Now’s the Time to Apply to Annual Fiction Workshop

Are you determined to finish that novel this year? Or do you need help finding your way through a short story you started?

Then consider applying to the 2019 Annual Fiction Writing Workshop led by Richard Bausch, an award-winning author and professor in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Chapman University. The free community workshop has been a Bausch tradition since the renowned short story writer and novelist joined Chapman in fall 2012.

“We don’t put any limitations on applicants, either by age or by background,” Bausch says. “Who can tell where the next good writer will come from? A selected participant could be a high school student, an unemployed person, a doctor, a lawyer, a custodian or restaurant worker, a retired bank examiner, a truck driver or a teacher. Frankly, the more diversity in the class, the better. We encourage everyone to apply – so dust off that manuscript you’ve been working on, or write a new one and submit it.”

The competitive application process via manuscript submission is open to anyone who is able to meet in Orange once a week throughout the spring semester. Deadline to apply is Friday, Feb. 1. Applications should be double-spaced pages, prose fiction, up to 10 pages and in Word document format only. PDFs will not be accepted. Include name, phone number and email and submit through the online application site. (Chapman students, faculty and employees are ineligible to apply.)

The workshop will meet Tuesdays, beginning Feb. 5, at 7:30 p.m. at 1888 Center in Orange.

Bausch is an acknowledged master of both the novel and short-story form. His work has been published in “Esquire,” “Harper’s,” “The New Yorker,” “The Atlantic Monthly,” “Playboy”, “GQ,” and “The Southern Review,” among many others and anthologized in “New Stories from the South,” “The Best American Short Stories,” “O. Henry Prize Stories,” “The Pushcart Prize Stories,” “The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story,” “The Granta Book of the American Short Story” and more.

He is the author of 12 novels and eight collections of stories. His novel “Peace” is presently being filmed in Canada by Academy Award Winning Director Robert David Port.

Bausch has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and The Rea Award. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and since 2002 has been the sole editor of the prestigious Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.