Besides having one of the best writer’s websites I’ve ever seen, Joan Dempsey has successfully merged the craft she loves with a business model that helps others reach their writing goals. On March 8 at 6 PM EST, she joins me on the Behind the Prose Radio Show to tell us how she lives the literary life oh-so-well. There are things I want to know like: what is a “writing shed” and how does one get one? How do writers decide which genre to focus on? And can you really teach an old writer dog new cut-clutter-from-your sentences-tricks?

Besides delving into her original course, Improve Your Writing: Ten Essential Tools for Streamlining Your Sentences, we’ll focus on the craft of her short story, “Wild Swan” which appeared in The Adirondack Review.

Joan will take your questions live on the air via my studio call-in phone number 347-857-2225.

Tweet your questions or SKYPE in by clicking the button on the live show! #noexcuses

Let’s listen, learn, and write!

Writer Joan Dempsey, MFA

ABOUT JOAN DEMPSEY, MFA
Joan is a graduate of both the MFA in Creative Writing and the Post-Graduate Certificate for the Teaching of Creative Writing Programs at Antioch University Los Angeles, and in 2012 the Elizabeth George Foundation awarded her a significant research grant to work on her current novel-in-progress, Prelude.

Her work has been published in The Adirondack Review, Alligator Juniper, Plenitude Magazine, Obsidian: Literature of the African Diaspora, The Citron Review and has been aired on National Public Radio. In 2008 she was awarded a Maine Literary Award for best unpublished short fiction.

Her first novel – Vigilant –  (as yet unpublished) was a finalist in two novel competitions:  the 2012 Unboxed Books Prize in Fiction and the 2013 Columbus Creative Cooperative Great Novel Contest. Other finalist nods include the 2011 Maine Literary Award for Short Fiction, the 2009 Orlando Nonfiction Prize from A Room of Her Own Foundation, the 2009 Arthur Edelstein Prize for Short Fiction, and in 2007 the Fulton Prize, the Reynolds Price Fiction Award, and the Writers at Work Fellowship Competition in Fiction.

She’s received grants from the Maine Arts Commission and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and scholarships from the Key West Literary Seminars and from Antioch University. She lives in New Gloucester, Maine, where she works from “the shed.”