[New: Read about me in Wikipedia]

The Writers Workshop Project fills a gap between expensive college programs and workshops and grassroots workshops or solo writing efforts. WWP meetings offer writers a friendly place to

• Learn craft
• Stay focused
• Receive professional feedback & guidance
• Meet professionals
• Save money
• And more

The low workshop fee is affordable by most writers and helps promote a professional environment. The fee also pays for room rental, materials, snacks and teaching time. All writing levels are welcome.

A limit of no more than about 8 participants maintains the WWP’s comfortable, intimate atmosphere.

Most workshops are led by Michael Jackman (see below for more info), though occasionally there are guest presenters.

• While college programs and fancy workshops offer writers a place to network, learn craft and give and receive intense commentary on your creative work, they’re limited in time, are expensive, and at the undergraduate or beginner level may not offer a small gathering of interested professionals.

• Informal workshops can contain committed writers and offer good critiques. But in my experience, they can eventually lose focus and stagnate at the same level of craft.

• The WWP can improve your level of critique and craft. Take it back to your own writing and to your informal workshop.

The WWP also sponsors and organizes retreats, readings and other events, such as Creative Cocktails.

About WWP Director and Workshop Leader Michael Jackman

I’m thankful that my teaching and writing skills have allowed me to promote a culture of writing, workshopping and performing through the WWP, Indiana University Southeast, the Spalding MFA low-residency program, and wherever I can.

In addition to directing the WWP, I’m a Senior Lecturer in Writing at Indiana University Southeast, an award-winning columnist, a published poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and an editorial consultant for New Southerner and the IU Southeast alumni magazine.

Formerly, I served on the executive committee of the American Jewish Press Association and the board of InKY, now Louisville Literary Arts, which runs the InKY Reading Series and Writers Block festival.

At IUS I teach a wide variety of courses, to undergraduates and sometimes students in the Masters of Liberal Studies program, including research, technical, and business writing, composition, creative writing, fiction, poetry and rhetoric. When I teach I do the best I can to instill in students improved writing ability as well as enthusiasm and love for the craft of written English. One of my goals is to create and support a culture of writing and literature at IUS outside the classroom.

In 2005 I received a Kentucky Society of Professional Journalists’ award for my column Technicalities, an irreverent weekly column on “the bewildering effects of high tech on our lives,” which I wrote for Snitch (now defunct). The column

appeared in Louisville, Lexington, and Paducah, Ky.; San Diego; Columbia, S.C.; and Savannah, Ga. I also briefly wrote a column about the Honda Fit, called A More Perfect Fit, for the autochannel. For four years I was a regular commentator on Louisville’s WFPL FM, and on Kentucky Public Radio.

One of my favorite accomplishments is to have performed my stories several times, and even written a couple of scripts, for folk singer John Gage’s live radio show Kentucky Homefront.

In 2000, as an editor for techrepublic.com, I traveled to Nepal in the company of other trekkers, and hiked on the Khumbu trail up to Everest base camp. I wrote daily diaries and took photographs, beamed back via satellite phone and chronicled on the company’s Web site. They live on in my archives. I was also the first Web editor for The Courier Journal.

I earned my MFA in creative writing from Spalding University, where I was mentored by poets Debra Kang Dean, Maureen Morehead (Kentucky Poet Laureate), and Molly Peacock, and also worked with poets Randall Horton and Greg Pape. I also earned an MA in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Louisville, where I was a student of acclaimed novelist and former Kentucky Poet Laureate Sena Naslund, and poet Jeffrey Skinner. I enjoy writing of all kinds, including research, poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and journalism. In the creative writing field, writers are often advised to stick to one genre. While it’s a practical way to approach writing, I can’t seem to follow that advice, so I don’t give it. Write whatever you want to, and write your hearts out.

At UofL, I stuck around after my MA to qualify for a doctorate in Composition and Rhetoric. I left the program “A.B.D.” (“all but dissertation”).

For hobbies I like to swim freestyle crawl, go hiking and camping, sing, play guitar and flute (and lately blues harmonica), do NY Times crossword puzzles, and watch sci fi like Dr. Who, Torchwood, Battlestar Galactica, nerd/geek sitcoms like Big Bang Theory, Freaks and Geeks, classics like Bogart and Bacall’s To Have and Have Not, and madcap Marx Bros comedies.

I’m married to Dana Sue Kahn Jackman, and live in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville, KY with our Kentucky Bobtail cat Elsa Sophie.

That’s all I can think to say about me. If you have any questions about me, my workshops, or my courses, e-mail me through my contacts page.