From Grocery List to Protagonist: Plotting to Publishing with Allison Baxter

In this entertaining fiction-writing workshop, you’ll create characters and a plot based on found grocery lists. Who is buying ‘oatmeal, Drano, and migraine medicine’ and why? Through such questions, you’ll create a protagonist, diagram a plot, and write a scene. You’ll also discuss places to publish short stories and how to get an agent for longer works. There will also be discussion of the website, grocerylists.org, and the book it inspired, A La Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers by Hilary Carlip.

Class meets in person Thursday, June 4, 6 – 8 pm.

Class size: Minimum 5, maximum 15.

Member discount: Members of Write On receive a 10% discount on all classes and workshops. To become a member, please click here. To receive the discount, members must log in to the website using their unique password and enter member10 in the promotion code box. The code is case sensitive.

Teaching Artist: Allison Baxter has taught ESL for 29 years and lives in Illinois with her family. Among the works she has published are “How I Lost My Father Twice” on Scary MommyBlog and “Anamnesis” in the Examined Life Journal: University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. She has a short mystery, “On Ice,” in Mystery Magazine. She published “Faith,” flash fiction based on her experience growing up in Louisiana, in an anthology of the Off Campus Writers Workshop, Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction. Most recently, she published a short story, “Dunes, Dogs, and Du Mauriers,” in Gone Fishin’: Crime Takes a Holiday, The Guppy Anthology. She is the secretary of Sisters in Crime Chicagoland and writes an interview column in the Guppies Newsletter.