I’ve spoken at events around the world, including the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Aspen Institute, Book Expo America, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Google Talks, Writer’s Digest West, CreativeLive, the Bay Area Book Festival, the San Francisco Writers Conference, and the AWP Conference.
I speak on a variety of writing and creativity topics—list included below—and I love Zooming into a classroom or book group for a chat.
To book a speaking engagement, please contact me via wgfaulkner AT gmail.com.
For other matters, I prefer to be contacted via psychic missives, messages in bottles, paper airplanes, and handwritten letters.
Or please contact my agent, Julie Stevenson at Massie & McQuilken .
Special Events
Wine and Words
Color, fragrance, texture, taste: many senses are engaged when you enjoy a glass of wine. But have you ever tried listening to a sip of wine? Turning your attention to the sounds and whispers of your thoughts and memories, the stories and visions conjured by your imagination?
Guided by your hosts, Grant Faulkner and Elizabeth Rosner, you’re invited to an adventurous and playful experience tasting a curated selection of wines, along with prompts to inspire writing your own 100-word descriptions—or stories, rather, because every sip of wine holds a story. Or a poem.
[The description above is exactly 100 words, by the way.]
Please note: This experience doesn’t have to be solely about wine. We can do this event with cheese, chocolate, tea, coffee, anything.
See our brochure, Tasting Wine and Telling Stories.
Teaching and Speaking Topics
The Art of Brevity
In flash fiction, the whole is a part and the part is a whole. The form forces the writer to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste, and move a story by hints and implications. Flash stories are built through gaps as much as the connective tissue of words, so what’s left out of a story is often more important than what’s included.
In this workshop, Grant Faulkner, co-founder of 100 Word Story and the author of The Art of Brevity—will discuss how a different type of creativity emerges within a hard compositional limit, exploring the many different forms that short shorts can take.
A Crash Course in Novel Writing
One of the biggest obstacles any writer faces is writing the first draft of a novel. As Nora Ephron said, “I think the hardest part about writing is writing.”
Your story matters, and “someday” is not the time to write it. If something has been holding you back from writing your novel—whether it be lack of time, lack of motivation, lack of knowing how to write it, or just plain fear—then Grant Faulkner, former Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, can help you get your creative juices flowing and take the first steps to planning your novel.
Warning: you will leave this session with a novel plan in hand, so be prepared to write.
What It Takes to Finish a Book
Writing a novel has been compared to months of pregnancy, running a marathon, climbing a mountain, or even going to war. And it can feel like all those things in one. This is why it’s worth thinking about the novels you’ve abandoned and ask if you gave up because the novel wasn’t good enough or because you lacked the stamina to see it through.
Many a novelist has hit a wall and abandoned their creative dreams not because of a lack of talent, but because of their creative mindset. Your main task as a novelist is to train for endurance and develop the creative mindset necessary to be vulnerable, overcome imposter syndrome, release perfectionism, manage envy, develop grit, be accountable—and commit to finishing your novel!
From Snapshot to Story and Back: Writing with Images and Photos
Diane Arbus said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Good writers write to the questions, not the answers. Mixing photos into stories heightens those questions because a “photo story” creates an intertextual conversation, the story flowing from the photo, the photo flowing from the story, to create a different reading and writing experience: tactile, filmic, playful, documentary, archival, and even otherworldly.
In this class, we’ll write to photos and discuss how photos can be added to your stories to enhance the reader’s experience.
Flash Memoir
Flash memoir is one of the most exciting and least understood forms in contemporary nonfiction. Somewhere between the lyric essay and the prose poem, between the journal entry and the personal essay, flash memoir has no single definition and no settled home. It can be a sentence. It can be a page. It can be a numbered proposition, a fragment, a single image rendered in prose, a scene that ends before it fully begins.
The flash memoir’s brevity is not a limitation but a demand: every word must earn its place, every image must carry more than its surface weight, every silence must speak. The sliver of a life, rendered with precision, can tell us more about what it means to be alive than a hundred pages of explanation might.
This class will explore the flash memoir from the inside: what it is, what it can do, and why writers are increasingly drawn to it. The class will examine how the form relates to larger questions about memory, truth, and the self. We will consider how flash memoir differs from flash fiction, how it relates to the lyric essay and prose poem traditions, and why its particular compression may be uniquely suited to the way we actually remember our lives—not in long arcs, but in sudden, vivid, irreducible moments. Writers at every stage of their practice will leave with a deeper understanding of this emerging form and its extraordinary possibilities.
The Rejection Mindset: Building Resilience to Submit Your Story
Every writer knows the sting of rejection — the form letter, the silence, the “not quite right for us.” But few writers have been given the tools to transform that sting into something useful. This class changes that.
Drawing on psychological research, the rejection stories of celebrated authors, and a set of practical exercises, we’ll explore why rejection feels the way it does (it’s not weakness — it’s neuroscience), how writers from Marlon James to Madeleine L’Engle navigated their darkest moments of doubt and kept going, and what it looks like to build a genuine rejection practice — one that makes submitting feel less like exposure and more like craft.
We’ll also pull back the curtain on the other side of the desk, exploring how agents and editors experience rejection themselves, and what that means for how we interpret the inevitable “no.”
You’ll leave with a clearer sense of your own rejection patterns, a values-based framework for staying grounded when the responses come in, and a community of fellow writers to submit alongside.
Because the world might tell us it doesn’t want our stories. But we’ve got to disagree.
Writing with Vulnerability
Writing with vulnerability is more important than any craft tool because being vulnerable is how we connect with others, so writers who risk vulnerability tend to write stories that are the most compelling.
A good story occurs when an author travels, or even plummets, into the depths of vulnerability and genuinely opens his or her soul in search of truths that otherwise go untold.
Join Grant Faulkner and learn about what happens when you share the most difficult parts of your story in service of deeper truths.
Writing with Love
- How does one write with love?
- How does writing with love change the words on the page—and the author who writes them?
Inspired by James Baldwin’s belief that writing is an act of bearing witness and by Carvell Wallace’s radical definition of love as struggle—to love yourself better, to love others better, and to help others love better—this course grew from a conviction that love is not the soft subject of Hallmark cards, but the most important word in the human language.
By writing with love, we can not only write more layered and nuanced stories, we can make our writing practice more fulfilling, healthy, generous, and caring.
bell hooks taught us that love is a verb, a practice, a choice made daily. Mary Oliver said that attention is the beginning of devotion. Edwidge Danticat wrote about the singular intimacy between writer and reader—that we are alone together on the page. This course, which I often team teach with June Gervais, holds all three ideas simultaneously: love as intimacy, love as practice, and love as the most precise form of attention a writer can offer.
The course will include reading, discussion, and generative writing. Themes covered include:
- What Is Love? Finding Your Other Word for Love
- Love of Self: Compassion, Complexity, Courage
- Love of Others: Risk, Consolation, and Ethics
- Love of the World: Grief, Delight, and Resistance
- Love for the Reader
- Love as Mystery: Writing to the Questions
- How Do We Build Love Into Our Writing Process/Practice?
- Writing as Love: Making Your Writing an Invitation
See our course brochure!
Being an Author and Being an Authorpreneur
Are you a writer/author with an idea for a reading series, a literary podcast, or a course you want to develop and teach? Maybe you’ve imagined launching a literary nonprofit, magazine, bookstore, or even a book festival. Whether you’ve started to cobble together a creative life in addition to your writing—or maybe you’re already doing it—you’re an authorpreneuer.
In this session, Grant Faulkner (cofounder of the community and podcast Memoir Nation, cofounder of the Flash Fiction Institute, and cofounder of the literary journal 100 Word Story) offers an inspiring and practical course that covers what he’s learned about growing literary- and book-adjacent businesses, drawing on decades of experience as a creator, publisher, producer, and literary change-maker.
Authorpreneurship, he’s learned, flows naturally from your creative life. It takes chutzpah and an entrepreneurial spirit to fully leap into the creative life, and Grant has learned that this is not an all-or-nothing game. This course will cover why you need to cultivate multiple streams of income, why timing matters, and why the old truism—“you gotta fake it till you make it”—is as relevant here as anywhere. This time together will support you to think beyond the bounds of being “just” an author and invite you to conceive of your work not only as a career but as a calling—one that will allow you to share your gifts with the world in expansive and unexpected ways.