Sanibel Island Writers Conference 2025

Welcome to the Sanibel Island Writers Conference! Get ready to tap into your creativity and connect with fellow wordsmiths at this exciting in-person event. Join us on the campus of Florida Gulf Coast University for an unforgettable experience. Whether you're a seasoned writer or just starting out, this conference is designed to inspire and ignite your passion for storytelling. Immerse yourself in engaging workshops, insightful panels, and thought-provoking discussions led by experienced writers. Expand your network, exchange ideas, and gain valuable insights to take your writing to new heights.

Info: The TV Writing Crash Course is a comprehensive study of four tentpole components of TV writing that offer deep insight into the craft. Whether you are just a fan of scripted television or an aspiring writer yourself, you will leave this workshop with significantly more knowledge about the nuances and specifics of TV writing. After dissecting the form, we will breakdown an episode of TV live to reveal the DNA that makes it so effective.

Info: Do you ever listen to friend tell a story that’s so boring you want to gouge your own eyes out? In this workshop, you’ll learn critical writing tips to take your story from a boring situation to something other people care about. You'll write to a prompt and if you want, you can get feedback on your draft. This class is always so much fun. You’ll leave with the start of a new story and Writing Class Radio’s top tips for making your story worth reading.

Info: What would it mean to write your body? To tell its truths from a place of power rather than shame or regret? In this workshop, we will reclaim our narrative agency. We will start with an exploration of notions of pleasure derived from food, nature, sexuality, and other earthly substances and manifestations. From there, we’ll investigate notions of pain by dipping into body dysmorphia, critical illness, and other aches. Our time together will conclude with writerly ways of transcending the physical realm, such as meditation, prayer, and the arts, as well as with an examination of the life cycles of birth and death. We will write as both an act of empathy for all bodies and as a personal pledge of self-compassion.

Info: In this workshop, writing coach MJ Fievre will draw on her extensive experience across self-publishing, boutique and independent presses, hybrid models, and traditional houses to help participants navigate the options available today. She will break down the opportunities and challenges of each path, showing how publishing routes affect creative control, financial investment, distribution, and long-term visibility. By the end of the session, writers will have a clear framework for choosing the publishing strategy that best fits their goals and aspirations.

Info: Too much plot? None at all? Confused about how to handle the past or strengthen your story? In this workshop we'll look at the elements of plot and structure and how they are interrelated. Topics covered will include conflict, complication, reversal, resolution, the roles of characters, presentation of time, and other aspects of narrative design. Through examples, exercises, and discussion, participants will learn strategies for assessing drafts and revising productively. Note: This class serves fiction writers and those working on memoir, narrative nonfiction, or any dramatic form.

Info: We’ll demystify the writing process, which may once have seemed intimidating. Writing is work; it’s a physical, if sedentary, activity. Writers write even when the writing’s not going well— especially when the writing’s not going well. We’ll discuss the craft of storytelling, explore the elements and techniques of short fiction, and examine the qualities that make for vivid and compelling flash fiction. You’ll read exemplary short-short stories that will inspire, provoke, and serve as models for your own stories. You’ll write up a storm following the prompts and exercises. You’ll play with found forms and invent your own. You’ll get writing and you’ll keep writing. You’ll learn that your characters, your settings, and your themes are out there in the world. You’ll learn to look, to listen, to pay attention, and to notice, the fiction writer’s first job. The act of writing itself, you’ll realize, is its own reward. And the more you write, the more you'll want to write.

Info: This is a generative workshop focusing on the sonnet’s traditional form and its ever-evolving, exciting, flexible variations. We will revel in this mighty small powerhouse of a poem and its possibilities. Please come ready to write, experiment, distill, expand, and laugh a little too. Maybe you have wondered—as I have—how sonnet-like must a poem be to be a sonnet? We’ll try to answer that as we look to Shakespeare and beyond—prose sonnets (Harryette Mullen), the "American sonnet" ( Terrance Hayes) the Seussian memoir sonnet (Diane Seuss), and abecedarian sonnets (Barbara Hamby).  Students will engage with the rigor and flexibility of the form, learning all the sonnet can hold.

Info: These are troubled times—with fires, hurricanes, floods, political upheavals, and the aftermath of a pandemic.  To my mind, one of the most important things we can do during such times is focus on community, connections, compassion, and joy. We will look at some writers who write joy in all its complexities via the natural world, the spiritual world, and via the transformative power of language. We will focus on excerpts from longer readings, and we will write in response to some exercises that can later be opened to full drafts of stories or essays or poems.

Info: In this workshop, we'll read together from assorted flash lyric essays that exemplify some of the most memorable features of the genre. We'll write in response to the invitations, permissions, and prompts gleaned from these essays, and participants will be able to share emulations as they choose. Everyone will leave the workshop with recommendations for future reading and publications where they can send polished work.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Water School, 11098 Fgcu Boulevard North, Fort Myers, United States