Top Row: Michael Samerdyke, Larry Taylor, Carl Frederick, Peter Huston, Michelle Gawe, Anthony Giacomelli
Middle Row: Keith Demanche, Barbara Campbell, Laurie Lanzdorf, Laura Whitton, Theodora Goss, Jeanne Cavelos, Dan Simmons
Bottom Row: Douglas Cohen, Sarah Todd, Elisa Romero-McCullough, Jim Isaak, Alette Willis, Boris Layupan
Photo taken by Karen Simmons
What makes Odyssey unique is that you’re learning from someone who is a writer and an editor—the best of both worlds.
In my first two days here, I learned more about writing (not just genre writing, but all writing) than I did in three years of creative writing courses at college. Then I realized I still had five weeks and three days left. DAMN! That’s what I call my money’s worth.
Odysseus had it easy!
If you’re serious about writing and getting published, it’s well worth the sacrifice in time, money, and effort to attend Odyssey.
I made new friends, discovered that I am a writer, had the most intense six weeks of my life and read great stories. Odyssey is the BEST!
Odyssey taught me what I didn’t learn in my college writing classes. My time writing and making friends who are writers themselves really encouraged and challenged me.
Odyssey has chopped the writer in me into its component parts—a painful process—and improved and reassembled them. I am much better now, and the scars will heal.
An incredibly valuable experience. I knew I would learn a lot, but I didn’t expect to learn so much about my writing problems by the second day!
Odyssey made me aware of bad habits my writing had developed and made me fix them. It gave me the chance to write five short stories and a short-short in six weeks, a pace that would have been impossible elsewhere. I am very glad I attended Odyssey.
If you aren’t made of iron before, you will be.
Odyssey is the best writing workshop I’ve been to and I’ve been to several. I’ve been taught by the best, but Jeanne is in a universe far beyond those other instructors. She’s better than the best. Other workshops don’t go nearly into the depths of story crafting as Odyssey does. If you want to learn about the craft of fiction and are serious enough to put in an intensive six weeks devoted solely to your craft then Odyssey is the only choice.
Odyssey has taught me an enormous amount about the craft of writing. I now understand the components that make up my stories—the arc of plot, characterization and point of view, world building and achieved strangeness. For the first time, I’m writing not just from instinct but from a firm knowledge of what makes good stories and how to improve my own. Jeanne is an incredible instructor—insightful, passionate about the craft, and committed to the class’s writing and careers. She held us to a high standard throughout, and made us write better than we’ve ever written before.
“With a plot, it will be that much better.”
—Boris Layupan
“Which leads to me getting off on Christ.”
—Barbara Campbell
“June Cleaver in the gene lab.”
—Debra Doyle
“It was like ‘A Boy and His Dog’ without the boy or his dog.”
—Peter Huston
“I didn’t like it, but that’s because I understood it.”
—Jim Isaak
“I tend not to believe ball clutchers.”
—Barbara Campbell
“Who’s clutching my testicles?”
—Barbara Campbell
“I hate to keep referring to male genitalia, but I will.”
—Barbara Campbell
“I didn’t know what the hell had gone on. But I didn’t care.”
—Dan Simmons
“The funniest part was the doll-beating scene.”
—Alette Willis
“I’m not going to tell you to go hang out in the porn stores, but maybe you should.”
—Peter Huston
“I loved the sex too.”
—Dan Simmons
“I felt it was like a bad translation from the French.”
—Carl Frederick
“He chewed more than he bit off.”
—Dan Simmons on Henry James
“You’ve got a lot of flaming ducks here, and it’s hard to chase them all down.”
—Dan Simmons
“I felt like I had little hamsters running through my head. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
—Barbara Campbell
“What’s the point of creating a fantasy world if it’s smaller and darker and less visible than the real world?”
—Dan Simmons
“For people who don’t have a five-year-old kid at home, it can be just one damn saurus after another.”
—Michael Samerdyke
“The image I had of this guy was he was slender and prissy and needed to be roughed up a little.”
—Boris Layupan
“I would like to have a pocket like this, where all I have to do is reach in and all my questions are answered.”
—Sarah Todd
“We want to see the nasty underneath.”
—Sarah Todd
“Does he know how she felt when she got her first slit-nosed doll baby?”
—Barbara Campbell
“Just because you dress your women in hard brassieres doesn’t make ’em tough.”
—Larry Taylor
“I’ve found examples in Tolstoy, in Faulkner. It didn’t work for them either.”
—Larry Taylor
“It wasn’t half as awful as I thought.”
—Barbara Campbell
“Clearly you must be wrong then. I can’t think what other explanation there could be.”
—Barbara Campbell
“Watch out for the Alpha Beta Conan fraternity.”
—Sarah Todd
“He’d probably be a lot more worried about, ‘Does this dress make me look fat?'”
—Elisa Romero-McCullough
“Isn’t it good shit? Isn’t it good shit? It’s good shit!”
—Peter Huston quoting Doug Cohen regarding Doug’s story
“Where is he going with one sheep?”
—Peter Huston
“It started out with that routine worm kill.”
—Michael Samerdyke
“It was just the death of her mother or something like that.”
—Carl Frederick
“A young birch is about as un-nutmeggy as you can get.”
—Barbara Campbell
“Maybe I overreact when sticky things fall on me.”
—Barbara Campbell
“I want to date the ghost.”
—Barbara Campbell
“I know this means something, but I don’t know what.”
—Larry Taylor
“I think you need to spend a little more time on slitting the throat.”
—Laurie Lanzdorf
“And then you just ramble on a while like, ‘Holy crap!'”
—Keith Demanche
“Another dead horse!”
—Elisa Romero-McCullough
“The bloody knife, the happy soup bowl, the warm cups.”
—Peter Huston
“The great stirrup controversy.”
—Carl Frederick
“I didn’t mean to call you honey.”
—Charles L. Grant to Anthony Giacomelli
“I avoid movies and books and anything in a submarine if I can.”
—Theodora Goss
“I didn’t understand anything that’s going on, and that made it hard to read.”
—Anthony Giacomelli
“As long as he’s decapitated, I want to see it.”
—Douglas Cohen
“The business with the severed head could be better described.”
—Michael Samerdyke
“I want the moment those teeth go into that stick of love.”
—Barbara Campbell
“You can’t drop the dropped penis.”
—Laura Whitton
“If that happened to me I think I’d be terrified, with or without a penis.”
—Larry Taylor
“I wouldn’t want to get near a naked confused woman, especially alone.”
—Peter Huston
“I found him just a detestable little boy.”
—Barbara Campbell
“She just seems to me—mwaa ha ha!”
—Sarah Todd
“She’s this bad girl!”
—Theodora Goss
“Nobody can giggle. Ever.”
—Sarah Todd
“Can he just be great in bed and have clean fingernails?”
—Barbara Campbell
“It is unforgivable. You will roast in hell forever.”
—Barry B. Longyear
“Bird-o-gram.”
—Carl Frederick
“If I see it one more time I’ll throw the story in the fireplace.”
—Douglas Cohen