ABOUT
A workshop is a room with the door open.
Plenty of places will sell you a writing class. A catalogue of unrelated courses from dozens of instructors is open to everyone, but that’s not a workshop. It’s a marketplace pretending to be a community.
We built the other thing: a workshop. Open to any writer, calibrated to where you actually are. A place to grow, not a shelf to browse.
WHAT “OPEN” MEANS
It isn’t a slogan; it’s how the workshop is built. It shapes who gets in, how the room runs, and how you pay.
01 Open access.
A short application, not a competition. We don’t rank you, score a portfolio, or decide whether you’re “ready.” Some classes have prerequisites, but that’s calibration so everyone’s in the room with peers, never a filter for prestige.
02 Open structure.
Every class holds the same standard: clear goals, real feedback, a structured arc, and room for a community to form. You always see who’s teaching—and how small the class is—before you pay.
03 Open economics.
Transparent pricing, transparent class sizes, transparent takeaways. The price is the price: no sales, no financial aid lottery, no surprises. Membership is month to month, so you can leave whenever you want.
One thing that isn’t open: your work.
Whatever you share in the room stays yours: drafts, ideas, copyright. We never reuse it or pass it around.
WHO IT’S FOR
A writer at any stage should find a room that meets them where they are.
The ones who never started.
You’ve wanted it for years. The talent was there, the will was there, the conditions weren’t. This is room where you begin.
The ones who keep stopping.
Working writers with real lives. You start, life intervenes, you stop. What you need isn’t more talent: it’s deadlines that hold and people expecting your pages.
The ones who finished an MFA.
You had a workshop, a cohort, a structure, and then it ended. This is where you get the structure back, without going back to school.
WHY I BUILT THIS
I’ve spent my life around this work, and I know that community is how the writing gets done.
My fiction has won the Starcherone Prize; I’ve held fellowships from Cambridge and the Whiting Foundation and earned a PhD from the University of Southern California. My work has been written about and reviewed in the national media and translated into multiple languages. I teach at the university level; I’ve sat on the other side of the desk long enough to know how the machinery works.
But none of that has made the writing life feel survivable. I know the submission years from the inside: the near misses, the long silences, the offer that finally arrived from a press that wasn’t the right home for the book. The market is lonelier than anyone tells you, and no prize on a shelf changes the feeling of facing the page by yourself.
What actually kept me writing was other writers, people who expected my pages and kept reading them long after any class was over. That’s why I built the Open Workshop: no gatekeeping, no fairy tales about the industry, just an open door and a chair with your name on it.
— Bryan Hurt, Founder
THE WORK
Books by Bryan Hurt. You should know whose room you’re walking into before you pull up a chair.
THE FOURTH MAN
FICTION
WATCHLIST
EDITOR
EVERYONE WANTS TO BE AMBASSADOR TO FRANCE
STORIES • STARCHERONE PRIZE
“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
— Steven King, On Writing
Pull up a chair.
The door’s open. Start with a class or join the room year-round with a membership. Either way you won’t be writing alone.