Shaping and Publishing Part of a Longer Project

You’re in the thick of writing a long work – a book, a manuscript, a thesis.  But maybe you want to finish – and publish – something shorter.  Something excerpted from your longer project, or something adjacent to it.  

What if you skimmed off the cream layer, chose only the sirloin, focused just on the blossom and not the whole squash?  This workshop will talk through the possibilities of shorter works cut from a longer project – either excerpted from it and shaped to stand alone, or something new but stemming from the same ideas, or something that doesn’t quite fit but refuses to be left behind.  We’ll discuss turning these pieces into chapbooks, “shortie” collections, and/or stand-alone essays.  Please be ready to work (on your own) with a significant work-in-progress.

Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her full-length collection Be With Me Always was published by Nebraska in 2019 and was a finalist for the Foreword Indies Awards for Essays. Her lyric essay anthology A Harp in the Stars, published by Nebraska in 2021, won a Forward Indies Honorable Mention for Essays. Randon’s lyric essay chapbook Devotional was published by Red Bird in 2017, and her essay “The Heart as a Torn Muscle” was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2016 and selected for the anthology The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Individual essays have been published in the Modern Love column of The New York Times; The Massachusetts Review; Passages North; PANK; Brain, Child; Sweet: A Literary Confection; The Georgia Review; Shenandoah; The Rumpus; Brevity; Fourth Genre; The Los Angeles Review of Books; Creative Nonfiction, Literary Hub, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and elsewhere. Her next book is a lyric meditation on shadows, also forthcoming from Nebraska, in 2023.