My name is Evan Fleischer. I'm a writer, teacher, and editor based in Maine. I've been running writing classes for students of all ages for over four years — from worldbuilding workshops where middle schoolers invented functional languages, to craft seminars for adults wrestling with novels they've been carrying around for years.
I hold an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College. My writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. I've worked as a ghostwriter, researcher, fiction editor, and book editor, and I've taught creative writing at the university level and through independent programs.
MFA in Fiction
Emerson College
The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times
Students ages 8–adult, online and in-person, since 2022
A lot of traditional creative writing courses follow what I'd call a 'silence and critique' model — you hand out your story, people tell you what they like and don't like, and you sit there and take it in. There's nothing wrong with learning to be a better critic. But it always struck me as strange that teachers rarely let a room full of creative writers actually be creative together.
"Instead of talking about the story, we get to act it out — as if we're all there, as if it's happening in that very moment. I've been running it for over three years, and that shift — from talking about something to pretending we're actually there — almost always works."
The goal in any given class is inhabited thinking: not analyzing a story from the outside, but reasoning from inside it. What does your character know? What does the world imply? What does this sentence want to become? I find out what students love and work from there. A student who loves the Backrooms gets cosmic horror. A student building a world with magical girls and written-form-only monsters gets worldbuilding. A student writing a 1950s mansion murder mystery gets Phantom Thread and Antiques Roadshow.
Everyone is welcome here. First session is always free.
Questions? Curious about a class? Just want to say hello?
orangecatwritingworkshop [at] gmail [dot] com