Out of curiosity, how many applications do y'all usually get?

If it's not public info, though, no worries. As I said, I'm just curious.

http://isbw.murlafferty.com/?p=160

is having a problem. It may be in Times Square. Is there a clone available?

I can't speak to transportation. Coming from eastern MA, I took the bus to Viable Paradise. However, accommodations do not have to double the expense of the workshop.

Aside from that,yes. The food really is amazing. Mac Stone has been refining the recipes all these years. But that doesn't hold a candle to the conversations. Think of it, writers. A whole week talking writing, as well as every other subject under the sun.

Oh, and Jim, one more thing I'd add under the "note with appalled wonder" heading: Impromptu live music events most (possibly all) nights. I never learned so many songs or sang in front of so many people in my whole life. (I am an introvert, gosh darn it!)

I got a book out of it!

Do you have a certain level of quality in the submissions below which you have to tell people "we don't think there's enough here to even work with"? If not, wouldn't that mean that you are, in some sense, taking people's money in exchange for indulging their pretensions of being good enough to be published? (Or because they expect to earn it back when they eventually *are* published, in which case they are more likely an optimist than a statistician. The list of sales by alumni, without mentioning the number of attendees who never sold anything, seems like an open invitation to count the hits and forget the misses.)

I'm not asking this from hostility, but because somehow this offer tickles my "if you can't see the sucker at the table" nerve. Maybe it's just oversensitive, but, you know, better over than under.

Yog's law applies to publishing, not to education - you shouldn't be applying to VP if you're thinking that it's a publishing thing, not an education thing. You don't tell someone not to go to college if they want to be a writer because going to college means that money is flowing away from the author (not that you have to go to college to be a writer, of course).

VP is like a MFA, except VP is cheaper, more practical, and contains 100% more historical merry-go-rounds.

Yes. That's why we have the submission process, and regular instructor chats where we rate the application stories. We don't say anything as cruel as "We don't think there's enough here to work with," the letters we send out in late June/early July are either "You're accepted," "You're on the wait-list," or "Thank you for your application." Everyone we accept is on the high end of the bell curve.

That could produce a bias too. If we only accept people who will probably be published anyway, then who's surprised when they publish? Lately we've had more and more applicants who already have professional sales on the CVs.

Workshopping isn't a necessary step to publication. Far more people have published without going to a workshop in their lives than the opposite. (You also have your workshop junkies: The folks who try to collect the whole set; Viable Paradise, Clarion, Odyssey, Taos Toolbox, etc. etc., who never submit a work to anywhere that isn't a workshop.)

VP 1 and II -- when the workshop was attached to a convention -- took everyone who applied. VP III, our first year at the Island Inn, was the first time the students outnumbered the instructors, and was the year we didn't have any staff to take the load. That was a class-size in the mid-twenties.

For myself, what I'm looking for in applications is whether I can teach the person something. Perhaps help the person get past a couple of years of trial-and-error. It's one thing to hear, "You have to learn to edit your own works," or read Self-editing For Fiction Writers, it's another to watch Miss Teresa, at normal reading speed, red-pencil in hand, take two pages of your work (which you've presumably already edited to the best of your ability), and shrink it by a third while making it sound even more like you.

After the first couple of years we've had 24-28 students per year, so you can figure out pretty easily how many folks have gone through the workshop. (We've dropped back to 24 because we found that with 8 instructors we can give better personal attention at that level.) Somewhere in the low four-hundreds. Someone who isn't me has the actual count.

The list of student publications isn't exhaustive; it's self-reported, and maintained off site by a volunteer.

We aren't publishing anyone, nor promising that you'll be published; workshops count in the same category as a subscription to The Writer or membership at a convention, or a semester of Freshman Comp at your local community college.

I have done enough editing of my own work (and, on occasion, others'), and watched other editors, to be suitably impressed -- I can see how a person could get there, with years upon years of practice, and I both know what it looks like and know how far it is from where I am.

Wow.

Ah, I see. I guess I was focusing more on the specific work being worked on, not on how the experience develops the attendee's skills as an author.

Normally, publishers pay you for your work.

Normally, you pay schools for their work.

There are few people such as Teresa, who is on a whole different level of critical ability. They're not going to be right every time, but never dismiss what they say. You might even win the argument.