Two Craft Sessions

On the Saturday afternoon of the Harvest Writers Retreat, there will be two optional craft talks for retreat participants, one on building a plan for submissions and another on generating new short pieces.. To see the full retreat schedule, click here.


Who, What, Why, When, Where: Building a Plan for Submissions

with Meghan Sterling

Very few writers have editors and publishers knocking on their doors asking for writing. So no matter the genre you’re writing in or how many publication credits you have to your name, you need a plan for submitting your work. Where should you send your work? When should you send out your work? What should you send? How might you deal with all of the inevitable rejections? How might you build on your successful submissions? These and many other questions related to submitting will be asked and answered. This talk will give participants a roadmap for developing their own unique submissions plan that is appropriate for their goals in the coming year(s).


Meghan Sterling’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Rhino Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Colorado Review, Rust & Moth, and many others. Her chapbook, How We Drift, was published by Blue Lyra Press. She is Associate Poetry Editor for the Maine Review, Featured Poet in Frost Meadow Review’s Spring 2020 issue, a Dibner Fellow at the 2020 Black Fly Writer’s Retreat, and a Hewnoaks Artists’ Colony Resident in 2019 and 2021. She was co-editor of the anthology, A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, published by Littoral Books. Her debut full-length poetry collection, These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) came out in 2021. Her second full-length collection, View from a Borrowed Field, won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize and will come out in March 2023. Her chapbook, Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora (Harbor Editions) will come out in April 2023. Her third full-length collection, Comfort the Mourners (Everybody Press) will come out summer 2023. When she isn’t writing poetry, being a mom or running in the snow, she serves as MWPA’s Program Director.


Innovating in Flash: A Generative Pop-up Session

with CB Anderson

Interested in new forms for your short-shorts? Ready to experiment? In this hour-long session we’ll look at the braid and the collage. After some brief instruction, participants will craft pieces based on a series of prompts and suggestions. Sharing will occur as time permits, and we’ll talk about where to submit finished flashes. Poets, memoirists, fiction writers: All welcome!


Cynthia (CB) Anderson is a writer, journalist and teacher. Her book Home Now: How 6,000 Refugees Transformed an American Town (Perseus Public Affairs) received honorable mention in the 2020 New York Book Festival. Her collection River Talk (C&R Press) was a Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2014 and received the 2014 New England Book Festival award for Short Stories.

Her fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, North American Review, Pangyrus, Hayden's Ferry, Indiana Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Masters Review and elsewhere. Prizes include the New Millennium Award and the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize.