kind of commitment to writing means you are a writer, even if you are still learning and growing.

I’m not sure I expected any of that, and certainly not all at once and so magically.

On your website you say you “primarily write about worlds that don’t yet (quite) exist.” What draws you to write about the near future?

I like to think that phrase covers both fantasy and science fiction. Basically, I tend not to go too far from reality in any of my speculative fiction—my fantasy stories usually don’t have overt magic and my science fiction stories aren’t too heavy on technology. I like the worlds I create to be stranger and more complex than the one we live in, but not so much that they aren’t recognizable. They’re like a funhouse mirror—similar around the edges but warped when you try to compare them to our reality head-on—and, if I do things just right, designed to make certain aspects of our world seem just that much more clear, whether for good or for ill.

Your story “Thanks for the Memories,” an interactive story about a woman piecing her life together one memory at a time, came out in Sub-Q in December 2018. What were some of the challenges in writing a story structured that way?

I had so much fun writing “Thanks for the Memories,” and it’s based on a story I wrote for my last week of Odyssey. I could never make it quite work in prose, but making it interactive and letting the player/reader experience the feeling of trying to work out the main character’s past from within her shoes, using her memories, was the perfect fit of story and format. The hardest part of doing it, other than learning a new coding language to write the piece, was figuring out how to make the piece non-linear (so you could experience the memories in any order), but also structured (so there was a set beginning, middle, and end to drive the story). My solution was to create a frame narrative with a ticking clock and key moments that always happened when the player got through a certain number of memories. That way their experience of the memories could always be different, but the story would still have a shape and forward plot momentum. I like to think it worked out in the end.

You’ve written for the exergame Zombies, Run! What did you learn from writing scripts for the game that you’ve been able to apply to writing prose?

To go back to an earlier question, one of the things you learn at Odyssey, I think, is to better understand your natural strengths and weaknesses as a writer. You’re writing quickly and reacting to all the things you’re being taught, and you often end up drawing on the things that make you the writer you are when you first start, the things that feel as easy to you as breathing. That’s not to say that people don’t push themselves in new ways at Odyssey, but I think having such a concentrated writing experience helps you get to know yourself as a writer.

What I learned is that one of my greatest strengths as a writer is conveying character through voice and one of my biggest weaknesses is plot and structure. The Zombies, Run! writing experience has been wonderful for the latter. We plot out seasons at a time and individual missions within that season before we write them, and that process has helped me put some of the things that Jeanne mentioned a lot at Odyssey (like causal chain) into practice in a different way. Not only that, but Zombies, Run! uses a format that’s still all about storytelling, but still has to fit a specific structure, length, and pace. In writing for Zombies, Run! (and learning from the talented writing staff, led by writer Naomi Alderman), I’ve figured out how to work within a set plot structure to make my stories clearer and better. As I start moving into longer form work, that’s something I will absolutely be drawing on.

When and how did you make your first sale?

My first sale was a revision of another story I wrote at Odyssey: “Wolfy Things.” I had a tendency to turn in shorter pieces, and this was no exception—I think that first draft was about 1,000 words in total. The story really resonated with everyone, but there were a few questions and things I needed to flesh out, so I worked on it after I got back home and turned it in to the very first workshop at my MFA program the following January. I think I was encouraged to keep going with it in part by one of my Odyssey roommates, who had all of us sign the first page of her favorite story by us when we left. That was the story she picked, and since I love her writing, it made me want to make “Wolfy Things” even better.

After a few more tweaks of the story during my MFA workshop, I started sending the story out and collecting rejections. My Odyssey class had all made a pact to try to get 100 rejections in a year, and while I never got remotely close, the pact encouraged me to keep sending the story out and boosting my numbers. Eventually, instead of sending a rejection, the fine folks at PodCastle bought it, which was amazing.

What’s next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

I’m working on a few different short stories at the moment, both on the fantasy and the science fiction side of the SFF genre. They include a fantasy story about an island where people are made into ink and bound to obey the things they read, a sci-fi piece about a human scholarship student trying to fit in at a finishing school for androids, and a story in my memory universe (where “Thanks for the Memories” and my story “Sour Milk Girls” are set) focused on life after prison for a woman whose memory has been erased as a condition of her parole. I’m also gearing up to write a novella about the ghostly protectors of a majority-black urban neighborhood in a rapidly gentrifying city. I look forward to finishing those, getting them out in the world, and continuing to try to do Odyssey proud!