THE 2012 PORT TOWNSEND WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
All faculty readings and lectures take place in the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater; all meals take place in the Fort Worden Commons. Register for any day, any track here.
Sunday, July 8
3:30-5:30—Check-in outside the Centrum office building
5:30—Dinner
7:00—Welcoming at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater
7:30—Reading by Judith Kitchen
Monday, July 9
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Jennine Capó Crucet Room D
• Erin Belieu Room F
• Judith Kitchen Room H
• Chris Crutcher Room J
• Gary Copeland Lilley Room K
• Ashley Capps Room L
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz Room M
• Diane Roberts Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Midge Raymond Room D
“Setting the Scene”
Place plays an important role in any story, from offering insight into characters to creating a mood. This workshop will help you get a sense of the where in your writing, from researching places to incorporating details and dialogue. We’ll look at classic and contemporary examples of how writers use setting to flesh out stories—and a variety of writing prompts will teach you how to pay attention to place in your work.
• Wendy Call Room N
“Build Your Own Rainbow: Narrative Arc”
In this workshop we’ll talk about how to build (and rebuild) a sturdy structure for your story. How do you create a narrative arc? What might one look like? Why have one at all? With help from Eduardo Galeano and Sandra Cisneros, we’ll answer all these questions and more, then we’ll map our own color-filled arcs.
• Alex Kuo Room L
“The Poetry of Witness”
This session will begin with a short discussion about what is poetry as witness (as in Forché’s “The Colonel” and Auden’s “September 1, 1939”) before we explore various ways of writing poetry about the cultural and political implications of what we experience daily. The main focus of each session will involve directed writing assignments and provide the opportunity to read and discuss each other’s work.
• Janée Baugher Room K
“Science Poetry”
Albert Einstein says, “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle, you can live as if everything is a miracle.” Praise the atom, the aorta, the arachnid! This workshop celebrates the miracle of the Natural Sciences by demystifying writing influenced by the sciences. In this workshop you’ll be introduced to poets who use biology, chemistry, physics, and math as subject matter, and you’ll begin to flex your own science-writing muscles with the help of in-class writing prompts.
• Sayantani Dasgupta Room H
“Ways In: One Class, Five New Essay Drafts”
Writing is like any other art form. Meaning, instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, the key is to practice it every day, because the more you practice, the better you get. While it would be wonderful to be able to write fresh, new prose every single time, as writers we know that getting stuck for ideas is also part of the process. In order to inject fresh energy into your writing, in this class, you will receive five new springboards, each very different from the other, to start you off on five new essays. (We’ll work on each springboard for about ten minutes and keep some time for reading and discussion.)
1) The Kitchen Exercise
2) Working with Images
3) Fairy Tales and You
4) Compare and Contrast
5) Three-Word memoirs
• Jim Bertolino Room M
“Contrary Impulses: A Poetry-Writing Workshop”
In this class, searching for the heart of the post-modern poem, you will develop a list of key words and images, as well as a list of words and images that are contrary to the first list. Then you’ll utilize items from both categories. This approach can produce surprisingly insightful poems, and you will have the opportunity to draft three during the workshop.
• Afternoon Freewrite Room F
Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
4-5—Craft lecture by Ashley Capps
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Sam Ligon; Diane Roberts
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Tuesday, July 10
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Jennine Capó Crucet Room D
• Erin Belieu Room F
• Judith Kitchen Room H
• Chris Crutcher Room J
• Gary Copeland Lilley Room K
• Ashley Capps Room L
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz Room M
• Diane Roberts Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Midge Raymond Room D
“Getting Into Character”
In both fiction and nonfiction, good characterization is what brings readers into our stories. In this workshop, we’ll discuss strategies for bringing characters to life, whether they are fictional or whether they’re real people appearing on the page for the first time. Using examples, we’ll discuss how character relates to such aspects of story as dialogue, setting, and plot, and we’ll also spend time writing, with exercises designed to develop and flesh out your characters.
• Wendy Call Room N
“Just Who’s Telling This Story, Anyway?: First-person Narrator”
In this workshop, we’ll explore the multi-faceted role of the first-person narrator in nonfiction prose. We’ll explore narrators created by several writers, including Sherman Alexie and James Agee. Next, we’ll create character sketches of our own first-person narrators, and learn how to tame that three-headed monster: author, first-person narrator, and “I-character.”
• Janée Baugher Room K
“Reconstruct Your Poems”
How do you successfully critique your work once you’ve created it? How do you know when the inspired piece you’ve written is ready for public consumption? Creating the work was fun, imaginitive, freeing, but the revision process seems arduous, tedious, overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. In this class, we’ll employ creative and entertaining techniques to help you plow through those many drafts of your work in order to arrive at its final stage. Specifically, we’ll evaluate your works’ point-of-view, its poetic line, the function of form, and qualify its diction, gone, and musicality.
• Susan Landgraf Room L
“The Art of Revision”
“[R]evision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the highly complex and satisfying process of creation,” May Sarton wrote. We’ll warm up by looking at E. B. White’s first draft of his short essay on the first moon landing for The New Yorker and then look at some revisions by Stafford and others. Bring a poem, essay, or short story to work on, to “re-create.”
• Alex Kuo Room O
“The Poetry of Witness”
This session will begin with a short discussion about poetry as witness (as in Forché’s “The Colonel” and Auden’s “September 1, 1939”) before we explore various ways of writing poetry about the cultural and political implications of what we experience daily. The main focus of each session will involve directed writing assignments and provide the opportunity to read and discuss each other’s work.
• Sayantani Dasgupta Room H
“Your Life in Parts: Writing the Segmented Essay”
One of the most popular forms of creative nonfiction is the segmented essay because it allows the author to step outside conventional narrative patterns of time and place. A segmented essay works in segments or parts that build off of each other. They are interspersed with white space, which functions as an essential design and foundation element, and therefore, segmented essays do not require traditional transitions. In addition to personal story, the segments may include research (ranging right from religion to science), change in authorial voice and perspective, shifts of time, etc. While all these disparate segments (including the silences and white spaces) must have their individual character and arc intact, they must also all work together. In this class, we will look at the form through the writings of accomplished essayists such as Nora Ephron and work on fleshing out a segmented essay of our own.
• Heidi Garnett Room J
“The Power of the Line”
Each poem has its own structure and one of the key controlling factors is the interplay between the line and the white space of the page. How does a long line affect cadence, rhythm and meaning versus a short line? What happens when a single word becomes the line? How do the spaces between lines affect our reading of the poem? Or the juxtapositions between space and script within a line? What is the effect of an end-stopped line versus the use of enjambment? How can enjambment become a powerful tool? What happens when all the rules are broken? The class will explore lineation and space as used by poets such as Creeley, Williams, McKay and Wright.
• Anne Germanacos Room M
“The Gift of Writing”
It’s easy to misplace the gift at the heart of the act of writing. In an effort to remind ourselves, let’s pause from the plethora of assumed knowledge and improvise a concentration of exchange. In this enactment, we’ll think about gifts in their many manifestations, particularly those associated with language and art. Bringa short gift (any genre).
• Afternoon Freewrite Room F
Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
4-5—Craft lecture by Diane Roberts
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Gary Copeland Lilley, TBA
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Wednesday, July 11
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Jennine Capó Crucet Room D
• Erin Belieu Room F
• Judith Kitchen Room H
• Chris Crutcher Room J
• Gary Copeland Lilley Room K
• Ashley Capps Room L
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz Room M
• Diane Roberts Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Midge Raymond Room D
“Say Anything: How to Write Great Dialogue”
From portraying character to moving the plot forward, dialogue works hard in any story—and writers often need to work just as hard to create authentic, realistic voices in their prose. In this workshop, we’ll study examples of good dialogue and discuss how and why these work, and we’ll go over tips for how to write engaging conversations, with writing exercises that will reinforce the major tenets of effective dialogue.
• Wendy Call Room M
“What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger: Character Development”
We’ll delve into character development, which is just as important in nonfiction as it is in fiction. We’ll talk about how we can make compelling characters out of real people—without making anything up. Come ready to ask and answer challenging questions about your main character. Examples from Elizabeth Gilbert and Katherine Boo will provide inspiration. Though designed for nonfiction writers, this workshop is equally appropriate for fiction writers.
• Alex Kuo Room L
“The Poetry of Witness”
This session will begin with a short discussion about what is poetry as witness (as in Forche’s “The Colonel” and Auden’s “September 1, 1939”) before we explore various ways of writing poetry about the cultural and political implications of what we experience daily. The main focus of each session will involve directed writing assignments and provide the opportunity to read and discuss each other’s work.
• Susan Landgraf Room K
“Richard Hugo Still Lives Big on the Page”
Hugo’s imposing presence—stocky bear build—and his deep voice still come through in his poems. And he has a lot to tell us about the ways to create poems that squall, grate, grind, kick ass. He wrote about Assumptions: “Words love the ridiculous areas of our minds. But silly or solid, assumptions are necessary elements in a successful base of writing operations.” For instance, whenever he saw a town that triggered a poem, he had 78 assumptions, number three being: “I have lived there all my life and should have left long ago but couldn’t.” We’ll look at some of Hugo’s poems and let him teach us about writing great poems, one right on the spot.
• Sam Ligon Room N
“The Short-Short Story”
In his seminal work “In Search of Lost Time,” Proust talks about the tyranny of rhyme forcing poets into some of their greatest lines. But prose writers have less experience with formal constraints, like rhyme, to put pressure on lines, and as a means to consider form in general. In this class we’ll examine the form of the short-short story, how it often works (and doesn’t), as well as how formal constraint can change the way we approach line and story. Because there’s so little space in a short-short, evocative outlines, shadows, implication, and suggestion hover at the edges. Short-shorts tend to rely on surprise, a hard, tight turn at the end. They can feel elliptical or fragmented, and are not always concerned with depth and complexity of character as much as with emotional gravity within a moment. Lydia Davis calls the short-short “a nervous form of story.” Charles Baxter says the short-short needs “surprise, a quick turning of the wrist toward texture, something suddenly broken or quickly repaired.” Mark Strand says, “Its end is erasure.”
• Stan Rubin Room H
“Wallace Stevens: The Mind of Poetry”
“To be a poet at all one ought to be a poet constantly” (Letter). Wallace Stevens by mid-century was established as a unique, and, for some, forbidding giant among American poets. Once called “the most representative American poet,” he has become ever more influential in our time. In conversation and consideration, we will interrogate selections from his poetry and prose in order to better understand his rich, multifaceted legacy—one that is not as difficult to come to terms with as you may think.
• Bill Mawhinney Room O
“Does Your Writing Wear A Social Mask? The Shadow Knows…”
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. —Carl Jung
A “shadow” is a part of our self that we hide, repress or deny. Robert Bly says we were each born into a “360-degree personality.” As infants we express the full circle of our human nature, without editing or censoring. As we grow up, however, we learn that certain slices of our 360-degree pie are unacceptable to the people around us. So, we throw those slices over our shoulder into a black bag, which we drag behind us. All writers are blocked to some degree—usually because of ideas about what not to write. We don’t allow ourselves free rein to express all that is carried by our bodies, our minds, and our hearts. Your shadows are a gold mine of creative energy. If you stuff things in your black bag while you write, your writing won’t have enough energy for it to live the way you want it to. Using prompts and exercises, this workshop will help you touch a piece of your shadow, then use what emerges as a springboard for your writing to be stronger and truer than before.
• Afternoon Freewrite Room F
Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
4-5—Craft lecture by Jennine Capó Crucet
5:30—Dinner
7:00—Participant reading downtown at the Northwind Arts Center
7:30—Participant readings at the Schoolhouse Building
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Thursday, July 12
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Jennine Capó Crucet Room D
• Erin Belieu Room F
• Judith Kitchen Room H
• Chris Crutcher Room J
• Gary Copeland Lilley Room K
• Ashley Capps Room L
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz Room M
• Diane Roberts Room N
• Sam Ligon Room O
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Midge Raymond Room D
“Be Your Own Editor”
As Ernest Hemingway once said, “Easy writing makes hard reading.” Revision is a necessary part of any writing project, yet revising one’s own work can often seem daunting. In this workshop, you’ll learn tools for how to approach your own writing with the objectivity of an editor. We’ll talk about when to begin the revision process as well as how to divide it into palatable stages. Bring a work-in-progress for in-class writing.
• Wendy Call Room N
“Every Page is a Stage: Scene Shop”
Whether your nonfiction tends toward the narrative or the lyrical, the shimmering image and the stellar scene are essential components. We’ll take a look at cinematic scenes by master writers George Orwell and Luis Alberto Urrea and break them down to their component parts. Finally, we’ll create our own stage on the page and let the action roll.
• Janée Baugher Room L
“Flash Fiction: Write Prose like a Poet”
A short-short story has two requirements, says Fred Chappell: “that it be quite short (under 2,000 words) and that it be troubling.” In this workshop, we’ll review the elements of craft employed by fiction writers (e.g. plot, subtext, characterization) and the elements of craft employed by poets (e.g. compression, rhythm, imagery). After highlighting the similarities and difference between the two genres, we’ll discuss how writers of flash fiction approach their art with a poet’s sensibility. Next, we’ll begin to compose our own short-shorts by responding to in-class writing exercises specifically designed to help writers write succintly while suspending disbelief.
• Philip Shaw Room K
“Beyond Constraint: A Conversation on the Relevance of the Avant-Garde in the World of Workshop”
With more avenues of expression and publication than ever before, where do some of the more exotic names mentioned in our workshops influence the writing and structural forms being acknowledged today? Let’s take a breakneck trip across continents and through time – from the mid-century to the contemporary—to establish a foundation of why there are some authors we reference but rarely in the workshop environment do we delve into how they accomplish their linguistic inventions. We will focus on prose however, where the collision of poetry and prose occur we will charge down those paths in our discussion. If the following names are either beloved or intrigue you: Pessoa, Frisch, Calvino, Borges, Cortázar, Bernhard, Bolaño, Oe, and Murakami; come join a conversation that will provide some interesting new reference points for all of us to consider in our work.
• Alex Kuo Room M
“Nature Writing”
A multi-genre (poetry, prose, hybrid) approach to writing about nature from the perspective of the new nature writing movement, it’ll begin with a discussion of some historical nature writing. You will then be encouraged to think about expanding the boundaries of the traditional genres and take a risk and try out new linguistic forms to reflect your evolving perceptions of what you think nature is.
• Panel Discussion Room O
“Writing Race”
Nigger, gook, spic, kike, chief—these words and others like them are a distasteful part of our lexicon. Can we take offensive expressions that represent subjugation and suffering and make them useful, relevant, and even culturally competent? Or do we eliminate inflammatory language from our work completely? This panel intends to initiate a difficult conversation about race in the context of our work as writers.
• • John Baxter Room H
“Writing the Schools”
The way English/language arts is taught in schools is changing. All but four states have adopted the Common Core education standards and though they are considered the definitive guidelines, these standards will impact the way English is taught. Come join in a discussion of writing techniques for parents and teachers as we discuss suggestions, observations, and techniques for helping future language arts students prepare for their future.
• Afternoon Freewrite Room F
Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
4-5—Craft lecture by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Ashley Capps; Jennine Capó Crucet
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Friday, July 13
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Jennine Capó Crucet Room D
• Erin Belieu Room F
• Judith Kitchen Room H
• Chris Crutcher Room J
• Gary Copeland Lilley Room K
• Ashley Capps Room L
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz Room M
• Diane Roberts Room N
• Sam Ligon Room O
12-1:00—Lunch
• “Free Fridays at the Fort” concert on the Fort Worden Commons lawn
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Wendy Call Room N
“What’s the Big Idea? Theme”
There’s the situation, then there’s the story. How do we braid them together, with that elusive third element: theme? We’ll ask ourselves hard questions about the big ideas of our true stories. Are they big enough? Are they too big? Rebecca McClanahan and Vivian Gornick will inspire us to braid our own just-big-enough ideas into our stories.
• Janée Baugher Room M
“Literature and Visual Arts”
How and why do writers engage with art? Whether through collaboration or mere inspiration, many literary artists have turned to the visual arts. Ekphrasis, the art of description (i.e., “the verbal representation of visual representation”), has a long literary tradition dating back to Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad. In this workshop, we will explore the mode of ekphrasis in both prose and poetry. Not only will we unveil the ekphrastic methods of various authors (e.g. Gertrude Stein, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Peter Cooley) but we’ll begin to flex our own ekphrastic muscles through in-class writing exercises. Writers of all genres are welcome.
• Bill Mann Room D
“Getting In Touch With Your Inner Humor”
Most of us can be pretty funny—at least, when we focus on it. We’ll discuss the process of unlocking your inner mirth by exploring varied approaches to written humor ranging from Ogden Nash to Stephen Leacock, plus Calvin Trillin, P.J. O’Rourke, Joe Queenan and web humorist Andy Borowitz. We’ll also examine some first-rate TV comedy writing—Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Larry David and still-funny, classic Monty Python sketches.
• Alex Kuo Room O
“Nature Writing”
A multi-genre (poetry, prose, hybrid) approach to writing about nature from the perspective of the new nature writing movement, it’ll begin with a discussion of some historical nature writing. You will then be encouraged to think about expanding the boundaries of the traditional genres and take a risk and try out new linguistic forms to reflect your evolving perceptions of what you think nature is.
• Stan Rubin Room H
“Plath’s Voices”
How do we really know Sylvia? Many value Sylvia Plath’s poetry and more have opinions about her fate and cultural significance. (Yes, movies have been made.) We will explore together the voices representing Plath in various sources—her journals, her letters, her poems, including original and printed versions—in a common effort to understand better the work and the unfolding significance of this gifted poet and complicated person. To hear her. This will be very much a discussion, a reader’s circle to which we will all contribute. No prior opinion of Plath is required—but you’ll probably have one of your own in process when we’re finished. (“…god, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts”—early journal entry).
• Arlene Kim Room K
“Re-FORM School”
Sestina, sonnet, haiku, villanelle, ghazal—classic forms to be sure. But, you’ve updated your wardrobe from Elizabethan ruffs, ascots and flapper fringe, thrift-shop cheongsams, and parachute pants, so perhaps it’s time to give your poetic forms a new look, too. If you’re feeling stuck in stodgy, old-school fashions, come and correct your course to something inventive, non-traditional. Our poetic “lookbook” will include pieces inspired by all kinds of forms: book indexes, postcards, recipes, dictionaries, math problems, personals ads, lists. We’ll also come up with a few fresh silhouettes of our own. Feel free to bring a piece, new or old, that you’d like to reform—mannequins and seam rippers provided.
• Sayantani Dasgupta Room L
“Writing with Cultural Sensitivity: How to Write About the Other”
Cultural Sensitivity may be defined as the ability to adjust one’s perception and behaviors, and then practice styles to effectively meet the needs of different racial or ethnic groups. The first step in this direction lies in acknowledging that cultural differences exist. The “ideal” reader is no longer restricted to one particular geographical area or cultural sensitivity. Therefore, it becomes even more important to be able to maintain the thin line between what is culturally provocative and downright insensitive. In this session, by looking at short excerpts from the writings of Rudyard Kipling, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lan Samantha Chang, and Salman Rushdie, we will discuss how to incorporate adequate research and the oddities of culture in our writing in order to avoid generalizations, be those of land, language, religion, food, or gender.
• Fayette Hauser Room J
“Method Acting for Writers”
This workshop will guide the writer through the exercises of relaxation
and the techniques of performance preparation as created by the great
Method Acting teacher Lee Strasberg. All actors use a preparation technique to arrive at a personal space and it is from this place that great performances emerge. Any writer that wants to perform their work can learn and utilize these specific techniques to create that personal space and project the magic of their material.
• Afternoon Freewrite Room F
Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
4-5—Craft lecture by Judith Kitchen
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Erin Belieu; Chris Crutcher
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Saturday, July 14
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Jennine Capó Crucet Room D
• Erin Belieu Room F
• Judith Kitchen Room H
• Chris Crutcher Room J
• Gary Copeland Lilley Room K
• Ashley Capps Room L
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz Room M
• Diane Roberts Room N
• Sam Ligon Room O
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Midge Raymond Room D
“The Art of the Title”
What’s in a title? Quite a lot—a title is usually a book’s first introduction to the world, and you want to make a good first impression. In this workshop, we’ll examine titles that work and why, and we’ll look at the rejected titles of famous books to see what doesn’t. Through a series of tips and writing prompts, you’ll learn how to create titles that convey the tone, nature, and content of your project, and you’ll leave the session with a list of solid title possibilities for your work-in-progress.
• Wendy Call Room N
“I love your je ne sais quoi…: Style”
In this workshop, we’ll ask perhaps the toughest of questions: Just how do they do it? How do writers create voices on the page so singular that we recognize them immediately? We’ll look at short examples by David Foster Wallace and Joan Didion, parse their inimitable and unmistakable styles, and explore our own.
• Janée Baugher Room M
“Unraveling the Sestina”
Poets and prose writers alike have adopted the sestina as a favorite form. This workshop will include instruction on how to construct sestinas, a discussion of form-follows-function, and suggestions for creative and modern ways to celebrate this 12th century poetic form. After reading sestinas on the poetic and prose forms, we’ll write one of our own sestinas.
• Susan Landgraf Room K
“The Art of Acrostics: How to Order the World”
The word acrostic comes to the English language via the Latin derivation of the Greek words akron and stikhos (line of verse). Acrostics are both poems and puzzles. In this workshop, we’ll look at acrostics as ways to help us order thoughts and poems. We’ll study a few acrostics to begin, do several writing exercises, then write an acrostic.
• Alex Kuo Room H
“Nature Writing”
A multi-genre (poetry, prose, hybrid) approach to writing about nature from the perspective of the new nature writing movement, it’ll begin with a discussion of some historical nature writing. You will then be encouraged to think about expanding the boundaries of the traditional genres and take a risk and try out new linguistic forms to reflect your evolving perceptions of what you think nature is.
• Arlene Kim Room J
“Revision Bomb”
Stop handling your revisions like fragile, heirloom crystal. Be honest—has your mollycoddling done that poem any favors lately? When more than a tweak is needed, when simply cutting your darlings isn’t enough, it’s time to lob a revision bomb. Blindfold your poems, your hostages—it’s OK; it’s tough love—and lead them to this session where we will cut, paste, blackout, interrogate, improvise, mosh pit, double-team, and spin the roulette wheel on them. Throw a grenade at those tired, old poem drafts; see what withstands the explosion. This hands-on workshop is not for the reluctant wader or the faint-he/arted. (If you can, bring multiple copies of your captives—er, poems.)
• Elizabeth Austen Room M
“Beyond the Page: Poems Aloud, Poems Alive”
What does it take to make poems come alive in performance? Commitment, practice… and some skills that we’ll explore in this interactive workshop. We’ll explore the physical nature of language, and practice embodying the poem—backing it up with breath, voice and body. You’ll leave with concrete tools to improve your reading skills and public presence. Applicable to all styles of poetry. Bring two short poems.
• Afternoon Freewrite Room F
Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
4-5—Craft lecture by Gary Copeland Lilley
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Reading Benjamin Alire Sáenz
9:00—Party and Book-signing in Building 262.
Sunday, July 15
8–11—Dorm check out for departing participants
8-9—Breakfast
9—Airport shuttle leaves
9–3:30—Free time
3:30-5:30—Check-in outside the Centrum office building; welcome gathering
5:30—Dinner
7:00—Welcoming and orientation at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater
7:30—Reading by Dorothy Allison
Monday, July 16
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Cheryl Strayed Room N
• Peggy Shumaker Room F
• Pam Houston Room D
• Dorothy Allison Room H
• Ashley Capps Room K
• Dana Levin Room L
• Kim Addonizio Room J
• Susan Steinberg Room O
9-10:30 Morning Exercises
• Ellie Mathews Room M
12-1:00—Lunch
1-2—Afternoon Freewrite Room F
• Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Gayle Kaune Room O
“Writing and Healing”
We’ve all heard that writing can be healing, but exactly what elements are
healing and how do they intersect with good writing? We’ll talk about current
research, do our own writing, and discuss possible implications for our
writing, writing groups and teaching.
• Mark Clemens Room M
“The Things We Carry”
Taking as our guidepost Tim O’Brien’s magnificent short-story microcosm of the Vietnam War, “The Things They Carried,” we will discuss what each of us carries, as well as the characters we are working to develop. From physical objects to personal history, from acts of kindness to emotional quandaries, what are the burdens your characters carry, is your own load heavy or light or both combined? The contents of our personal and fictional backpacks spread out on the table, we’ll pinpoint ways they can work in stories we want to tell.
• Janée Baugher Room N
“Science Poetry”
Albert Einstein says, “There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is
a miracle, you can live as if everything is a miracle.” Praise the atom, the aorta, the arachnid! This workshop celebrates the miracle of the Natural Sciences by demystifying writing influenced by the sciences. In this workshop you’ll be introduced to poets who use biology, chemistry, physics, and math as subject matter, and you’ll begin to flex your own science-writing muscles with the help of in-class writing prompts.
• Susan Landgraf Room L
“What Li Bai’s Poems Can Tell Us about Modern China”
As Zhou Zi wrote in “Pearls of Tang & Song Poetry,” Li Bai (known as Li Po
in the United States) “hated corruptive officials and bureaucratic dignitaries” and “left behind his footprints” of poems that earned him the title of “Poetry Celestial.” His work from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) has been translated by many poets, including Sam Hamill. We’ll look at several translations of a number of poems to find what Li Bai said and why his work helps us understand China today. We’ll also write a “seven jue” poem (four lines with seven letters per line), a form he often used. The Republic of China has changed dramatically—and yet, China and the Chinese people are still Li Bai’s China and her people.
• Colette Tennant Room J
“Picture This”
A picture is worth…a few good poems at least. In this workshop we will
begin by briefly defining Ekphrastic poetry. We will analyze poems inspired by paintings. Then, we will practice “reading” a painting. Finally, we will create new work, using art as our inspiration. It’s a great way to generate poems and a lot of fun to let art beget art.
• Sam Ligon Room D
“Negative Space in Fiction”
While we’ve all heard the writing advice to “show, don’t tell,” just as important to fiction is what we don’t show or tell—what we reveal through absence or omission. Musicians and composers use silence in song to create tension and meaning and contrast against sound. Painters use negative space around a subject to create contrast and to heighten color and composition in the subject itself. In fiction, what’s not revealed, and how it’s not revealed, often creates a tremendous gravity of absence, or a kind of shadow effect, that informs character and meaning in story. In “Death in the Afternoon”, Ernest Hemingway wrote that “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” We’ll discuss Hemingway’s “iceberg principal,” or what Amy Hempel refers to as “negative space,” using two stories as examples of creating shape, meaning, and gravity through absence or omission—Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” and Hempel’s “Today Will Be a Quiet Day.”
• Tammy Strobel Room K
“Writing in the Digital Age”
Tell your story in the digital world. Topics covered include: setting up the foundation to create a blog, how to structure blog posts, finding your audience, and the importance of storytelling.
• Elizabeth Austen Room F
“Beyond the Page: Poems Aloud, Poems Alive”
What does it take to make poems come alive in performance? Commitment,
practice…and some skills that we’ll explore in this interactive workshop.
We’ll explore the physical nature of language, and practice embodying the
poem—backing it up with breath, voice and body. You’ll leave with concrete
tools to improve your reading skills and public presence. Applicable to all
styles of poetry. Bring two short poems.
• Lia Gladstone Room H
“Site-Specific Playwriting”
Theater is the oldest form of dramatic storytelling. We’ll begin with a series of
playwriting craft elements, then collaborate on the writing of a site-specific
play with the goal of a performance at the end of the week. The unique
environment of Fort Worden State Park will serve as a catalyst for
exploration and creation. Please note: while the first day is a drop-in
workshop, participants who want to continue will be asked to commit for the
whole week in order to deliver a finished product by week’s end.
4-5—Craft lecture by Dana Levin
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Peggy Shumaker, Ashley Capps
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Tuesday, July 17
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Cheryl Strayed Room N
• Peggy Shumaker Room F
• Pam Houston Room D
• Dorothy Allison Room H
• Ashley Capps Room K
• Dana Levin Room L
• Kim Addonizio Room J
• Susan Steinberg Room O
9-10:30 Morning Exercises
• Ellie Mathews Room M
12-1:00—Lunch
1-2—Afternoon Freewrite Room F
• Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Q. Lindsey Barrett Room K
“Writing Sex”
Sex is when humans are the most masked and when we are most open and vulnerable. The sex scene offers writers an opportunity to exploit this dichotomy, to reveal character: expose her for the wild woman she is inside, show the tender truly of him. Yet writers often find this the most difficult of scenes to write, certainly the most embarrassing. Why is crafting a sex scene without the titillation of juvenilia, yet less explicit than erotica so difficult? Learn how to keep it literary, to walk the tightrope without falling into the pit of pornography; how to find your balance between the sterility of a clinician and the flowery description of a romance novel. We’ll look at some contemporary examples and do a bit of directed writing.
• Janée Baugher Room N
“Reconstruct Your Poems”
How do you successfully critique your work once you’ve created it? How do
you know when the inspired piece you’ve written is ready for public consumption? Creating the work was fun, imaginitive, freeing, but the revision process seems arduous, tedious, overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. In this class, we’ll employ creative and entertaining techniques to help you plow through those many drafts of your work in order to arrive at its final stage. Specifically, we’ll evaluate your works’ point-of-view, its poetic line, the function of form, and qualify its diction, gone, and musicality.
• Richard Widerkehr Room F
“Voice and Poetic Diction: High, Low, and Mixed”
Our choice of words—slang or formal, plain or figurative, concete or abstract—is very close to what makes our voice our own. Yet we’ll focus on diction here. It’s easier to point to, since voice is a tango, more mysterious. Two in-class writing ideas will be offered: 1) Writing from word prompts that allow us to mix our diction; 2) Writing two brief scenes, a calm one and a turbulent one, then mixing or juxtaposing the contrary images. We’ll look at examples by contemporaries such as Erin Belieu, Patricia Hooper, and Gary Copeland Lilley, along with Roethke, Shakespeare, and Dickinson.
• Philip Shaw Room L
“Beyond Constraint: A Conversation on the Relevance of the Avant-Garde in the World of Workshop”
With more avenues of expression and publication than ever before, where do some of the more exotic names mentioned in our workshops influence the writing and structural forms being acknowledged today? Let’s take a breakneck trip across continents and through time—from the mid-century to the contemporary—to establish a foundation of why there are some authors we reference but rarely in the workshop environment do we delve into how they accomplish their linguistic inventions. We will focus on prose however, where the collision of poetry and prose occur we will charge down those paths in our discussion. If the following names are either beloved or intrigue you: Pessoa, Frisch, Calvino, Borges, Cortázar, Bernhard, Bolaño, Oe, and Murakami; come join a conversation that will provide some interesting new reference points for all of us to consider in our work.
• Sam Ligon Room O
“Short Fiction and the Inverted Time Telescope”
In an interview with Willow Springs in 2007, Stuart Dybek said that “fiction is a temporal art. Its main subject is time. Its great power is chronology because chronology has an inescapable way of translating into cause and effect. It’s deceptive and illusory, but that’s the power of linear narrative….But linear narration is only one way to perceive reality.” And inverting or subverting linear narration might be another way to perceive reality. Writers such as Dybek, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, and many others often play with chronology and time in their fiction, sometimes finding and revealing the heart of a story in a moment brought to life in the protagonist’s past, ending with that past moment even, unhinging the story from forward moving chronological narration. In this class we’ll read and discuss two stories that establish a present from which the action springboards into the past, never to return to the present, Dybek’s “Pet Milk,” and Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.” We’ll be considering this fundamental question: If the story’s essential revelation is in the past, why is a present introduced from which to travel backward?
• Deborah Poe Room J
“Hybrid Forms/Mongrel Selves”
In this workshop we’ll use the words hybridity to think about creating pieces that embrace multiple genres at once: prose poems, flash fiction, narrative that looks like poetry, etc. Some examples from which we might discuss excerpts include: Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” Natasha Tretheway’s “Beyond Katrina,” Akilah Oliver’s “A Toast in the House of Friends,” Rebecca Brown’s “Excerpts from a Family Medical Dictionary,” and Anne Carson’s “Plainwater.”
• Sayantani Dasgupta Room D
“Ways In: One Class, Five New Essay Drafts”
Writing is like any other art form. Meaning, instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, the key is to practice it every day, because the more you practice, the better you get. While it would be wonderful to be able to write fresh, new prose every single time, as writers we know that getting stuck for ideas is also part of the process. In order to inject fresh energy into your writing, in this class, you will receive five new springboards, each very different from the other, to start you off on five new essays. (We’ll work on each springboard for about ten minutes and keep some time for reading and discussion.)
1) The Kitchen Exercise
2) Working with Images
3) Fairy Tales and You
4) Compare and Contrast
5) Three-Word memoirs
• Lia Gladstone Room H
“Site-Specific Playwriting”
(Continuation.)
4-5—Craft lecture by Pam Houston
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Susan Steinberg; James Hannaham
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Wednesday, July 18
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Cheryl Strayed Room N
• Peggy Shumaker Room F
• Pam Houston Room D
• Dorothy Allison Room H
• Ashley Capps Room K
• Dana Levin Room L
• Kim Addonizio Room J
• Susan Steinberg Room O
9-10:30 Morning Exercises
• Ellie Mathews Room M
12-1:00—Lunch
1-2—Afternoon Freewrite Room F
• Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Mark Clemens Room K
“Your Narrator Deconstructed”
Who is the narrator of your story? Is she simple or complex? Is he forthcoming or does he dissemblie? Does your narrator maintain a steady stance in relation to the situation they’re in, or is she or he slippery and flawed? We’ll dissect a contemporary short story in which these questions are paramount. The story—Julian Barnes’ “Homage to Hemingway”—seems to be, at first, a witty sashay through issues of gender, age, vanity, ambition, celebrity authors, the value of writing workshops and realities of modern marriage. Then deft shifts in the narrator’s point-of-view tilt the tale and the picture is fractured further by allusions to Hemingway’s novel “Across the River and into the Trees,” and short story, “Homage to Switzerland.” The latter prompts Barnes’ unnamed narrator to muse, “And the way the three parts of the story overlap…makes us think about the way our own lives overlap with one another. How we are all connected, all complicit.” Does the narrator really believe this? Is it true? That’s where our conversation begins.
• Susan Landgraf Room L
“What About Sound?”
Sounds slice the air, break barriers, and hold the world together. What about our poems? Where’s the sound? We’ll look at prose pieces by Alice Walker and Mark Twain and at poems by Quincy Troupe, Cate Marvin, and Federico García Lorca, then write a poem that blows, whispers, and tap dances across the Olympic Mountains.
• Jeanne Morel Room O
“Drafting Your Dictionary”
The dictionary is a powerful form that embodies depth and authority. In recent years, it has become both a generative and an organizing form for writers. This workshop will invite you to weave threads from your history, imagination, and writing, and create a dictionary that is uniquely yours. Composing your own dictionary is a generative act that will probe the edges of your interpretations and move your work in new directions. For poets, storytellers, memoirists.
• Sam Ligon Room N
“The Short-Short Story”
In his seminal work “In Search of Lost Time,” Proust talks about the tyranny of rhyme forcing poets into some of their greatest lines. But prose writers have less experience with formal constraints, like rhyme, to put pressure on lines, and as a means to consider form in general. In this class we’ll examine the form of the short-short story, how it often works (and doesn’t), as well as how formal constraint can change the way we approach line and story. Because there’s so little space in a short-short, evocative outlines, shadows, implication, and suggestion hover at the edges. Short-shorts tend to rely on surprise, a hard, tight turn at the end. They can feel elliptical or fragmented, and are not always concerned with depth and complexity of character as much as with emotional gravity within a moment. Lydia Davis calls the short-short “a nervous form of story.” Charles Baxter says the short-short needs “surprise, a quick turning of the wrist toward texture, something suddenly broken or quickly repaired.” Mark Strand says, “Its end is erasure.”
• Deborah Poe Room J
“Art as a Point of Departure”
What is the difference between using art as a point of departure versus ekphrastic writing—writing that describes artwork? What is ekphrastic poetry? What is not? If you use different mediums—film, other books, sound art—how does that change the use of art as a point of departure? In this workshop, we will reflect on the use of art as an instigator for new work. But we will contemplate how the joining of ideas, research, ideas of the artist, and a focus on various mediums can produce different kinds of pieces than straight ekphrastic poetry.
• Bill Mawhinney Room M
“Does Your Writing Wear A Social Mask? The Shadow Knows…”
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. —Carl Jung
A “shadow” is a part of our self that we hide, repress or deny. Robert Bly says
we were each born into a “360-degree personality.” As infants we express the full circle of our human nature, without editing or censoring. As we grow up, however, we learn that certain slices of our 360-degree pie are unacceptable to the people around us. So, we throw those slices over our shoulder into a black bag, which we drag behind us. All writers are blocked to some degree—usually because of ideas about what not to write. We don’t allow ourselves free rein to express all that is carried by our bodies, our minds, and our hearts. Your shadows are a gold mine of creative energy. If you stuff things in your black bag while you write, your writing won’t have enough energy for it to live the way you want it to. Using prompts and exercises, this workshop will help you touch a piece of your shadow, then use what emerges as a springboard for your writing to be stronger and truer than before.
• Sayantani Dasgupta Room D
“Your Life in Parts: Writing the Segmented Essay”
One of the most popular forms of creative nonfiction is the segmented essay because it allows the author to step outside conventional narrative patterns of time and place. A segmented essay works in segments or parts that build off of each other. They are interspersed with white space, which functions as an essential design and foundation element, and therefore, segmented essays do not require traditional transitions. In addition to personal story, the segments may include research (ranging right from religion to science), change in authorial voice and perspective, shifts of time, etc. While all these disparate segments (including the silences and white spaces) must have their individual character and arc intact, they must also all work together. In this class, we will look at the form through the writings of accomplished essayists such as Nora Ephron and work on fleshing out a segmented essay of our own.
• Lia Gladstone Room H
“Site-Specific Playwriting”
(Continuation.)
4-5—Craft lecture by Kim Addonizio
5:30—Dinner
7:00—Participant reading downtown at the Northwind Arts Center
7:30—Participant readings at the Schoolhouse Building
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Thursday, July 19
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Cheryl Strayed Room N
• Peggy Shumaker Room F
• Pam Houston Room D
• Dorothy Allison Room H
• Ashley Capps Room K
• Dana Levin Room L
• Kim Addonizio Room J
• Susan Steinberg Room O
9-10:30 Morning Exercises
• Ellie Mathews Room M
12-1:00—Lunch
1-2—Afternoon Freewrite Room F
• Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Sam Ligon Room N
“Persona, Politics, and Protest in Poetry and Prose: A Collaborative Workshop for Prose Writers and Poets”
Please note: this is not a drop-in workshop. Pre-registration is required and
limited to twelve.
“I think any writer of substance is a cultural critic by nature,” fiction writer Lydia Millet told Willow Springs in a 2010 interview: “Books should have an agenda, but I don’t think you should be able to deliver a one-liner about what that agenda is….Even if a piece is satirical, if it’s sheer polemic, it doesn’t work as art.” In this three-day class, we’ll each workshop two political persona pieces, whatever “political” might mean, and these can be poems, short pieces of imaginative prose, or one of each. We’ll be especially interested in collaboration and the discovery of hybrid forms here, perhaps blurring the line between poetry and prose or essay and story, or something else entirely, and to this end, each poet in the class will be paired with a prose writer, with the idea of developing a political discussion on the page. Subject matter and focus for the first piece of writing is up to each individual writer, but the second piece will be a response to your partner’s first piece. We’ll be looking to spark off each other’s work, to advance or reject or certainly struggle with each other’s ideas through the development of our own. We’ll also be considering the danger and limitations of propaganda—writing in which an agenda doesn’t allow space for a reader to work, because meaning and purpose has already been too clearly determined by the writer. But where is the line between propaganda and art with an agenda? Can a work be both propaganda and art? When? How? When? How? Can politics and protest exist within writing that breathes and surprises and becomes far larger than sloganeering? How might the use of persona help a piece transcend propaganda? In this workshop, limited to six poets and six prose writers, we’ll sharpen our axes, collaborate on the page, and see what arises.
• Wayne Lee Room M
“The Music of Poetry:
Poetry is so much more than sense and sensibility—it’s also sounds, cadences, patterns, silence. The best poets complement the standard literary devices such as assonance, consonance, alliteration, repetition, variation, rhythm, and rhyme with a full palette of musical elements. In this workshop, we’ll explore the basic building blocks of music such as theme and variation, pace, accent, pauses, dynamics, timbre, tone, and texture to enhance the written and spoken word. We’ll listen to the innate musicality of some of our greatest poets, discuss strategies for making our poems more “musical,” and write a poem built around a musical prompt.
• Janée Baugher Room K
“Flash Fiction: Write Prose like a Poet”
A short-short story has two requirements, says Fred Chappell: “That it be quite short (under 2,000 words) and that it be troubling.” In this workshop, we’ll review the elements of craft employed by fiction writers (e.g. plot, subtext, characterization) and the elements of craft employed by poets (e.g. compression, rhythm, imagery). After highlighting the similarities and difference between the two genres, we’ll discuss how writers of flash fiction approach their art with a poet’s sensibility. Next, we’ll begin to compose our own short-shorts by responding to in-class writing exercises specifically designed to help writers write succintly while suspending disbelief.
• Richard Widerkehr Room L
“The Next Poem: “Where in the Blankety-Blank Are We Going?”
Writers’ growth is mysterious. Sometimes stuff happens, and it changes who we are. Other times we may get tired of what we’re writing and want to change. We’ll try two writing ideas. Door number one: Pretend you’re clairvoyant and write from the point-of-view of yourself five years from now, talking to yourself about where you need to go. Door number two: Write in the voice of a character who’s not yourself. Sometimes a personna can take us other places. Fiction writers know this, but poets miight want to give it a try. Finally, we’ll look at poems by Roethke and a contemporary poet, Patricia Hooper, who’ve who’ve gone through different stages.
• Bill Mann Room D
“Getting In Touch With Your Inner Humor”
Most of us can be pretty funny—at least, when we focus on it. We’ll discuss the process of unlocking your inner mirth by exploring varied approaches to written humor ranging from Ogden Nash to Stephen Leacock, plus Calvin Trillin, P.J. O’Rourke, Joe Queenan and web humorist Andy Borowitz. We’ll also examine some first-rate TV comedy writing—Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Larry David and still-funny, classic Monty Python sketches.
• Deborah Poe Room J
“Contrapuntal Collaboration”
There are three major definitions of contrapuntal. It’s the melody added as accompaniment to a given melody or ‘plain-song’. Contrapuntal refers also to the art of adding one or more melodies as accompaniment to a given melody or ‘plain-song’ according to certain fixed rules (the style of composition in which melodies are thus combined). Contrapuntal can also mean a combination of two types of rhythm in a line of verse. Palestinian-American critical theorist Edward Said, himself a pianist and music critic, wrote extensively about how literature can be contrapuntal. We will talk a little bit about how literature might be contrapuntal. We will focus on writing pieces that possess a keen attentiveness to prose rhythms, poetry’s musicality, and the contrapuntal. We will focus on ways in which thinking about the contrapuntal during our creative process might impact the meaningfulness of our work.
• Kate Lebo Room O
“Making the Pie Higher: Writing the Modern American Food Poem”
If Emily Dickinson had been a foodie, she might have written “food is never
just about food” instead of “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—Success in
Circuit lies.” In this class we’ll consider how food can help us “tell it slant” in
our own work. We’ll discuss contemporary food poems and generate new
work. Best of all, we’ll eat pie.
• Lia Gladstone Room H
“Site-Specific Playwriting”
(Continuation.)
4-5—Craft lecture by Cheryl Strayed
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Kim Addonizio and Gary Copeland Lilley
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Friday, July 20
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Cheryl Strayed Room N
• Peggy Shumaker Room F
• Pam Houston Room D
• Dorothy Allison Room H
• Ashley Capps Room K
• Dana Levin Room L
• Kim Addonizio Room J
• Susan Steinberg Room O
9-10:30 Morning Exercises
• Ellie Mathews Room M
12-1:00—Lunch
12-1:00—Free Fridays at the Fort concert on the Fort Worden Commons lawn
1-2—Afternoon Freewrite Room F
• Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
1-4—Afternoon class
• Sam Ligon Room N
“Persona, Politics, and Protest in Poetry and Prose: A Collaborative Workshop for Prose Writers and Poets”
Continuation: pre-registration required.
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Janée Baugher Room M
“Literature and Visual Arts”
How and why do writers engage with art? Whether through collaboration or mere inspiration, many literary artists have turned to the visual arts. Ekphrasis, the art of description (i.e., “the verbal representation of visual representation”), has a long literary tradition dating back to Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad. In this workshop, we will explore the mode of ekphrasis in both prose and poetry. Not only will we unveil the ekphrastic methods of various authors (e.g. Gertrude Stein, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Peter Cooley) but we’ll begin to flex our own ekphrastic muscles through in-class writing exercises. Writers of all genres are welcome.
• Kate Trueblood Room O
“The Scene: Building Block for All Fiction”
Since the time of Shakespeare when Rosalind revealed she was not the youth Ganymede but the maid Roselind, scenes have contained reversals, recognitions, power shifts, epiphanies, and in more modern times, anti-epiphanies. In this seminar, we will focus on the scene, that essential building block of fiction that allows us to become the masons of cathedrals, castles, and lighthouses—i.e., novels, novellas, and short stories. We will begin by generating good dialogue and then learn how to integrate physical gesture, exposition, back-story, and the details of time and place. We will discuss how to determine what is worth dramatizing and what would be better delivered as flashback or exposition, and how best to use these other tools. It is useful to consider where the payoff to the reader must be delivered or denied in a scene. Pacing must also be considered. Scenes in short stories are constructed to deliver swiftly whereas in a novel there’s a more leisurely rhythm of delay and delivery as back-story is spooled out to the reader. These are distinctions of craft that are crucial to any writer of fiction.
• Bill Mann Room D
“Getting In Touch With Your Inner Humor”
Most of us can be pretty funny—at least, when we focus on it. We’ll discuss the process of unlocking your inner mirth by exploring varied approaches to written humor ranging from Ogden Nash to Stephen Leacock, plus Calvin Trillin, P.J. O’Rourke, Joe Queenan and web humorist Andy Borowitz. We’ll also examine some first-rate TV comedy writing—Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Larry David and still-funny, classic Monty Python sketches.
• Susan Landgraf Room J
“A Few Women Poets of the World and Their Common Denominators”
We’ll look at five women poets: Gwendolyn Brooks (U.S.), Gabriela Mistral (Chile), Nimah Nawwab (Saudi Arabia), Naomi Shihab Nye (U.S.), and Amrita Pritam (India). Their voices ring with the cultural influences of their countries and experiences—with the unique landscape, philosophy, history, and women’s issues they came from and wrote about. Yet, there are common denominators, as we’ll find by looking at several poems by each poet. Then we’ll do some brainstorming about our own cultural influences and write a poem.
• Deborah Poe Room F
“Writing with Scientific Thought”
We will reflect on how one can use science to inspire creative writing. By looking at writing samples from such writers as Arthur Sze, Czeslaw Milosz, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Andrea Barrett, Bernadette Mayer, and Rikki Ducornet, we’ll consider how established writers use scientific ideas in their own work. Though our focus is not an introduction of scientific terms per se, we will use scientific thought as launching pads for creative writing, generating work during the workshop. The workshop is designed to provide new channels to access new work.
• Jeannine Hall Gailey Room L
“Two Japanese Forms: Haiku and Haibun.”
You may have heard of haiku (though we’ll discuss the form beyond the usual 5-7-5 definition) but have you ever heard of haibun? In this class, we’ll look at contemporary and classic writing examples of these two fascinating forms, from both Japanese and American writers. Then, we’ll try a few exercises to generate some haiku, and then use both travel and dream-based exercises to write a few haibun.
• Lia Gladstone Room H
“Site-Specific Playwriting”
(Continuation.)
4-5—Craft lecture by Dorothy Allison
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Dana Levin; Cheryl Strayed
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Saturday, July 21
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Cheryl Strayed Room N
• Peggy Shumaker Room F
• Pam Houston Room D
• Dorothy Allison Room H
• Ashley Capps Room K
• Dana Levin Room L
• Kim Addonizio Room J
• Susan Steinberg Room O
9-10:30 Morning Exercises
• Ellie Mathews Room M
12-1:00—Lunch
1-2—Afternoon Freewrite Room F
• Join writers of all levels through a selection of freewrites.
1-4—Afternoon class
• Sam Ligon Room N
“Persona, Politics, and Protest in Poetry and Prose: A Collaborative Workshop for Prose Writers and Poets”
Continuation: pre-registration required.
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Stellasue Lee, Room M
“Saying the Unsayable”
As long as creative people feel in harmony with their work and are progressing they are happy and fulfilled. When the relationship breaks down, their interior life also breaks down.
—Ira Progoff
Explaining the unexplainable is something of a magic act. Those who show up to a blank page with an unfettered mind will unravel the mystery and learn that journal writing/transformation line is the key to the subconscious and essential to the process. And in the process, things happen that are always a surprise. This kind of writing is about reaching into the mid-section and exposing what lies within. It is one of the oldest methods of self-exploration and expression and leads you to understand their inner core and how life works empowering them to change the course of their thinking. Once down on paper, it lives. This workshop will focus on what an image/moment consists of, and how showing—in place of telling—builds into a poem. Come prepared to do a writing exercise. Sharing will be optional.
• Brian Christian Room J
“The Third Thing: Exercises in Register”
Ezra Pound argued that the power of poetry comes from three sources: sound, image…and a third thing, which he had to invent a word for. Arguably the most powerful driving force in 20th and 21st-century poetry is also the least explored—Pound called it “logopoeia”; we now call it register, or the reason why the words “pearlescent” and “dudes” don’t mix. Through close readings and our own experiments, we’ll have a look at the power and possibilities of register in 20th and 21st-century poetry—including your own.
• Janée Baugher Room F
“Unraveling the Sestina”
Poets and prose writers alike have adopted the sestina as a favorite form. This workshop will include instruction on how to construct sestinas, a discussion of form-follows-function, and suggestions for creative and modern ways to celebrate this 12th century poetic form. After reading sestinas on the poetic and prose forms, we’ll write one of our own sestinas.
• Kate Trueblood Room O
“The Scene: Building Block for All Fiction”
Since the time of Shakespeare when Rosalind revealed she was not the youth Ganymede but the maid Roselind, scenes have contained reversals, recognitions, power shifts, epiphanies, and in more modern times, anti-epiphanies. It is useful to consider where the payoff to the reader must be delivered or denied in a scene. In this seminar, we will focus on the scene, that essential building block of fiction that allows us to become the masons of cathedrals, castles, and lighthouses—i.e., novels, novellas, and short stories. We will begin by generating good dialogue and then learn how to integrate physical gesture, exposition, back-story, and the details of time and place. We will discuss how to determine what is worth dramatizing and what would be better delivered as flashback or exposition, and how best to use these other tools.
• Deborah Poe Room D
“The Sensual Infrastructure: Between the Abstract and Concrete”
As prose and poetry writers, we will reflect on how one can improve writing by way of deftly balancing abstract and concrete language. By weaving abstract and concrete language through spatial description and sensory details, readers are able to connect to stories and poems more deeply. We’ll consider how bridging the abstract and tangible does not merely provide a descriptive function. Such bridging engages readers more directly intellectually, psychologically and emotionally with the importance of your work.
• Sayantani Dasgupta Room H
“Writing with Cultural Sensitivity: How to Write About the Other”
Cultural Sensitivity may be defined as the ability to adjust one’s perception
and behaviors, and then practice styles to effectively meet the needs of
different racial or ethnic groups. The first step in this direction lies in
acknowledging that cultural differences exist. The “ideal” reader is no longer
restricted to one particular geographical area or cultural sensitivity. Therefore,
it becomes even more important to be able to maintain the thin line between
what is culturally provocative and downright insensitive. In this session, by
looking at short excerpts from the writings of Rudyard Kipling, Jhumpa
Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lan Samantha Chang, and Salman Rushdie,
we will discuss how to incorporate adequate research and the oddities of
culture in our writing in order to avoid generalizations, be those of land,
language, religion, food, or gender.
• Jeannine Hall Gailey Room K
“Putting Together Your Poetry Manuscript.”
In this class, we’ll discuss how to put together a first collection of poetry— either chapbooks or full-length. We’ll discuss tone, theme, organization, sequence, and other considerations of what makes a manuscript really sing. We’ll take a look at a few different books and the tools the writers used to organize them.
• Lia Gladstone Room H
“Site-Specific Playwriting”
(Continuation.)
4-5—Craft lecture by Susan Steinberg
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Reading by Pam Houston
9:00—The Nine O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Building 262)
Sunday, July 22
9—Airport shuttle leaves
8-9—Breakfast
Dorm check out by 11:00 am
FACULTY BIOS:
Benjamin Alire Sáenz is the author of such books as “Carry Me Like Water,” “The House of Forgetting,” and “Names on a Map.” He has two books of poetry through Copper Canyon Press: “Dreaming the End of War” and “The Book of What Remains.” He has taught at the University of Texas at El Paso for the past twenty years.
Elizabeth Austen is the author of the poetry collection “Every Dress a Decision” and the chapbooks “The Girl Who Goes Alone” and “Where Currents Meet.” She is a dynamic performer of her own and others’ poems, and has been featured at the Skagit River Poetry Festival, Richard Hugo House Literary Series, Poets House, and elsewhere.
Janée J. Baugher is the author of “Coördinates of Yes.” She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2011 presented her poetry at the Library of Congress. As an essayist, she was awarded a 2012 fellowship at the Island Institute of Sitka. She teaches creative writing and literature at the Richard Hugo House.
John Baxter has taught middle-school and high-school English for the past 15 years. He recently trained in the ERWC (Expository Reading and Writing Course) that readies high-school students for college-level reading and writing, and he integrates the curriculum with American literary period’s fiction and nonfiction.
Jim Bertolino’s twenty-fifth collection of poetry, “Finding Water, Holding Stone”, was released in 2009 by Cherry Grove Collections. He has won a number of national poetry competitions, including the Discovery Award, and has taught poetry writing from Cornell University to the North Cascades Institute. Now retired, he lives outside Bellingham.
Gary Copeland Lilley currently lives and teaches in Port Townsend, Washington. A North Carolina native, he earned his MFA from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. His publications include four books of poetry, the most recent of which is “Alpha Zulu,” available from Copper Canyon Press.
Wendy Call, the author of “No Word for Welcome,” has been a writer-in-residence at Harborview Medical Center, New College of Florida, Seattle University, and the Studios of Key West. She is co-editor of “Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide.”
Mark Clemens has worked for the Evergreen State College and the Washington State Arts Commission.He was a field PIO on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. He received his MFA from the University of Montana; work has appeared in such magazines as The North American Review.
Sayantani Dasgupta teaches religious studies and south-Asian history and literature at the University of Idaho. Work has appeared in Gulf Stream, SN Review, Blood Orange Review and others. Her essay “On Seeking Answers” received a 2010 Pushcart Prize Special Mention.
Heidi Garnett is the author of “Phosphorus,” from Thistledown Press, and her work has appeared in such journals as Event, The New Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. In 2010, she was the runner-up for the Rattle Poetry prize, out of six thousand entries.
She recently won the Winston-Collins prize for “best Canadian poem of the year.”
Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of “Becoming the Villainess” and “She Returns to the Floating World.” Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. She volunteers for the Crab Creek Review, teaches part-time for National University’s MFA program, and reviews books at such outlets as The Rumpus.
Anne Germanacos is the author of the short-story collection “In the Time of the Girls.” Her work has been published in close to a hundred literary reviews. She taught writing and cultural studies to American students in Greece for twenty-five years, and lives on Crete and in San Francisco.
Lia Gladstone recently returned from her second trip to Afghanistan, where she taught theater. Her playwriting credits include “The Magic Bus,” “Homeland,” “Tango and the Hotel Santiago,” and “Children of the Far Far Away.” Her major site-specific piece was “The Biltmore Cabaret,” staged in a 1940’s-era restaurant in Chelsea, NY.
Fayette Hauser is a founding member of the infamous counter-culture performance group The Cockettes and has performed her original material in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. She studied Method Acting with Susan Peretz, a colleague of Lee Strasberg.
Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, “Cowboys Are My Weakness” and “Waltzing the Cat.” Her stories have been selected for the 1999 volumes of Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Awards. She is a regular contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine and the author of a novel, Sight Hound, among other books.
Gayle Kaune’s poetry appears in such literary magazines as Kalliope, the Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, and Portland Magazine. Her chapbook “Concentric Circles” won the Flume Press Award. Her book, “Still Life in the Physical World” is out with Blue Begonia Press. “All the Birds Awake” was published last summer by Tebot Bach.
Arlene Kim was chosen as one of Poets & Writers 2012 debut poets for her collection “What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes?” Work has appeared in Diode, DIAGRAM, Blackbird, and NPR’s “KUOW Presents.” She lives in Seattle where she reads for the DMQ Review and writes poems, prose, and bits in between.
Susan Landgraf’s chapbook “Other Voices” came out in 2009. Her poems have appeared in nearly two hundred magazines, including Poet Lore, Ploughshares, and the Cincinnati Poetry Review. Honors include grants to travel and study in South Africa, Namibia, Peru, and Bolivia. She currently teaches at Highline Community College.
Stellasue Lee is editor emeritus at RATTLE. Her work is published in numerous literary journals. Two of her books have been entrants for a Pulitzer Prize: Firecracker Red, a powerful collection of poems set squarely in the earth; and Crossing The Double Yellow Line, a journey of sharp turns and hair.jpgn curves.
Wayne Lee is a Santa Fe poet who played violin for 22 years in a Seattle string quartet. He has taught at Western Washington University, Cornish School, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and elsewhere. He is the author of two chapbooks and a full-length collection of poems that is due out in 2012 from Red Mountain Press.
Sam Ligon is the author of the short-story collection “Drift and Swerve” and the novel “Safe in Heaven Dead.” His stories have appeared in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, and New England Review. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and is the editor of Willow Springs.
Bill Mann wrote a comedy series for Canada’s Global TV network and a best-selling humor book. A judge at the San Francisco Stand-Up Comedy Competition, he’s been a regular guest on an San Francisco comedy radio show and also wrote a thrice-weekly humor column for CBS MarketWatch.com.
Ellie Mathews has published four books, including “The Linden Tree” and “The Ungarnished Truth,” as well as a dozen short stories. She has received awards from Milkweed Editions and the Seattle Arts Commission, and has been a Fishtrap fellow.
Bill Mawhinney, the author of two collections of poetry—“Songs In My Begging Bowl” and “Cairns Along The Road”—has worked as a prep school master, construction estimator, facilities engineer, and technical writer. He currently organizes and hosts Port Townsend’s Northwind Reading Series and teaches at The Writer’s Workshoppe.
Jeanne Morel is the author of “That Crossing Is Not Automatic.” She is interested in the tension between the here and the there, in arrivals and departures, and in the spaces and edges in between. She has taught poetry workshops at Richard Hugo House and the Washington State Reformatory, and is an MFA candidate in poetry at Pacific University.
Midge Raymond’s short-story collection, Forgetting English, received the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in many literary journals and been nominated for numerous Pushcart Prizes. She has worked as an editor and copywriter for such publishers as Houghton Mifflin, Penguin, and St. Martin’s Press.
In 2005, Philip Shaw ghost-wrote a visual history of Seattle’s Pike Place Market for Sasquatch Books. His first novel, “The Recipients,” was completed while in residency at Centrum in 2011 and awaits a bold decision. “IOUneverWHY,” his chapbook of unwieldy fictions, was released in the spring of 2012.
Cheryl Strayed’s critically acclaimed novel “Torch” was selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books by Pacific Northwest writers. Strayed’s essays have appeared twice in the Best American Essays anthology. Her new memoir “Wild” tracks her journey along the Pacific Coast Trail.
Tammy Strobel is a blogger who’s work has been featured in the New York Times, Today Show, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, and other media outlets. She created her blog, RowdyKittens.com, in late 2007 with the goal of improving her writing and sharing her story of focusing on social change through simple living.
Colette Tennant teaches creative writing and poetry at Corban University. She also teaches art history in Germany and Italy. Main Street Rag published her poetry book, Commotion of Wings, as an Editor’s Choice in 2010. Her poems have appeared in such journals as the Southern Poetry Review, Natural Bridge, and Dos Passos Review.
Elizabeth Thorpe’s short stories and novel excerpts have appeared in such magazines as Per Contra, Painted Bride Quarterly, Puckerbrush Review, and the Maine Review. She teaches writing at Drexel University and in the UArts Pre-College program, and works as an editor for several literary magazines. She earned her MFA from Goddard College.
Richard Widerkehr has published two full-length collections of poems: “The Way Home” and “Her Story of Fire,” as well as two chapbooks and a novel, “Sedimental Journey.” His poems and stories have appeared in such magazines as Passages North, Salt River Review, and the Bellingham Review.