Imagine: a verdant park setting with classroom space, long stretches of beach, and only two short miles to such outdoor decks and restaurants such as the one pictured right. Now add nearly two-hundred of the most passionate and dedicated writers in the Pacific Northwest and you have something approaching the 2009 Port Townsend Writers' Conference.
It all starts Sunday, July 12, and features a full bevy of morning workshops, afternoon workshops, freewrites, craft lectures, and evening readings. Daily schedule is enclosed. We'll see you at the Fort!
THE 2009 PORT TOWNSEND WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
All faculty readings and lectures take place in the Wheeler Theater; all meals take place in the Fort Worden Commons.
Sunday July 12
3:30-5:30—Check-in outside the Centrum office building; cocktails on the bluff
5:30—Dinner
7:15—Welcome at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater
7:30—Readings by Mark Doty; Kim Barnes
Monday July 13
7-8—Morning Freewrite Room D
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
· Chris Abani Room D
· Kim Barnes Room M
· Adrian Castro Room F
· Denise Chávez Room K
· Tony Cohan Room L
· Mark Doty Room J
· Peter Orner Room O
· Robert Wrigley Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
· Lana Ayers Room N
“The List Poem as Expression of Obsession and Ecstasy” Anthropologists have discovered that cultures which developed written language in short order began cataloging or making lists. It is human nature to want to keep the names of all the birds we see or tell our beloved all ways we love them. In this session we’ll explore various poets’ approaches to list poems—including the work of Christopher Smart, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pablo Neruda, Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton and Wallace Stevens—and delve in to generating one of our own.
· Wendy Call Room D
“Twelve Ways to Improve Your Nonfiction Prose”
We’ll discuss a dozen suggestions for improving the literary and narrative quality of your nonfiction prose, with examples from some of our best-loved nonfiction word-workers.
· Deborah Poe Room F
“Writing with Scientific Thought”
As prose and poetry writers, 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, 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.
- Sam Ligon—Room O
“The Short-Short Story”
In Remembrance of Things Past, 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.”
- Ellie Mathews—Room L
“Introduction to Writing for Young Readers”
This workshop will touch on picture books on up through full-length YA novels, emphasizing story arc and structure, whether in fiction or narrative nonfiction. We will cover myths and assumptions about the field, talk about audience age categories, and discuss resources available to those interested in writing literature for children. Discussions will focus on story idea generation, story openings and endings, and examples from well-known children’s literature. In-class exercises, time permitting.
4-5—Lecture by Chris Abani: “Separating ‘Ritual’ from ‘Process’ in Fiction”
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Paul Lisicky, Sam Ligon
Tuesday July 14
7-8—Morning Freewrite Room D
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
· Chris Abani Room D
· Kim Barnes Room M
· Adrian Castro Room F
· Denise Chávez Room K
· Tony Cohan Room L
· Mark Doty Room J
· Peter Orner Room O
· Robert Wrigley Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
· Sam Ligon Room N
“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.”
· Sheila Bender Room K
“Writing the Personal Essay.”
Edward Hoagland has described the personal essayist as “piling up masonry incrementally, not trying for the Taj Mahal like an ambitious novelist.” In this workshop, we’ll learn how to use eight patterns of rhetorical organization to foster the building the modest abodes that can house our insights and make meaning. Drawing on work by E.B. White, Brenda Miller, Stephen Winn, and others, we’ll learn how to architect personal essays, which serve, Philip Lopate says, as “basic research on the self, in ways that are allied with science and philosophy.”
· Paul Lisicky Room D
“Carhartt or Chanel?: Musings on Prose Styles.”
Why does prose style matter? How do the various elements of craft—syntax, figuration, tone, paragraphing, and anything else you can think of—contribute to content? Why do some writers dress in sturdy Carhartt work pants and others wear pink Chanel clamdiggers? In this class we’ll examine the prose of a handful of notable writers and talk about the ways in which style furnishes meaning. We’ll also try out an exercise inspired by these excerpts in an effort to become more generous readers, better attuned to the quirks and beauties of the prose we write and read.
· Wendy Call Room L
“Doce Senderos Hacía una Narrativa”
En “Doce Senderos” tomamos nuestra inspiración de algunos de los y las mejores escitores de las Américas. Será una fiesta de “escritura libre.” (This workshop will be held entirely in Spanish)
· Shane Book Room J
“Beyond Sonnets: Creativity Through Modern Constraints.”
This course employs a range of modern formal constraints to help you explore imaginative possibilities and generate new work. Attempting, as poet Richard Hugo advised, to “write off the subject,” and taking cues from writers whose stated mission was to invent a form as lasting as the sonnet, we’ll explore a host of strategies to stimulate creativity, freeing ourselves from the self-censoring tendencies that shut us down during the earliest stages of the writing process. Throughout our goal is to stimulate creativity through writing and reading modern poetry and workshopping our discoveries in a resolute yet celebratory spirit of discovery.
· Lorraine Healy Room M
“’This Bunch of Flowers and Horseshoes…’:What Neruda’s Odes can teach us as poets.”
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s three books of odes are an extravagant catalog of praise to the simplest things of this world. The atom, a tuna, laziness, love—the everyday elements and essences of human experience glow in the translucent language of these poems. Nothing is “beneath” the poet’s perception: the odes praise ordinary objects as well as the struggle of those who are marginalized.
What can we, as poets, learn from Neruda’s Odes, which he offered up as “this bunch of flowers and horsehoes”? What can these songs of joy and abandon, of pain and compassion for sufferers, teach us, fifty years after they were first published? This afternoon workshop will explore the range of Neruda’s topics in the three books of the Odas Elementales, talk about the vision of the world that stands behind them, and discuss the ways in which we can “unleash ourselves” upon the simplest objects and artifacts that surround us, and start writing our own poems of praise.
· Dinah Manoff Room O
“Standing in Your Characters’ Shoes.”
Looking for your characters’ voices? Struggling to create realistic dialogue? Using a variety of acting and writing exercises, this class offers writers the chance to step inside your characters and walk around in their shoes. Bring your major and minor characters along with you to class. Or borrow a character from one of the Raymond Carver stories handed out to illustrate the exercises.
4-5—Craft Lecture by Denise Chávez: “Plática/Talk on Writing Borders”
5:30-6:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Peter Orner; Cristina García
Wednesday July 15
7-8—Morning Freewrite Room D
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning Workshop
· Chris Abani Room D
· Kim Barnes Room M
· Adrian Castro Room F
· Denise Chávez Room K
· Tony Cohan Room L
· Mark Doty Room J
· Peter Orner Room O
· Robert Wrigley Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops in special topics
· Camille Dungy Room D
“Spreading the Word”
We will read a few poems to investigate ways poets can deliver information so that a speaker demonstrates a unique consciousness separate from other sources for whom he/she is also speaking. By considering making changes to the poems and noting the differences these alterations allow, we'll gain tools for incorporating effective multi-vocality in our own work. We’ll look at W.S. Merwin’s “Berryman” and Lucille Clifton’s “Mulberry Fields,” among other poems.
· Ellie Mathews—Room L
“Introduction to Writing for Young Readers”
This workshop will touch on picture books on up through full-length YA novels, emphasizing story arc and structure, whether in fiction or narrative nonfiction. We will cover myths and assumptions about the field, talk about audience age categories, and discuss resources available to those interested in writing literature for children. Discussions will focus on story idea generation, story openings and endings, and examples from well-known children’s literature. In-class exercises, time permitting.
· Barbara Sjoholm—Room M
“Writing Travel”
Do you have stories you want to tell about your travels—to
exotic lands or just back to your home town? We’ll learn the differences among a short destination piece, a personal memoir of place or a travel essay that combines journalism and reflection. We’ll do some writing, discuss some travel authors and talk about how to keep a travel journal and do research, as well as how to use notes and research while writing and revising.
· Kathie Meyer Room K
“Writing for Newspapers” How to get started writing short-form nonfiction as a freelance journalist. Learn how and when to approach an editor, and how to shape stories for newspapers.
· Lorraine Healy Room J
“’Este atado de flores y herraduras…’: Qué nos enseñan las Odas de Neruda a los poetas de hoy”
Los tres libros de las Odas Elementales del poeta chileno Pablo Neruda constituyen un catálogo de alabanzas a los elementos más simples de nuestro mundo. El átomo, un atún en el mercado, la pereza, el amor—las cosas diarias y las esencias de la experiencia humana brillan en el lenguaje transparente de las odas. No hay nada que esté “por debajo” de la percepción del poeta: la sodas alaban al objeto ordinario tanto como a la batalla de supervivencia de quien vive marginado. Y entonces, como poetas, ¿qué podemos aprender de la mirada implícita en las odas de Neruda, que las ofreció como “este atado de flores y herraduras”? ¿Qué nos enseñan estos cantos de gozo y esperanza, de dolor y compasión por el que sufre, a cincuenta años de su publicación? Este taller explora el alcance de los tópicos cubiertos por Neruda en los tres libros de las Odas Elementales, analiza la visión del mundo que encierran, y propone formas con las que “desatarnos” sobre las cosas que nos rodean y comenzar a escribir nuestros propios poemas de alabanza. Así que vente con papel y lápiz, poeta, porque de este taller te vas con tus propias odas, recién sacaditas del horno…(This workshop will be held entirely in Spanish.)
· Dinah Manoff Room O
“Standing in Your Characters’ Shoes.”
Looking for your characters’ voices? Struggling to create realistic dialogue? Using a variety of acting and writing exercises, this class offers writers the chance to step inside your characters and walk around in their shoes. Bring your major and minor characters along with you to class. Or borrow a character from one of the Raymond Carver stories handed out to illustrate the exercises.
4-5—Craft Lecture by Robert Wrigley: “Making Sound of Sense”
5:30-6:30—Dinner
7—Poetry Reading Downtown at the Northwind Arts Gallery
7:30—Readings by Tony Cohan; Denise Chávez
Thursday July 16
7-8—Morning Freewrite Room D
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
· Chris Abani Room D
· Kim Barnes Room M
· Adrian Castro Room F
· Denise Chávez Room K
· Tony Cohan Room L
· Mark Doty Room J
· Peter Orner Room O
· Robert Wrigley Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
· Sheila Bender Room K
“Writing Grief”
The art of writing serves us well when we are mourning. Narration about the moment we learned or really took in that we were losing someone dear to us can lead to retrieval of that person and their importance in our lives, to tears and to joy, to a folding of that person into ourselves. In this workshop, you’ll learn ways into this kind writing and ways to sustain your work, whether in prose or poetry, once you have begun.
· Barbara Sjoholm Room O
“Writing Travel”
Do you have stories you want to tell about your travels—to exotic lands or just back to your home town? We'll learn the differences among a short destination piece, a personal memoir of place or a travel essay that combines journalism and reflection. We’ll do some writing, discuss some travel authors and talk about how to keep a travel journal and do research, as well as how to use notes and research while writing and revising.
· Lana Ayers Room N
“The List Poem as Expression of Obsession and Ecstasy” Anthropologists have discovered that cultures which developed written language in short order began cataloging or making lists. It is human nature to want to keep the names of all the birds we see or tell our beloved all ways we love them. In this session we’ll explore various poets’ approaches to list poems—including the work of Christopher Smart, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pablo Neruda, Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton and Wallace Stevens—and delve in to generating one of our own.
· Kate Lebo, Ryan Boudinot, Nancy Pagh, and Kary Wayson Room D
“What a Way to Make a Living”
You know the jingle: “Working 9 to 5 will make you crazy if you let it.” For many artists Dolly Parton’s tune isn’t just catchy, it’s the unavoidable truth. Few American writers make a living off their words. So what about the rest of us? How do we work full-time, raise a family, stay creative, find a writing community and find time to write? Kate Lebo, Ryan Boudinot, Nancy Pagh, and Kary Wayson will discuss the working-while-writing conundrum and give tips on how to stay productive and sane when writing is your life, not your livelihood.
· Sayantani Dasgupta Room F
“Writing with Cultural Sensitivity”
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 the fact 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.
4-5—Craft Lecture by Kim Barnes: “Objectifying the Villain in Personal Nonfiction”
5:30-6:30—Dinner
7:30—Reading by Robert Wrigley
Friday July 17
7-8—Morning Freewrite Room D
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
· Chris Abani Room D
· Kim Barnes Room M
· Adrian Castro Room F
· Denise Chávez Room K
· Tony Cohan Room L
· Mark Doty Room J
· Peter Orner Room O
· Robert Wrigley Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops in special topics
· Shane Book Room O
“Beyond Sonnets: Creativity Through Modern Constraints.”
This course employs a range of modern formal constraints to help you explore imaginative possibilities and generate new work. Attempting, as poet Richard Hugo advised, to “write off the subject,” and taking cues from writers whose stated mission was to invent a form as lasting as the sonnet, we’ll explore a host of strategies to stimulate creativity, freeing ourselves from the self-censoring tendencies that shut us down during the earliest stages of the writing process. Throughout our goal is to stimulate creativity through writing and reading modern poetry and workshopping our discoveries in a resolute yet celebratory spirit of discovery.
· Adrian Castro Room K
“I'm in the Band: Pulling the Muse from Music”
Discussion and samples of how poets incorporate various
music (i.e. jazz, drums, Latin jazz, rock, etc.) into their
poetry.
· Deborah Poe Room J
“Writing with Scientific Thought”
As prose and poetry writers, 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, and Rikki Ducornet, we 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.
· Camille Dungy Room F
“Spreading the Word”
We will read a few poems to investigate ways poets can deliver information so that a speaker demonstrates a unique consciousness separate from other sources for whom he/she is also speaking. By considering making changes to the poems and noting the differences these alterations allow, we’ll gain tools for incorporating effective multi-vocality in our own work. We’ll look at Merwin’s “Berryman” and Lucille Clifton’s “Mulberry Fields,” among others.
· Farris, Katie Room M
“Writing Multitudes: Faulkner and the Voice of the
Community”
It could be argued that the single most famous county in Mississippi doesn't exist on any map. Yoknapatawpha County, created by Faulkner and populated with characters from his score of novels, is a rich place filled with memory, secrets, and sunlight as thick and dense as August. It is significant that Faulkner created not just a family, not merely a town, but an entire county with which to work. This larger area allows him to explore many different facets of community: rural and urban, wealthy and poor, black and white and of course the subtle gradations on the spectrum. In this workshop, we will examine the techniques and significances of the communal voice in Faulkner and in our own writing. Whether through the use of the first person plural in “A Rose for Emily” or the multiple narrators in “The Sound and the Fury,” Faulkner used various narrative techniques to bring a depth of human experience that a single voice cannot attain. We will discuss the reasons he used these techniques and how and when we can borrow them to lend the weight and experience of a community to our own work. There will be a short in-class writing assignment.
· Kitty Hoffman Room N
“Trying to Go Home Again: Excavation of time and place in the writing of Richard Rodriguez, Annie Dillard, and others”
What is “home” in a time of social dislocation, immigration, exile, refugees? Is home a place, culture, community, the natural world? Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can’t go home again, but homelessness and the creation of home is a key theme in our time. Some writers of literary non-fiction explore the past to uncover and create meaning and a sense of ‘home’ in the present. Others, like Richard Rodriguez and Annie Dillard, range across the realms of human knowledge and experience, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated notions and facts. We tend to think of non-fiction as the most literal and discursive of genres, but these writers push the boundaries of the genre by insisting on multi-layered truth. An exploration of their techniques is an archaeology of meaning, a discussion about creating truth out of chaos. While their thematic concerns may seem unrelated, Rodriguez and Dillard use similar writing techniques to explore and possibly create a sense of belonging in the world, a notion of home. Through an encounter with their strategies, we will explore the use of time and place, of multi-layered meaning, as tools for the creation of new meaning.
· Nancy Pagh Room O
“Northwest Poetry”
In recent years the phrase “Northwest poet” has become a pejorative. What is a “Northwest Poem,” and what is the source of suspicion against poetry rooted in sensual awareness of region and place? We will explore the tensions in this terminology and the resistance to it, and will read together some work by David Wagoner, Pat Lowther, James Bertolino, and Beth Bentley. Participants will be set loose to explore and witness the beach near the class, and to engage in a writing exercise.
4-5—Craft Lecture by Mark Doty: “Complicating the Poem”
5:30-6:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Conference participants
Saturday July 18
7-8—Morning Freewrite Room D
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning Workshop
· Chris Abani Room D
· Kim Barnes Room M
· Adrian Castro Room F
· Denise Chávez Room K
· Tony Cohan Room L
· Mark Doty Room J
· Peter Orner Room O
· Robert Wrigley Room N
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
· Peter Orner Room D
“Using History and Politics in Fiction.”
We will be examing how writers use of history in general, and politics, in particular, in fiction. Not in the context of historical fiction as a distinct genre (Fiction dressed up in historical costume), but more as history and politics as the stuff of everday life (and myth). Gabriel García Márquez says it better than I can: “[N]ow is the time to lean a stool against the front door and relate from the beginning the details of this national commotion, before the historians have a chance to get at it.” This workshop will examine how fiction writers relate these details of “national commotion” and what makes their their stories different, and perhaps sometimes more important, than the work of historians.
· Sheila Bender Room F
“Epistolary Writing and the Personal Essay.”
There is a grand tradition of writing in letter form: many fine poems, essays and novels are letters or collections of letters. The form lends itself well to a particular kind of personal essay—one in which the author describes a process that is as accessible as baking a cake or knitting a scarf—and uses it as metaphor for a truth that is difficult to share. In this workshop, we’ll use exercises to identify the processes we know and can describe in order to tell something larger.
· Kathie Meyer Room N
“Writing the Feature Article”
Those who find truth stranger than fiction, love to learn about new things, and find the human condition fascinating are born feature writers. Learn what essential elements make a reader experience your story in their mind’s eye.
4-5—Craft Lecture by Tony Cohan: “Managing Your Writing Mind”
5:30-6:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Chris Abani; Adrian Castro
8:45—Closing reception on upper lawn/faculty booksigning in Room D.
Sunday July 19
8-9—Breakfast
8:30—Airport shuttle leaves
Dorm check out by 11:00 am