I am on faculty at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, where I regularly offer creative writing and nonfiction workshops.
Our instructors are working writers and translators. We’ve published books, taught university classes and seminars, and written for magazines and literary journals throughout the English-speaking world. We started the Berlin Writers’ Workshop to bring world-class English-language creative writing instruction to Europe.
I offer manuscript reviews and consulting on writing projects.
I’ve worked with award-winning, well-known writers and authors and offer feedback based on respect, a deep knowledge of craft, and a serious attempt to understand your project on its own terms. My feedback always comes with detailed thoughts on style. I have worked with both fiction and nonfiction writers, at a variety of stages: from the conceptual phase to proposals to finished manuscripts. As a successful author in both trade and academic publishing, I am especially good at helping academics figure out how to make their research sing as storytelling. Get in touch if you want to talk.
When I finished the first draft of my latest novel, I thought: who is the person I am most afraid to read this? By which I meant, who was the smartest reader I could imagine for this text, the reader who would most readily notice my lapses in aesthetic and conceptual rigour, and call me to task for it. I realised that person was Ben Miller…what I had not fully anticipated, in my sadistic elan at the thought of being torn to shreds by Ben’s fierce intellect, was how generous and sensitive a reader he was too. This is not to say he treated me with kid gloves, he did not, but he communicated his critiques with such constructive enthusiasm and clarity as to genuinely inspire. I found his notes penetrating, clear-eyed, and actionable. I couldn’t recommend Ben’s work enough to any writer, of any genre or medium.
Jordan Tannahill