Turkey City Writer's Workshop is a peer-to-peer, professional science fiction writer's workshop in Texas. Founded in 1973 and still ongoing today, it was consciously modeled after the east coast Milford Writer's Workshop. The workshop "was a cradle of cyberpunk" where many of the practitioners of what would become cyberpunk first met.
Founding members of the group included Lisa Tuttle, Howard Waldrop, Steven Utley, and Tom Reamy. The workshop was first held in Grand Prairie, Texas, but soon shifted to Austin when most of the writers involved moved there during the mid-1970s. Bruce Sterling was one of the youngest members of the workshop when he joined it in 1974. Harlan Ellison "discovered" Sterling at Turkey City and arranged for the publication of his first novel. Other writers who have attended Turkey City include Ted Chiang, Paul Di Filippo, Cory Doctorow, Andy Duncan, George Alec Effinger, Mark Finn, Steven Gould, Eileen Gunn, Leigh Kennedy, John Kessel, Rick Klaw, Raph Koster, George R. R. Martin, Maureen McHugh, Paul O. Miles, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Chad Oliver, Lawrence Person, Jessica Reisman, Chris Roberson, Lewis Shiner, Lou Antonelli, John Shirley, Jeff VanderMeer, Don Webb, Martha Wells, and Connie Willis.
The workshop also compiled the "The Turkey City Lexicon," a collection of terms used when discussing recurring SF writing tropes. This guide for writers has been used and adapted by other writers workshops, both within and outside the science fiction genre. Robert J. Sawyer has described the document as the "mother of all workshopping vocabularies."
Famous quotes containing the words turkey, city, writer and/or workshop:
“A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Had I made capital on my prettiness, I should have closed the doors of public employment to women for many a year, by the very means which now makes them weak, underpaid competitors in the great workshop of the world.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)