Wednesday, January 7th, 2026

Class will meet Weekly via Zoom from 7:00PM - 8:30PM ET

Note: If you can't attend live, this class will be recorded. 

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button to talk with us. 

Sara Reish Desmond grew up in rural Pennsylvania and graduated from Kenyon College with a BA in English. After many years of working as a high school English teacher in urban Los Angeles and Boston, she earned her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her short fiction has been published in Front Porch, The Los Angeles Review, the Kenyon Review, Waterstone Review, and elsewhere. Her short story collection, entitled What We Might Become, which is centered on the idea of liminality and threshold experiences, was published in 2024 by Cornerstone Press, which won the Storytrade Award in Short Fiction and a bronze Independent Publishers Award. She is currently the Gish Jen Fellow at Writer's Room of Boston. She teaches and writes just north of Boston where she lives with her husband and two daughters. 

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

This class involves real-time conversation and feedback about the nature of individual collections and will involve feedback about query letters.

• Writers will gain a deeper understanding of the collection as a whole (including identifying gaps in the message) and perceived patterns to help shape their query narratives.
• Writers will sequence their collections with respect to identified aims/ messaging.
• Writers will leave with a query letter draft for submission to presses and/ or agents.

COURSE OUTLINE:

Week 1 Focus: Finding the Center (theme, pattern, point of view, elimination, and augmentation).

Week 2 Focus: Sequencing (voice, point of view, TOC)

Week 3 Focus: The Power of Distillation (story/ essay and overall theme)

Week 4 Focus: The Query Letter

PRAISE FOR SARA:

"This class exceeded my expectations, especially Sara's unique pov on the topic and her openness to her students' input." -former student

"Sara has a way of distilling both the art form of writing and the principles that drive us to want to write into consumable pieces. I always sign up for her classes when I see her post them." Joanna

"Sara did a great job with this class. She is an excellent presenter. Highly recommend." -former student

"Her creative prompts always have me generating something I'll continue to work on after I leave her class." Maggie

"From the very first class I took with Sara, I could tell she was a teacher and that her students must love her. She is a master of the story craft, that's for sure. But not every great writer also knows how to teach. She walks alongside her students in their classes: teaching, listening, helping students unlock their potential." Andrew

“The cadence of the sentences, the probing, unsettling voice of her narrators, and the dark conclusions she reaches about the underside of contemporary American life. . . Desmond writes with quiet fury.” – JESS ROW, author of The New Earth

“What We Might Become maps the spaces left in the wake of grief, and all the ways we hunger and search, in that aftermath, to connect, heal, and belong. I will return to these haunting, perfect stories, and their evocative landscapes, again and again.” – ROBIN MACARTHUR, author of Heart Spring Mountain

“These stories are vivid and taut, and one of Desmond’s great virtues is that she doesn’t get in the way of her characters. She lets them breathe.” – STEVE YARBROUGH, author of Stay Gone Days

“At the heart of Desmond’s stories are characters living lives of quiet desperation. . . To consider our own quiet desperation, who it causes us to harm, who it impels us to love. You will not shake these stories easily. I certainly have not.” – NEEMA AVASHIA, author of Another Appalachia

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

This 4-week class starts on Wednesday, January 7th, 2026, and will meet Weekly via Zoom from 7:00PM - 8:30PM ET.

Note: If you can't attend live, this class will be recorded.

• Instructor: Sara Reish Desmond

• Starts on Wednesday, January 7th, 2026
  

• Class will meet Weekly via Zoom from 7:00PM - 8:30PM ET

• Note: If you can't attend live, this class will be recorded.