Okay, this is a little different for a spotlight, but it’s my blog, I’m allowed. Since I just got finished teaching the sixth RAWR class last month, I thought I would tell those of you who don’t know a little about the workshop.
The idea for RAWR started in, um, 2014 probably. A few of us were talking online about writing resources and how it would be nice to have a Clarion*-like workshop for furry writers. Alkani Serval took those ideas and built a plan of action around them, and a year and a half later we welcomed our first five RAWR students.
*The Clarion Workshop is a six-week residential writing workshop that is over 50 years old. Professional writers teach one week at a time, so each class gets to learn from six different teachers. Classes are normally around 18 people, and they all live on a campus together for a month and a half while they’re working on their writing. It’s an intense experience that can be very rewarding.
This skips over a ton of hard work that Alkani put in. I and the other three people from the original discussion (Dark End, Sparf, and Ocean) also contributed a lot of work, but Alkani was the one who kept us on track and managed the whole project. I volunteered to teach, and we recruited Ryan Campbell, who’s in my writing group and who also attended Clarion (in a different year), to be the other instructor.
We didn’t have the resources to put together a six-week workshop, but we thought we could impart some of the lessons of Clarion in a week, especially if we could set up a residential workshop. We held our first class in January of 2016 in the Bay Area, because that’s where Ryan and I lived and it kept our costs down. It succeeded well enough to convince us that we could stage another workshop.
In 2017 we moved to South Lake Tahoe, which had a large amount of short-term rental space available at the time (they have or are in the process of changing their laws to make it less available) and had the added benefit of being fantastically beautiful. Our second, third, and fourth classes would be there among pine trees, Stellar’s jays, and mice, next to a beautiful lake.
But South Lake Tahoe is also on one side of the country and an hour away from the nearest major airport, if you consider Reno major. So we planned to hold the fifth RAWR class in campus facilities at a university in Dallas, which had the advantages of being central to the country, near a major airport, and near a major furry publisher. That would’ve been in 2020, so…you can figure out what happened next.
RAWR 5 and 6 have been remote, and the classes have been fantastic at handling that difficulty. Part of the point of RAWR is to be in-person so that the students have a chance to bond while working on their writing. That’s harder to do through a virtual window, but our two virtual classes have done their best. We hope to get back to in-person in 2023, conditions permitting.
Each workshop lasts a week, during which students will write a story and critique their fellow students’ stories. We hope that the experience will help the students bond as a class, because there’s a certain amount of trust necessary in giving and accepting critique, even if it’s only over one week and not six.
The submission period for RAWR 7 will open up soon here. If you’re an aspiring writer, why not give it a try?