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Short forms, long weekend.
2025 Conference Dates:
Conference: October 16th - 19th
Add-on Writing Retreat: October 19th - 23rd
Registration Opens April 2025
“As a newbie to the writing world, I did not know what to expect in a writing conference. The conference set the perfect tone for all participants to be willing to take risks, share deeply personal stories, and receive feedback.”
New this year!
Cobscook Institute, home of Iota Short Forms Conference, is partnering with Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance to offer an Iota that’s bigger and more robust than ever.
Here’s what’s new:
Generative workshop with poet Gibson Fay-Leblanc. This is designed with poets in mind, but is for anyone interested in focused work at the line or word level.
Multi-genre workshop of pre-submitted work with Penny Guisinger. Generative work has always been Iota’s focus, but participants can now add a two-session workshop for feedback on existing pages.
About The Conference:
Participants come to Iota to study all forms of short prose writing, including essays, prose poems, short stories, flash fiction and nonfiction, micro essays, and much more. “Short” is a relative term, of course, and our students work onsite on pieces that vary in length from flash to novellas. The conference is generative, and we know that some pieces begun at Iota have grown into much longer projects once the authors got back home.
Iota is designed to help writers break from questions about genre. When is a piece a micro essay and when is it a prose poem or when does it turn into flash fiction? Iota posits that it doesn’t matter: just write it.
2025 Conference Faculty:
Melanie Brooks is the author of the memoir A Hard Silence: One daughter remaps family, grief, and faith when HIV/AIDS changes it all (Vine Leaves Press, 2023) and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches creative nonfiction in the M.F.A. program at Bay Path University and in the M.F.A. program at Western Connecticut State University and professional writing at Northeastern University. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program and a Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. She has had numerous interviews and essays on topics ranging from loss and grief to parenting and aging published in The Boston Globe, HuffPost, Yankee Magazine, Psychology Today, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and other notable publications. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from university), and chocolate Lab.
www.melaniebrooks.com
Suzanne Strempek Shea is the author of six novels and five works of nonfiction with settings including Polish America, Ireland, Malawi, a bookstore and a radiation oncology department. Suzanne began writing creatively in her spare time while reporting for the Springfield (Mass.) Newspapers and The Providence (R.I.) Journal, and has freelanced for publications including Yankee, The Bark, Golf World, The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Obit and ESPN the Magazine. She founded Bay Path University's MFA and has taught in MFA programs at Emerson College, the University of South Florida and the University of Southern Maine. She is co-organizer of Iota Short forms, frequently teaches and lectures on the healing possibility of writing, and for six years has led an annual writing seminar in Dingle, Ireland.
www.suzannestrempekshea.org
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His second book, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and Orion, and his prose in Kenyon Review online, Portland Magazine, and Slice. He currently serves as Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland with his family.
www.gibsonfayleblanc.com
Penny Guisinger (she/her) is the author of Postcards from Here and the forthcoming Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Guernica, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. Pushcart nominated, a Maine Literary Award winner, and a three-time notable in Best American Essays, she is a co-director of Iota Short Forms and a former assistant editor at Brevity. Penny is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program.
2025 Conference Schedule
Thursday:
11:30 Registration Opens
1:30 Welcome and Formal Start
2:00 Generative Workshops (3 hours)
6:00 Dinner
7:30 Faculty Reading
Friday:
8:00 Breakfast Bar
9:00 Workshop for pre-submitted work (optional - extra cost)
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Generative Workshops (3 hours)
6:00 Dinner
7:30 Guest Reading
8:00 Open Mic
Saturday:
8:00 Breakfast Bar
9:00 Workshop for pre-submitted work (optional - extra cost)
11:45 Group Picture
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Generative Workshops (3 hours)
6:00 Dinner
8:00 Open Mic
Sunday:
8:00 Hot Breakfast
9:00 Generative Workshops (3 hours)
12:00 Conference Farewells and Departure
Add an Iota of a Retreat!
Running the week after the conference, it’s an opportunity to continue experiencing the peace and inspiration of the conference. Allow yourself the gift of processing all you’ve engaged with during the conference and having space to WRITE! The retreat will be set at your own speed, and you may tailor the day’s activities to your own to schedule.
Write, read, relax, explore the region and/or venture no farther than the Institute’s fifty acres of forest and former farmland via the many trails awaiting you there and beyond.
Lodging
Heartwood Lodge is a beautiful & comfortable home during the conference. Different room types are available to meet your needs, with full size beds and single bunk beds. Each room has a private bathroom and is available with single or double occupancy. The Lodge has a quiet library, a communal kitchen with dining room and laundry facilities.
2025 Conference Rates
Conference: $665
• Conference workshops & activities
• Meals: Thursday lunch, Friday breakfast and lunch, Saturday breakfast and lunch,
Sunday breakfast
Lodging
Single Room: $300
• 3 nights (check-in Thursday, checkout Sunday)
• Room with attached bathroom
Shared Double Room: $225
• 3 nights (check-in Thursday, checkout Sunday)
• Room with attached bathroom
RV Camping: $75
• 3 nights (check-in Thursday, checkout Sunday)
• Plug in and access shared bathrooms & common space.
Camping: $30
• 3 nights (check-in Thursday, checkout Sunday)
• Bring your own tent and access shared bathrooms & common space.
Conference Optional Add-ons
Dinners: $75 for three dinners (Thursday, Friday, Saturday Celebration)
Saturday Celebration Dinner Only: $25
Pre-submitted workshop: $150
Post-Conference Retreat
Retreat Registration Fee: $550
• 4 nights (Sunday until checkout Thursday)
• Room with attached bathroom
• Meals not included
• Optionally attend Cobscook Movement classes