Instructor Tom Andes wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books, 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, among many others. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a musician and freelance editor. Southern Crescent Recording Co. re-released his acclaimed EPs on vinyl under the title The Ones That Brought You Home in 2025. 

Learn more about Tom in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

This class is limited to 8 writers.

This course is for advanced writers looking to develop their skills at writing the short story and, more broadly, looking to develop their chops as a fiction writer, as the short story can sometimes be a springboard to writing longer work. That said, the workshop focuses on the short story form, so it assumes an interest in the particular challenges and rewards of that form.

Nothing hits quite like a great short story. We all know the feeling, especially after a perfect ending. It feels like we’ve been thrown off a cliff. We can’t believe the writer has stopped here. How can they refuse to tell us what comes next? Yet, we know intuitively this is the right place to stop because we either know what comes next, or we know everything we need to know about the characters in the story. The form is so tantalizing, so powerful, so beguiling in part because of what it doesn’t tell us, what it leaves out.

This workshop course for advanced writers attempts to interrogate the theories and practices that inform the contemporary American short story. What concerns and aesthetic practices animate the stories writers are currently publishing? To that end, alongside a traditional workshop, we’ll be looking at this year’s Best American Short Stories anthology and focusing on how writers in this anthology approach particular craft elements.

We'll devote a week to voice, a week to dialogue, a week to setting and a week to plot. We'll also devote two weeks to strategies for revision, focusing on concrete, actionable steps writers can take to develop their stories. Finally, we'll spend a week talking about publishing, again focusing on specific, actionable strategies writers can take to find magazines hospitable to their work and improve their chances of placing.

But the focus of the course will be on workshopping the stories writers bring to the course. Each writer will have the opportunity to workshop twice. The second workshop may—optionally—be a substantial revision of the first workshopped story. Workshopped stories should be between five and twenty pages in length.

A note about the reading: One might do well to be a little dubious of “best of” anthologies. Given the glut of stories published every year, can a single anthology ever claim to contain the best stories of the year? Of course not. But it’s a good place to start.

What Are the Writing Goals for This Course?

Writers can expect to walk away with direct, specific, actionable feedback on two complete short story manuscripts. They can also expect to walk away feeling conversant in the aesthetic and other issues that are at the heart of the contemporary short story. They will also deepen their knowledge of particular craft elements. They will also walk away with specific, actionable strategies they can employ when revising their stories and looking for places to publish their work.

Does This Class Include Instructor Feedback?

Yes, the instructor will participate in the workshop and provide feedback on two stories from each writer. The feedback will be specific and granular, based in a close, line-level reading of each story but also informed by an understanding of the writer’s intentions, the genre(s) the writer is working in, as well as the cultural context for the story. I know that in some workshops, there is a moratorium on so-called proscriptive suggestions. As a writer, I have always found proscriptive suggestions helpful, provided they are made with a degree of humility, presented as exercises, or perhaps prefaced with the statement, “If this was my story…” I’d like to model that type of engagement for the workshop, a deep, emotional, subjective reading of each story, with the understanding that our individual readings are just that, subjective, therefore our answers might not be the right answers for the writer.

COURSE OUTLINE

This course assumes writers already have a discipline, a practice, and stories they want to workshop, so two writers will be asked to submit their stories one week in advance of the initial class meeting for the first workshop. Each workshop will be divided as follows: 30 minutes for discussion of the published reading, followed by 45 minutes for each story the writers submit. The exception will be the first class, in which those 30 minutes will be spent on introductions and discussing workshop etiquette.

Week One: Introductions, workshop etiquette

Week Two: Focus on voice

Week Three: Focus on dialogue 

Week Four: Focus on setting

Week Five: Focus on plot

Week Six: Revision strategies part one 

Week Seven: Revision strategies part two

Week Eight: Submission and publication strategies

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

The goals of this course are basically twofold: to improve the writing of the workshop participants and to engage more deeply with the contemporary conversations that are part of American writing and specifically of the American short story at the present moment.

I take for granted that those goals are interrelated, that understanding our place in the contemporary conversations helps us better understand our own work and therefore how to improve it. There will also be specific craft takeaways for writers. Some of these might already be familiar revision strategies. But the goal of the course is to add as many tools as we can to the toolbox we use when writing and revising short fiction. To this end, writers will have received specific, actionable guidance and feedback on two full-length short stories, and we will have read and discussed representative selections from the most recent Best American anthology.

STUDENT TESTIMONIALS

“Tom is the kind of reader and teacher every writer should feel lucky to work with—sharp, incisive, intuitive, curious, and warm. Wildly well-read, he brings a keen critical mind and an expansive imagination to his teaching. It was in his classroom that I first workshopped the initial chapters of what would become my debut novel. He read my work with meticulousness and generosity, providing feedback that left me eager to return to the page.” — Antonia Angress, author of Sirens and Muses

“Tom is an outstanding instructor, coach, and editor. His ever-thoughtful feedback, editorial advice, and career guidance have been instrumental in my development as a writer over the years. Tom’s workshops are thoroughly engaging for writers at any stage in their career. He has an incredible breadth of literary knowledge, and his love for the written word is both genuine and contagious.” —Derrick Boden

“Tom does far more than edit, or even teach. He guides, mentors. After patiently sifting through my novel many times Tom continuously offered focused suggestions while pointing out strengths, all the while asking questions that allowed me to find my own answers. Think Morpheus saying, “Do you think that’s air you’re breathing?” Then Tom even shared versions of his own query letters—hugely impactful and confidence building. If you’d like to know more about my experience with Tom, please ask him for my email and reach out.” — Anto Ljoljic

“Thomas Andes is a brilliant writer and teacher, kind, perceptive,humorous, industrious, compassionate, inspiring. All the great attributes of a master teacher. I recommend him to you. I’ve learned so much in his workshop.” — Rosary O’Neill

“Tom was instrumental in bringing my manuscript to its final stage. His notes helped me hone in on character motivations, fight choreography, and overall big-picture changes that helped to drive the story forward much better than the manuscript I presented for his consideration. From the developmental edit to the line edit to helping with my query letter and synopsis, he maintained an enthusiasm for my story that kept me excited about moving forward through additional rewrites. I highly recommend him for anyone seeking editorial services.” — Jon Hébert

“Tom is the kind of mentor who seeks first to understand what you’re tying to write, and then helps you get there. So many instructors impose their own rigid rules of writing, but not Tom. He’s an expert of the craft who can provide guidance across a range of genres and styles without missing a beat. Tom’s editing is always insightful and invigorating. His teaching makes writing feel fun and his encouragement is so genuinely tailored to your project that you forget all the writerly despair.” — Laurel Shimasaki

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE: