What course did you take, how did you hear about the boot camp and why did you decide to take it?
I took Parris Island Journalism Boot Camp with Victoria Rowan, Fall 2001, eager to reinvigorate - and focus -- my writing career after being laid off from a trade magazine editorship. I wanted to make the shift from writing for others to writing for myself. Also, like many writers who have not explicitly studied journalism or the business of writing, I knew I could benefit from a more professional approach to the craft.

Did it lead to any assignments, connections or jobs? What did you learn?
One week we interviewed newsworthy acquaintances and tried to sell the profiles. With that material I published a profile/book review/event announcement in the Village Voice -- the managing editor's hybrid idea when I emphasized the curating work my multimedia poet interviewee was doing at St. Mark's Poetry Project, and an upcoming performance there of a new Brion Gysin book. Thanks to Victoria's pragmatic 'so-what, why this audience, why now' coaching, emphasizing these elements of my pitch set my subject at the helm of an upcoming event where avant garde artworld legends would be appearing. The right story for the right audience. I also understood from Bootcamp that I had a time hook most appropriate for a weekly newspaper like the Voice. The editor's suggestion entailed a lot more work but Bootcamp taught me that if an editor was gracious enough to tell me exactly what he could use all I needed to do was accept the challenge. As Victoria explained, "We're here to eliminate the reasons an editor has to reject your work."

MB's Bootcamp not only offered operable information about writing and selling in seven genres (personal essays, travel, op-ed, business features, profiles and reviews and tone-dependent pieces like the New Yorker's Talk of the Town), it underscored the importance of astute portfolio building to get a writer where she wants to go. I benefited most from Victoria's deconstructive clarity about composing and selling nonfiction writing -- and today it is appreciable how much I learned about piloting a writing career.

Anastasia M. Ashman is the co-editor of TALES FROM THE EXPAT HAREM: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, a bestselling book in Istanbul, where she currently lives with her Turkish husband. In March 2006, Seal Press will release the anthology in North America. Anastasia's personal essays appear in THE THONG ALSO RISES (Travelers' Tales September 2005) and, alongside prominent New York writers like Calvin Trillin and Jonathan Lethem, in THE SUBWAY CHRONICLES (Chamberlain Bros. May 2006). Anastasia continues to draw on Victoria Rowan's coaching as she writes a cultural memoir: BERKELEY TO BYZANTIUM: The Reorientation of a West Coast Adventuress.

What MB class did you take?
I took the 12-Week Novelist Class with Max Ludington.

Output
I ended up securing an agent, and just last week, I sent her my first rough draft of the entire novel!

How did you hear about the class?
I'm a Mediabistro AG member, and I always checked to see which classes were being offered.

What did you learn?
I came to the class having no experience with creative writing. I'm a journalist, and I had no idea how to go about writing something that had to be completely made up! The class really helped me to structure my ideas and start putting it down on the paper. It also helped me approach writing something that was longer than the 1200 word articles I'm used to writing!

How did the class help you with your work?
Max was great, but I also really came to rely on the comments from my classmates. They were so helpful, and provided so many different perspectives.

What class did you take?
I took MB's Personal Essay Boot Camp with Steve Friedman this summer.

Output: Article in the New York Observer.

What did you learn?
The 8 week class began with writing exercises that focused on inspiration, voice and technique. Then we all brought in marketable story ideas that we teamed up to pitch Steve who played the EIC heavy.

He helped us ID the best ideas from the dross, and then had us write pitches to specific editors who might run our pieces. For the last class, we wrote and workshopped our most marketable idea. Mine was a piece I'd started writing months before about buying a fur coat at the J. Mendel sample sale, only to have my husband tell me to sell it on Ebay.

How the class helped me do what I did:
I used techniques I'd learned in class, like writing about a sensation without naming it, to juice up the piece. Steve did some great on-the-spot editing that night. I went home at 10 pm, did the rewrite, sent it to the NY Observer the next afternoon, and had an acceptance by the following morning. The piece ran two weeks later.

Steve was an honest, creative teacher who helped me tackle my problem with endings, clean up nebulous descriptions and amp up conflict in my stories. The other writers in the class were generous in sharing their talent and suggestions.

I teach at the University of Illinois at Chicago on occasion, and let me tell you, if I knew as a student what I now know as an instructor, I'd have a Nobel Prize by now. Here was one amazing discovery: university librarians know a lot about research. All those years ago, I thought they were glorified clerks.

What do research librarians do while undergraduates are snubbing them? They prepare research guidelines - lists of resources that can be used to get information on a specific topic. Just because you are not on campus doesn't mean you can't use them.

The National Library of Australia has guides to resources on Australia's culture and people.

Rutgers has a detailed list of business and finance research resources. Some databases site are available only with a Rutgers ID, but you may be able to get to them through your public library.

Interested in the environment and related design issues? Cal-Berkeley has prepared this comprehensive compendium.

For international affairs, the United Nations has a guide to using their materials.

By the way, all of these were found through a simple keyword search for library research guides.

We writers not only need to work on our craft, but we also need to learn about subjects that we might want to write about. Between the public libary and the Internet, one can study just about any topic in extraordinary depth, but suppose you want more information in a more formal setting? And suppose you don't want to spend any money in the process?

You could check out what your community college offers, but I have a few suggestions that will keep your butt at home. Barnes & Noble offers a series of free online courses. You are encouraged to buy the necessary texts through B&N, but no one is forcing you to. I took one session that was huge, so I quickly blew off the course participation. Still, the syllabus and planned assignments kept me organized.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a more ambitious program. Its OpenCourseWare gives you access to course materials for a wide range of its academic offerings. You do not have access to faculty, and you don't get credit, but you do have a structure for tackling technical subjects on your own. Word2Word offers free online language courses that can supplement conversation classes. And, to help you run your business better, the Small Business Administration offers a series of free business education courses.

The day after Labor Day is one mourned by schoolkids everywhere. Sure, some kids have been back for almost a month already, but even the most air-conditioning-challenged urban districts are back now.

Many folks whose school years are long behind them (ahem) continue to organize their lives around the school calendar. For them, September is a time of renewal, and that may include continuing education.

This week, I'll cover some different educational options for writers. Naturally, I'd be in serious trouble if I skipped mediabistro.com's own course offerings. These courses are in-person and on-line, in New York and Seattle and places in between, and they range from the intensive to the quick seminar. Claire has conducted several interviews with MB Alumni that can give you more information.

What course did you take?Media Bistro Boot Camp for Journalists with JoBeth McDaniel in April 2003

Output:An essay I wrote for class was published in The Seattle Times. It will also appear in an anthology called Stories to Live By, which is due out later this month.

How did you find the class?I found it online at mediabistro.com

What did you learn from it?
I learned how to craft a great pitch letter. And as a great bonus, I connected with other writers in Atlanta, and we've stayed in touch.

What did you glean from the class that specifically helped you with your article?
The class workshoped the essay I wrote, so that definitely helped me with the story. Their encouragement gave me the push I needed to get it out the door. JoBeth specifically recommended I send the piece to Travelers' Tales, the company that's publishing it in their anthology.

Course:Food Writing Boot Camp with Kate Krader.

Output:During the class I developed the idea for my first book: Farms and Foods of the Garden State. In the lessons, we explored what we had access to and I came up with the concept.

How I Found the Class:The course was recommended by the people at ICE: the Institute for Culinary Education, one of the nation's top cooking schools.

What I learnedThe thing that was most important was the importance precision and proper format. When editors look at food writing, they take format very seriously. Are recipe ingredients in the proper order? Are items described correctly? Has the dish been properly tested? Are the English and foreign language names proofread and presented in the proper order?

How the course helped me do what I did:These details sell books. High concept is all well and good, but when a publisher sells a cookbook, they want it to be correct and understandable first and foremost.

Course:I took the 12-Week Novelist eclass with Nicole Bokat
from November to February 2004-2005.

Output: Completed novel manuscript.

How I Found the Class:I saw an ad for the class during one of my too-numerous stops by the mediabistro bbs (goofing off is one of the perks of full-time freelancing).

What I learned:The class gave me the needed deadlines to get "write a novel" on my to-do list and, once it was on the to-do list, it actually got done.

How the course helped me do what I did:During the 12 weeks, I cranked out the draft of a YA novel called "The Cortlandt Boys," about Max, a sports journalist who goes back to her old high school to cover the 10th anniversary of the boys basketball team winning the state championship. She finds the boys still stuck in their lives from ten years before until a mystery from the past yanks them into the present. I then spent the spring revising the manuscript. Having
proven to myself I can write a novel when I make time to do it, I've signed up for another 12-week novelist e-class this fall. My next novel will be about a girl who decides God is talking to her, told in the voice of her more conventionally religious roommate at the
boarding school they attend. As the last book never writes the next one, this may become a yearly tradition, or at least a welcome change of pace from the non-fiction articles I normally write.

Laura Vanderkam is a contributing editor at Reader's Digest, and a member of the USA Today Forum page's Board of Contributors. She is co-author with Dr. David Clayton, of the upcoming "Healthy Guide to
Unhealthy Living" (Simon & Schuster, Jan 2006) and is co-author, with Jan and Bob Davidson of "Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds" (Simon & Schuster, 2004).

When was the panel you took, and what MB classes did you take?

I'd taken a few mediabistro classes in the past (pitching with David Hochman, an afternoon copyediting seminar, "How to Find Anything" with the brilliant Don MacLeod), so on a lark I thought I'd take the "How to Break Into Radio" panel. It was $25, which is cheaper than a pair of tickets to the Arclight, so why not? I wasn't really looking to break into radio so much as dabble in radio. I was happy freelancing for print, so my only aspiration was to do a little more radio work, something I'd done in the past.

What job are you at right now? And did your other classes net any other published work or jobs?

Now I'm an associate producer for "The Business," a public radio show about "the business of show business" produced out of KCRW in Santa Monica. And after my class with David I sold an article to Budget Living.

What did you learn from the panel?

I learned that public radio is hungry for fresh ideas, and that, just like magazines, they're looking for a good pitch -- you don't have to wrestle with your cheapo laptop version of CoolEdit to pull together a complete produced piece. If they're interested, they'll work with you on the tech stuff. I also learned that being in the right place at the right time is really, really helpful (see below).

How did the panel get you your current job?

The brilliant thing about the panel was that there was a post-panel meet and greet scheduled at a nearby bar to give attendees a chance to meet and mingle with the panelists. I asked Matt Holzman, the producer of "The Business," how I could learn ProTools and how tough the transition was from CoolEdit. All I was really hoping to get from the panel was an idea of whether or not I needed to buy new software, and whether my sad little radio "kit" was out of date. But we talked a little bit, he asked me to send him my resume, and that Monday I went in, we talked some more, and suddenly I had a job. So, instead of dipping a toe in public radio, I pretty much dived in the deep end. In the last few months I've produced segments, been on-air, tackled ProTools, and learned a lot more technical stuff than a person who can't figure out her DVD player without help ever imagined possible.