Creator, Producer & Instructor, 2020–present
5 cohorts • 281 students • 40+ returning students • 13+ showcases produced
Overview Writing Your Life is a 6-week online writing workshop designed to help adult learners develop a personal writing practice through guided prompts, structured skill-building, and community feedback — culminating each cohort in a live virtual showcase featuring student performers and a featured guest. Created and produced entirely by Zed under SBC Productions, the course has run annually since 2020 across five cohorts, building a consistent and growing returning student community. The course is offered in both a general audience version and a sex-positive community version known as Writing Spicy (writingspicy.com).
PART ONE: The Course
Writing Your Life runs as a 6-week structured online cohort, designed to move participants from blank page to completed personal writing across six guided weeks. Each cohort has particular guidelines for content warnings, providing feedback to other students, and reading out loud, to maintain community intimacy and ensure meaningful feedback across the group.
- Designed complete 6-week curriculum from scratch including all prompts, exercises, weekly structure, and feedback frameworks
- Produced and facilitated 5 live cohorts annually from 2020 through present
- Built and managed all course infrastructure: registration, communications, learning platform, and student community
- Developed and executed all marketing and promotional campaigns across each cohort
- Managed 281 individual students across 5 cohorts with 40+ returning students across multiple cohorts
- Offered in two versions: Writing Your Life (general audience) and Writing Spicy (sex-positive community audience)
- Individual writing coaching to students who opt in to 1:1 mentoring
PART TWO: The Student Showcase
Each cohort of Writing Your Life culminates in a live virtual showcase — a produced online reading event featuring student performers from the cohort alongside one invited featured guest performer. The showcase is a fully produced virtual event, not a casual classroom share: it is promoted publicly, open to a broader audience beyond the cohort, and designed to give students a real performance experience as the culmination of their writing work.
- Produced 13+ Writing Your Life Student Showcases across 5 cohorts, 2020–present
- Each showcase features 2–3 student performers selected from the cohort
- Each showcase features one invited featured guest performer
- Managed all virtual production logistics for every showcase: platform setup, run-of-show, performer coordination, promotion, and audience communications
- Promoted each showcase publicly beyond the cohort community to build audience and give students a genuine performance experience
- Produced 2–3 showcases per cohort depending on cohort size and participant interest
- Partnered with bookstores and community organizations to co-produce some of the showcases, in order to broaden audience and reach
Outcome
Five years of sustained annual writing workshop production — 281 students, 5 cohorts, 13+ live virtual showcases — building one of the few consistently running online writing workshop programs in the queer literary community, with a showcase series that has given dozens of emerging writers their first public reading experience.
