Workshops

Wendy Wagner

Weirding Your World: Studying nature to create stranger and more meaningful settings & characters.

The true history of plants and animals on Earth is infinitely weirder than anything in fiction. We’ll discuss how to research and analyze real ecological systems to help you build your settings. And since the world shapes its inhabitants, we’ll also dig into the deeper biological underpinnings and motivations of minds and senses. Come prepared to write as we work through some fun generative exercises!

Wendy N. Wagner is a hiker, trail runner, and Stoker award-nominated horror author (with novels including Girl in the Creek and The Deer Kings) whose short fiction has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson awards. She’s a two-time Locus award nominee for her work editing Nightmare Magazine and is part of the Hugo award-winning editorial team at Lightspeed Magazine. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, a giant cat, and a Muppet disguised as a dog. Find her at winniewoohoo.com.

Jeff Burk

The High Concept Workshop: Want to write books that publishers actually want? Want to write books that people want to actually fucking read? Well, this is the workshop for you!

Each participant will come up with a title, a one-to-two sentence description (aka a logline), and a back cover description. As a class, we will discuss what works, what doesn’t work, and, most importantly, what people will actually pay attention to!

Jeff Burk is the cult favorite author of several books, including SHATNERQUAKE, CRIPPLE WOLF, and THE VERY INEFFECTIVE HAUNTED HOUSE. He is also the
controversial former head editor of Deadite Press and the Magazine of Bizarro Fiction. He spends his time hanging out with circus folks. He really likes cats.

Garrett Cook

The Story of the Deviant Eye: Perceiving the Grotesque in Plain Sight

The perceptions of the Surrealists differ markedly from those of the average person. Were this not so, we would not have Surrealist art. While most people walk about generally unfazed by things around them or snippets of commercial jingles or cartoons they saw once when they were eight years old, this is not so with Bizarro and Horror authors. We are possessed of an acute sense of the unseemly, the outre, and the just plain wrong. A billboard that others might pass every day on the way to work can haunt our nightmares for years and turn into a short story where it takes on a menacing and unearthly shape. In this workshop, I do not intend to ameliorate this condition, but rather to agitate it. We will be examining objects in this workshop, what makes them off, how they could be more off, why they feel weird, and what makes something weird. This will be heavily instinct-driven but will still work to cultivate the senses and sensibilities of the weird writer. We will first generate a 100-word drabble and then by the end of the workshop, at least get a good start on a 500-word flash piece. Turn a bag of junk into a literary treasure!

Garrett Cook is the Wonderland Award-winning and Splatterpunk Award-nominated author of Time Pimp, A God of Hungry Walls, Charcoal, and Kennel. He is a two-time winner of the Ultimate Bizarro Showdown. Whether through running the NBAS for three years or teaching online writing workshops, he has been a friend and mentor to Bizarro writers for over 15 years.

John Skipp

Bizarro Master Plotting Workshop: In this dizzying two-hour crash course, you’ll take the book idea you pitched in the High-Concept workshop and thoroughly flesh it out. Naming your characters. Charting their journeys. And identifying the 100+ crazy-ass things they do to get where they’re going, beat for beat.

This is a team-based exercise, where we break down into groups of two, taking turns throwing down all your wildest ideas while your partner captures them. It’s incredibly fun and eye-poppingly rewarding. BRING AT LEAST 100 INDEX CARDS AND ONE THICK-LINED SHARPEE! And be prepared to have your mind blown, as your whole story lies out before you!

John Skipp’s 2021 Splatterpunk Lifetime Achievement Award encapsulates his long, weird, colorful career as a Rondo award-winning filmmaker (TALES OF HALLOWEEN), Stoker Award-winning anthologist (DEMONS, MONDO ZOMBIE), and New York Times bestselling author (THE LIGHT AT THE END, THE SCREAM) whose books have sold millions of copies in a dozen languages worldwide. His first anthology, BOOK OF THE DEAD, laid the foundation
in 1989 for modern zombie literature. He also co-wrote one of the gnarliest episodes of Shudder’s CREEPSHOW Season One. From splatterpunk founding father to bizarro elder statesman, Skipp has influenced a generation of horror and counterculture artists around the world. His latest book, THIS IS SPLATTERPUNK, is both a career retrospective and a history of the genre. It’s also Bizarro as Fuck.