Call for Workshop Leaders/Volunteers: Dzanc Day 2011

SUBJECT: Call for Workshop Leaders / Volunteers: Dzanc Day 2011

Last year, Dzanc Books held its first annual Dzanc Day, consisting of forty creative writing workshops held in twenty different states. Thanks to the generous donation of our workshop leaders’ time and talents, Dzanc Day raised thousands of dollars to help support our charitable endeavors, including our Writer in Residence Program, which places professional writers into classrooms to provide creative writing instructions to public school students who could not otherwise afford the opportunity.

This year, Dzanc Day falls on Saturday, April 9, 2011, and we hope you’ll consider leading a workshop in your home city. Some of you participated last year as well, and we hope you’ll accept our thanks for the previous donation of your time and talent, and that you join us again this year, for what promises to be an even better event.

For those unfamiliar with last year’s efforts, we’re looking for volunteers to organize a writing workshop on a topic of their choice. Sessions should last a minimum of two hours (for which participants will be charged $30 each) but longer sessions are certainly possible as well. This workshop can be organized around any creative writing topic you’d like: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, journalism, or memoir. You might wish to run a workshop centered on a particular genre, a more generative session built around writing exercises, or a seminar about topics related to editing or publishing. You can lead a workshop on your own, or team up with friends and fellow writers in putting together your workshop. Just to make sure we don’t
have any miscommunications along the way, one person should be designated to serve as the official contact person for the event.

We’re happy to help you refine your ideas for your workshop, so please feel free to contact us if you’d like to discuss the possibilities. For this year's Dzanc Day, Matt Bell will be our lead contact, with Steven Gillis and Dan Wickett helping coordinate logistics. Feel free to also contact Matt directly at:

matt(at)dzancbooks.org (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail).

The first step in volunteering to be a Dzanc Day workshop leader is to fill out this online form.

The form will ask for your name and contact information, the location that you propose holding a workshop at, your bio (and the bios of anyone else you’re planning on having as co-leaders), and the type of workshop you propose to run (a short paragraph description would be great). If you're unsure of a suitable venue in your city, just let us know and we'll try to help you find one. In the additional information field, if you could, let us know what type of contacts you have within the area in regard to reaching writers that might be interested in such a workshop.

Once we have an idea of who would like to participate and where these workshops will be held, we’ll be in further contact to begin promotional efforts, including providing whatever help we can in promoting your particular event locally. If you feel it might take you some time to gather the information necessary to fill out the form, feel free to email to let us know you're interested in participating.

Again, we thank you for volunteering your time and helping us to raise funds for efforts such as our Writers in Residence Program, individual workshops, public readings, the Best of the Web series, and the Dzanc Prize, which recognizes a single writer for both literary excellence and community service. Dzanc could not possibly do all the wonderful things we're trying to organize and bring to the public were it not for your ongoing support.