April 25 Writer’s Workshop: Book Writing Coach Karen Bacellar teaches us about “Beginnings and Endings — How Stories Open, Close, and Echo”
When: Saturday, April 25, 2026 from 11-4pm
Where: 208 Queen Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22314
Buy your ticket: beginningsandendings.eventbrite.com
- 60-minute in-person and virtual seminar, noon-1pm ET
- $30 for in-person (includes light meal and drink)
- Free for virtual attendees
- Password for your free ticket: Zoom
- Click here to join us in the Zoom room
This seminar looks at how the opening and closing of a novel work in conversation with one another to shape the story as a whole. Rather than treating beginnings and endings as isolated moments, the session explores how they are designed in relationship and how that relationship creates meaning on the page.
Grounded in Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book, the seminar focuses on the question of where a story truly begins and where it needs to end. Using examples from both films and novels, the discussion invites writers to think more cinematically about story craft, especially how early and final scenes can visually or emotionally mirror one another. What does the story open with, and how is that moment answered or transformed by the end?
The goal of the seminar is to help writers gain clarity about the arc their story is tracing. By thinking intentionally about beginnings and endings together, writers can make more deliberate choices about how their story enters and exits the page.
About Book Coach Karen Bacellar Book
Karen Bacellar is a book coach, writer, and communications strategist who helps speculative fiction authors transform big ideas into structured, emotionally resonant novels. Through her business, Cinematic Book Coaching, she guides writers from creative overwhelm to clarity, offering strategic support that blends story craft with vision.
A former filmmaker, her short film Gaslight Grail won Best Short Film at the Chicago Horror Film Festival, and her story Tess/Gunther was a quarter-finalist in the Screencraft Cinematic Short Story Competition. She attended the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon in 2024 and 2025 and was named a Luso-American Fellowship finalist in 2025.
Karen is currently working on Cantora, a novel set in Salazar’s Portugal, and Listening for Ghosts, a novella exploring memory, grief, and the long arc of personal reckoning. She holds degrees from University College London and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Born in Brazil and raised in New England, she now lives in Virginia.
About our Elaine’s Literary Salon Host 
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