For anyone out there who might be considering applying to the Viable Paradise Writers Workshop, the application period for this year closes on midnight of June 15th.  Class size is twenty-four — with eight instructors on-site for the entire week, this makes for a fairly impressive teacher-student ratio (the nautically-minded among us like to think of it as hitting them with a full broadside.)

Viable Paradise is a one-week^† residential workshop held annually in the autumn on the island of Martha’s Vineyard; the focus is on fantasy and science fiction, and the students can submit either short stories or an equivalent portion of a novel for workshopping.

^†Why one week, rather than six weeks or a month, like some other workshops? Because not everybody out there in the world can free up that much time in one block. Students can, and people who have already committed themselves to some kind of major lifestyle change, but other people have things like families and day jobs. Almost anyone, though, can hack out a single week — take that overdue vacation from the office, or stock the freezer with a week’s worth of pre-made casseroles and indebt yourself to your mother and your mother-in-law and the teenager next door for the necessary babysitting, and come spend a week with people who actually understand why you’re still obsessing about this writing thing.