This summer, The Masters Review wants to learn with you! Join us for four live workshops designed to spark your creativity and elevate your craft. Each individual workshop will cost $20, or you can sign up today to get all four for $60! All workshops will take place over Zoom and a recording will be shared with everyone who registers, so you can participate no matter where you’re located. Learn more about our courses and instructors below.
Setting: Place and Space, taught by Brandon Williams
May 21, 2026
7:30pm EDT / 4:30 PDT
Of the basic literary elements that all fiction possesses (character, plot, point of view, etc.), setting is often an afterthought. In this course—”Setting: Place and Space”—we will flip that script, using setting as the conduit for deeper understanding of major story elements. We will consider both the geographical and spatial aspects of setting, and explore how we can utilize deep dives into both place and space to make our characters human, our internal and external conflicts specific, our dialogue individual, our tone and mood unique, and our details distinct. Through short lecture, discussion, and generative exercise, we will complicate your in-progress story or novel pages, considering our worlds and people from the ground-up: from the rooms in which they sit to the geography they inhabit.
Please come to the discussion with your story’s two or three most commonly used visual spaces in mind, and with a basic awareness of backstory for your main character and main supporting character. While no reading is required pre-workshop, we may discuss small sections from the following stories that I would recommend to anyone interested in these topics: Benjamin Percy, “The Caves of Oregon” and “Refresh, Refresh”; Susan Straight, “Bridge Work” (hey, we published that!).
Brandon Williams was raised in Northern California, teaches in Southern California, and (wishes he still) lived on the California Central Coast. He serves as Assistant Editor at The Masters Review. His work has appeared in Threepenny Review, Crazyhorse, Black Clock, The LA Review of Books, Carve, Confrontation, Huizache, and others. He is probably driving right now.
The Three Cs of Characterization, taught by Gage Saylor
June 18, 2026
7:30pm EDT / 4:30 PDT
This course will provide attendees with the tools and resources to shape their characters into their strongest, most complicated selves. Through what I call the three Cs (Context, Contrast, and Contact), we’ll cover the foundations of story and how they inform character before a protagonist even enters the scene. After complicating the relationship between a character and the world they inhabit, we’ll move to the interrelated craft choices that complement character and inform how readers align themselves with (or in opposition to) our protagonists. We’ll close on strategies to amplify a character’s personality and create a three-dimensional person who lingers with readers long after the story is over.
Please bring a story, novel excerpt, or a fleshed-out story/novel idea to participate in our generative exercises. If possible, prepare a two to three sentence summary of the premise, two to three sentences about the setting (landscape, general location, and time), and two to three sentences about your character as you currently understand them. While this preparation isn’t required, it will put attendees in the headspace to see their characters and story in a new light.
Gage Saylor is a writer, editor, and teacher from South Carolina. He earned a PhD in Fiction from Oklahoma State University, as well as an MFA and MA from McNeese State University. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Passages North, Tampa Review, Grist, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He currently serves as the Marketing Director for Split/Lip Press. Learn more at www.gagesaylor.com.
Navigating Flashback and Backstory, taught by Jen Dupree
July 16, 2026
7:30pm EDT / 4:30 PDT
In The Art of Time in Fiction, Joan Silber defines backstory as “the stuff in the past that’s fueling the current story. It is those bits from the characters’ histories that explain the cravings, fears and affinities that run in the present-time plot.” But how do we decide when and how long to leave the present story, what backstory to tell, and how to enter and leave the current narrative? In this workshop, we’ll ask these questions of our own work and we’ll look at examples of backstory in both “Crossings” by Bryan Washington and “Annunciation” by Lauren Groff.
Additional recommended reading: “Killings” by Andre Dubus, which can be found in his collection Finding a Girl in America (check your local library!). This story was the basis for the film In the Bedroom, and looking at them side-by-side allows for an interesting comparison of how backstory can be rendered. It’s worth checking out both if you have time. Also: “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder!
Jen Dupree is the award-winning author of two novels, The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach (2022) and What Do You Want from Me? (2025). Slow Motion: A Memoir of Friendship, Disability, and Advocacy, her first full-length work of nonfiction, will be out with Islandport Press in March of 2026. She is an assistant editor for The Masters Review, a library director, and a former bookstore owner. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from USM’s Stonecoast program. Her work has appeared in Slippery Elm, December, Solstice, The Masters Review, On the Rusk and other notable places. She is the winner of the Writer’s Digest Fiction Contest, a Pushcart nominee, and a two-time winner of a Maine Literary Award. She lives in Maine with her husband and Portuguese Water Dog (Pink) Floyd. Find her at www.JenniferDupree.com.
Generative Revision as an Act of Love, taught by Reena Shah
August 20, 2026
7:30pm EDT / 4:30 PDT
Revision is perhaps one of the least discussed, most feared aspects of the writing process. It’s also, in Kiese Laymon’s words, an act of love (“We revisit what we love.”). Using this principle, we’ll approach revision as a process of discovery that involves taking risks and being messy, regardless of whether the work is a 2nd draft or a 6th. We’ll examine global revision techniques, such as outlining cause and effect, to more surgical shifts, like playing with points of view.
We’ll look closely at two drafts of the story “The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado (I’ll send both prior to the class) as well as excerpts from Elizabeth McCracken’s “Thunderstruck” and Justin Torres’s We the Animals. We’ll also do a couple generative writing exercises to help us see our projects anew. My goal is for you to leave the course feeling energized about your work and with revision techniques for future drafts.
Please bring a story or novel excerpt that you are revising or hope to revise. If you have time, please consider the following questions before the class:
- What is your project in one to two sentences?
- What is the journey this work has already taken? Is this a first draft? Was it a story before it was a novel? Or a novel before it was a story? Or something else?
- Reread your manuscript once or twice before we meet with no other goal except curiosity. Jot down questions and ideas as they come up.
Reena Shah is the author of Every Happiness, an Indies Introduce pick for winter/spring 2026 and an Indie Next title for February 2026. Her work has appeared in swamp pink, The Masters Review, Electric Literature, Waxwing Magazine, Joyland, BBC, and National Geographic, among others. She is the recipient of a Steinbeck Fellowship, the Keene Prize in Literature from the University of Texas in Austin, a Fulbright Scholarship, and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship. For many years she was a kathak dancer with the Parul Shah Dance Company. She is a fiction editor at The Rumpus, teaches at a public school in Brooklyn, and lives in Roosevelt Island with her family.