Adult Creative Writing Classes

Fiction Shop (Instructor: David Fulmer)

Meets 6-8 p.m. Mondays, April 21-June 9 (class to be held on Tuesday, May 27 due to Memorial Day holiday) in the Movie Museum

You've heard of wood shop; here's "Fiction Shop," covering the nuts and bolts—the many practical elements—of fiction and non-fiction writing. Students bring skill and raw material and instructor David Fulmer helps them shape and polish. "It is a craft, after all," Fulmer says. This workshop will steer any writer to the next level of storytelling through written word. Components include setting, dialogue, characters, plotting, and editing. Short exercises push the learning curve. The session also includes a discussion of the business of fiction and effective strategies with agents and publishers.

Finding Your Voice (Instructor: Chelsea Rathburn)

Meets Mondays, 6-8pm on the third floor of the MMHouse (April 28-June 16);
7 weeks–skipping Memorial Day
Tuesdays, 10am-12pm on the third floor of the MMHouse (April 29-June 10);
7 weeks

Interested in poetry but not sure where to start? This introductory workshop will introduce you to techniques for creating compelling poetry and give you opportunities to practice them. You will explore imagery, tone, persona, line endings, the play of form against content, and more, with an aim toward developing your own unique voice. You’ll workshop students’ poems, examine established writers’ work, and engage in exercises designed to inspire your creativity and expand your skills.

About the Instructors:

David Fulmer is the author of five critically-acclaimed, award-winning novels. Chasing the Devil's Tail was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Barry Award, and a Falcon Award, and won a 2002 Shamus Award. Jass was nominated for the "Best of 2005" lists by Library Journal and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and received the 2006 Georgia Author of the Year Award for Fiction. These books and his two most recent, Rampart Street and The Dying Crapshooter's Blues, received excellent reviews from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Times Picayune, The Boston Globe, an Publishers Weekly. Rampart Street was voted "One of the Best Novels You’ve Never Read" by New York Magazine and won the Benjamin Franklin award for best fiction audio of 2007. His fifth novel, The Dying Crapshooter's Blues, set in Atlanta, ws published in 2007, and The Blue Door was published in January.

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of The Shifting Line, which won the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award and was published by the University of Evansville Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Atlantic Monthly, the New Criterion, the Hudson Review, the Cincinnati Review and others, and book reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Cortland Review. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas. A marketing writer by trade, she lives in Decatur.

To register for classes, please print and complete the registration form,
include payment, and mail to

Margaret Mitchell House
Attention Programs Department
990 Peachtree St.
Atlanta, GA 30309

The registration form is in Adobe PDF format.
You can download the Adobe Reader if you don't already have it installed.

For more information, please contact Melanie Eisenhart:
call 404-814-2063; 404-249-9388 (fax); or melanie.eisenhart@gwtw.org.