President's Report 2025-2026
The Annual Meeting/Open House, on Saturday, October 17, 2026 began my third year as Columbia Fiction Foundry president. Our mission is simple: To help each other become better fiction writers, even published authors. We advance that mission with three strategic objectives:
- Improve the quality of writing in the workshops;
- Expand the diversity of voices in the workshops; and
- Strengthen the CFF brand to raise awareness of CFF in the publishing industry.
The actions we take to support these objectives fall into several categories, including membership, communications and marketing, workshops, and programs. Every action requires volunteer effort.
That volunteer effort begins with the CFF governing group, our Executive Committee. At the annual meeting, members voted to have current ExComm members to serve another term. They also elected Seth Ribner to fill the open vice president slot, and added two new at-large ExComm members, Christy Oglesby and Melisa Ozen Ryan. Congratulations to the members of this strong ExComm. CFF will benefit from their ideas and actions.
Here’s a summary of our actions over the past year and the names of the individuals who made them happen.
Membership
We have around 1,500 members. A third of those members have signed up to receive the call-for-manuscripts for our writing workshops, and a small subset attend the workshops. We’d like to convert more members into active members.
Communications and Marketing
We have three interrelated communication tools that reach members with different frequencies.
- The website, available all the time, contains fundamental information.
- The newsletter comes out quarterly and highlights key CFF events and accomplishments.
- The e-blasts send news to members as needed.
We launched the newsletter this year with the vision of founding editor Linda Ellison. We published the current issue, on October 15, under the leadership of Linda’s dynamic successor, Morgan Desfosses.
Workshops
Workshops remain our core initiative. We hold workshops one Saturday morning and one Wednesday evening every month. Seven or eight people attend an average workshop, including observers who may be attending for the first time. Each workshop reviews five or six submissions. From January to October 2026, 52 unique CFF members participated in our workshops, submitting 109 manuscripts.
If you haven’t attended a workshop, please consider attending. If you’ve attended, please consider becoming a workshop moderator. ExComm member Richard Nochimson organizes moderators for the Saturday workshops. Lisa Melilli, ExComm member and founder of the Wednesday workshops, organizes moderators for those groups.
This year the ExComm adopted guidelines about restricting the use of AI in workshop submissions. ExComm members Jennifer Sears and Michael Hirsh drafted the guidelines.
At the Annual Meeting two year ago, Michael Hirsh noted that it would be helpful to supplement the strengths of our chapter-by-chapter workshops with full-novel workshops for critiquing structure, character development, and other topics. This year, Melisa Ozen Ryan raised the same idea and launched our first full-novel workshop in June.
CFF Presents Programming
By the end of the calendar year, CFF will have produced eight online events about the craft and business of writing. These programs provide CFF members with writing and publishing knowledge and also connect us with important publishing industry people.
All our programs are recorded and available on our CFF Video Library.
We’re devoting the next online program, on Thursday, November 5th, to workshop best practices. We’ve organized a panel of three experts with experience writing, teaching, editing, and leading workshops. Panelists will talk about what they look for when evaluating a piece of writing, how to judge a story on its own terms, and how to take in constructive feedback without feeling derailed. Registration for “Sharing Our Writing to Improve Our Craft” is here.
New Initiatives
Our progress depends on the ideas an energy of our members. Here are a few ideas that we’re thinking about or beginning to advance:
- Creating a program with literary agents who are Columbia alumni: Rising to the top of the slush pile is a tough crawl. The Columbia link can help.
- Expanding our full-novel workshops to other genres: Six months into our successful pilot program of workshopping full-novel speculative fiction manuscripts, we can add other genres, depending on interest.
- Expanding our outreach to Columbia MFA and fiction graduates: CFF workshops can serve as a half-way house transition from college workshops to the publishing world. CFF workshops will gain new perspectives and talented writers.
- Launching a weekly Zoom for writing at a designated time: Writing is a solitary exercise. In a weekly dedicated Zoom CFF members can find discipline and support from working in a virtual room with other writers.
- Starting an open mic night where CFF people read their work: In this initiative, based on the MFA program’s Columbia Selects, CFF writers are chosen to read their work to a wider audience, potentially including publishing industry influencers.
- Responding to workshop interest from Columbia alumni in Asia and Europe: Leaders from overseas Columbia alumni clubs have expressed interest in CFF workshops. International voices will enhance our workshops and the CFF brand.
I and the other ExComm members are open to receiving ideas and help as we advance our CFF mission. Like me, I’m sure you’ll find joy in connecting with other writers, from a wide variety of backgrounds, united by a desire to help each become better writers, even published writers.
Ken Schept, President
Columbia Fiction Foundry
