Weeklong Workshops
On-site Registration and Evening Opening Event: July 12
Classroom Instruction: July 13-17
Registration capped at 12 participants per workshop
Weeklong Master Classes
On-site Registration and Evening Opening Event: July 12
Classroom Instruction: July 13-17
Registration capped at 6 participants per workshop
Weekend Workshops
Evening Opening Event: July 17
On-site Registration and Classroom Instruction: July 18-19
Registration capped at 12 participants per workshop
Weeklong Workshops (July 13-17)
Fiction Workshop for Serious Writers (Intermediate & Advanced) – Robert Boswell - Closed
In Session One, I’ll present an MFA-Level class in the fundamentals of narrative. We’ll analyze a published story and discuss every aspect of craft we can cram into the allotted three hours. In the workshops that follow, we will discuss one manuscript by each conferee, examining the craft, discussing the content, and making suggestions for the next draft. Conferees may submit an original short story or a novel chapter (maximum 18 pages, double-spaced, 12 point type). If the conferee is writing very short stories or chapters, s/he may submit two pieces for discussion.
Robert Boswell
Robert Boswell is the author of novels (Century’s Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts), story collections (Living to Be 100, Dancing in the Movies, and The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards), a cyberpunk novel (Virtual Death), a prize-winning play (Tongues), and two books of nonfiction (The Half-Known World and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak [co-authored with David Schweidel]).A Guggenheim and NEA fellow, Boswell teaches at New Mexico State University, the University of Houston, and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
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The Memoir: Challenges and Struggles (Intermediate) – Minrose Gwin - Closed
Your memoir has now taken root on the page, and those pages have been in and out of your top drawer several times. At this point you’re finding your story, compelling though it is, snagged by certain challenges and dilemmas. In this workshop we’ll not only discuss a section of your draft but also help you recognize and wrestle with some of the craft challenges of the memoir as a genre and your memoir as a work of art in process. This is a workshop for writers whose memoirs are well underway.
Minrose Gwin
Minrose Gwinis the author of Wishing for Snow, a memoir about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life. Excerpts have appeared in The Women’s Review of Books and Southern Mothers: Facts and Fictions. Her first novel, The Queen of Palmyra, will be published in the fall of 2010. In her other life as a literary scholar, she’s authored three books and edited five, including The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology. She has taught contemporary literature and/or creative writing at five universities. A professor at the University of New Mexico for 11 years, she now teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but migrates back to the Southwest.
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Advanced Short Fiction (Advanced) – Pam Houston - Closed
The real artistry of fiction is the translation of the emotional stakes of the story onto its physical landscape: the way we dip our ladles into the bottomless pot of metaphor soup and pull out what we need, what we can then shape into story. We will aim for stories in which the language is always working in a least two ways at once, where metaphors dance between meanings like beads of water on a too-hot grill. This course will be an intensive and advanced fiction workshop.
Pam Houston
Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness (W.W. Norton), which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into 11 languages, and Waltzing the Cat (W.W. Norton), which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and the Best American Short Stories of the Century. Her novel, Sight Hound, (W.W. Norton, 2005) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.
Pam has recently published fiction and nonfiction in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The Bitch in the House, Dog is My Copilot, Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Fellowship, and the New York Times, Ploughshares, O, and National Geographic Adventure. A Little More About Me, a collection of autobiographical essays about travel and home, was published by W.W. Norton in 1999. In 2002 her first stage play, Tracking the Pleiades, was produced in Colorado. Houston has edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for Ecco Press called Women on Hunting, and written the text for a book of photographs called Men Before Ten A.M. (Beyond Words, 1996).
Houston is the Director of Creative Writing at University of California, Davis, and teaches at many writers’ conferences and festivals in the U.S. and abroad. When she is not in Davis, she lives in Colorado at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
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The Writer’s “I” (All Levels) – Jesse Lee Kercheval - Limited space remaining
First person can be confession, barely disguised truth, or outright lies, but it is the most intimate voice we can use as writers and in this workshop, we’ll learn why and how to make that intimacy work for us. This is a multi-genre workshop workshop for poets, fiction and nonfiction writers. It is ideal for anyone wanting to try a new genre and suitable for both beginning and experienced writers.
For the workshop, you can turn in any work in first person: up to six poems, one short story or novel excerpt up to 25 pages, or a memoir or creative nonfiction piece up to 25 pages. We’ll also do short exercises in different genres so everyone will have the chance to stretch their writing repertoire.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of ten books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including Cinema Muto, a collection of poems about silent film (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009) which won a Crab Orchard Open Selection Award; The Alice Stories (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize; and Space, a memoir about growing up near Cape Kennedy during the moon race that won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. Currently, she is the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin where she directs the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin with her husband, two wonderful children and one very bad dog.
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Poetry Miscellany (Intermediate & Advanced) – Dana Levin and Greg Glazner - Limited space remaining
Miscellany: A mixture, medley, or assortment; (a collection of) miscellaneous objects or items. And indeed, our workshop will include an assortment of activities: mini-lessons in poetic craft (the magic of figuration! the drama of line-breaks! the untapped powers of varying diction! the treasure-chest of speech acts! etc.); mini-lectures on master poets (Plath, Stevens, Gluck, to name some likely suspects) and the relationship of their poetry to various craft elements we will discuss; in-class exercises; and workshop of original participant poems. Greg will teach July 13-14; Dana July 16-17; and the double-whammy of Dana and Greg together on July 15. Participants will be asked to engage in one writing exercise and to submit that exercise plus two original poems for workshop before the Conference begins: one of those original poems, I hope, will be a bit of a mess. Submit messy!
Dana Levin
Dana Levin’s first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was awarded the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. The Lost Angeles Times says of her work, “Dana Levin’s poems are extravagant...her mind keeps making unexpected connections and the poems push beyond convention...they surprise us.” Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Conduit and the Iowa Review. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, Levin teachers in the Creative Writing and Literature Department at the College of Santa Fe. Her most recent book is Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press).
Greg Glazner
Greg Glazner’s books of poetry are From the Iron Chair, which won the Walt Whitman Award, and Singularity, both published by W.W. Norton. His awards include the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, the Fairfax Award (professor of the year, College of Santa Fe), and a 2005 NEA Fellowship. Currently a professor of Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe and faculty member in Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program, he founded the College of Santa Fe’s Community Writing Workshops for non-degree students. He has served as a first-round judge for the Colorado Review’s poetry book prize and as a final judge for the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2007 award for Best Book of Poetry.
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The Art of the Sentence, the Art of the Paragraph (All Levels) – Priscilla Long - Closed
First-rate writers use all the sentence forms, and they use particular forms not at random but to carry particular meanings or emotions. This hands-on course in developing virtuoso skills in sentencing and paragraphing is designed for writers of all levels—from beginner to advanced— interested in revising across several short works or across a book-in-progress. During our week together, we'll scrutinize brilliant sentences and paragraphs and we'll deepen our craft skill by writing or revising our own, using identical structures and analogous moves. Always working on our own material (this is not a return to the Third Grade!), we'll shape our sentences to intensify their content, perhaps using a shattered sentence (a fragment) to hold a shattering experience, and a slow, lazy, flowing sentence to hold a slow, lazy, flowing experience. Our new paragraphs will include leaps, turns, flourishes, and, always, transitions. Diction (word choice) is part of it: We'll explore techniques for gathering language that is more original, more true to our own vision, and more sonorous.
Priscilla Long
Priscilla Long is a poet, a writer of creative nonfiction and of fiction, and an independent scholar. In 2006 she received a National Magazine Award for best feature writing ("Genome Tome" appeared in The American Scholar).Her work appears or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Ontario Review, Under the Sun, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Seattle Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Passages North, Michigan Quarterly Review, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. She is author of Where the Sun Never Shines: a History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry (Paragon House, 1989). Other awards include The Journal’s Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Richard Hugo House Founder’s Award (a teaching award), awards from the Seattle and Los Angeles arts commissions, and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Fund poetry award. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington, teaches writing, and serves as Senior Editor of the online encyclopedia of Washington state history, www.historylink.org. She grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
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Beginning Memoir (Beginning) – Barbara Robinette Moss - Closed
Do you have a personal story that feels stuck in your mind, as if calling to be written? Have you jotted down bits and pieces of it but need a little help determining what you truly want to say? In this class, we will translate experiences and emotions into words. Through class exercises, we will focus on getting to the heart of the story, while acknowledging and considering the powerful emotions stirred by writing personal experiences. We will write, read aloud, and gently revise as we transpose our memories onto the page. Once a story has been established, we will search for the beginning, middle and end, and discuss techniques for strengthening the writing with metaphor, a sense of place and dialogue. Non-fiction writing can easily get cluttered with “everything that happened.” We will determine what details to leave in, what to leave out. No manuscript necessary, but please bring your willingness to write and share your experiences. Nightly reading and writing assignments.
Barbara Robinette Moss
In 1996, Barbara Robinette Moss won the gold medal for personal essay in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition. The winning story, “Near the Center of the Earth,” became the first chapter for her memoir, Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter, published by Scribner, 2000. After publication, Moss won the Iowa Authors Award 2000, and the 2002 Alabama Author Award for Nonfiction. Her nonfiction has been published in two anthologies, Bloom & Blossom, and Stories from the Blue Moon Café. Her work has also appeared in Allure Magazine. Moss has been a guest on All Things Considered, Jackie Lyden, The Gary Robertson Show, BBC Radio Scotland, The David Rothenburg Show, The Diane Rehm Show, WBAI Radio New York, and many others. Zeus’s Daughter has been translated into two languages. Moss’s second book, fierce (Scribner), was released in 2004. It has been widely reviewed and was an ELLE magazine pick for the month of October. Moss recently spent a year at The Actor’s Studio Drama School in New York City writing a screenplay, an adaptation of Change Me into Zeus’s Daughter. In the fall of 2007, her screenplay was optioned by CSC Productions in Hollywood, CA.
Moss is also an artist, and divides her time between writing and art making. She has participated in over one hundred juried art exhibitions, including the Los Angeles Printmaking Society Contemporary American Printmakers and the Museum of American Art Drawing Midwest. Though she is presently living in Kansas City, Barbara grew up in Alabama; consequently, her art and writing are rooted in the Deep South.
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Fiction as Art Form (Intermediate) – Daniel Mueller
Why do so many people who have never studied fiction believe they can nonetheless write stories that will move readers? Few who aren’t composers believe in their abilities to compose symphonies. Few who aren’t painters believe in their abilities to paint paintings. And yet many readers persist in believing that fiction writers spend roughly as long writing their stories as it takes readers to read them. In other words, they haven’t yet grasped that fiction writing is an art form like any other and that fiction succeeds when the rules by which it abides are invisible. In this workshop we will examine our own stories and the stories of others as disciplines, as works of literature governed by principles that can be articulated and mastered.
Each participant should bring to the workshop an original fiction manuscript of no more than 12 pages. All participants should expect to engage in a captivating, weeklong discussion of narrative craft that will entail writing exercises designed to impart particular techniques and strategies and the close reading of individual pieces of short fiction.
Dan Mueller
Daniel Mueller’s collection of short stories, How Animals Mate, won the Sewanee Fiction Prize and was published by Overlook Press. His stories have appeared in Playboy, Story, Story Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, Crescent Review, Another Chicago Magazine, CutBank, Cincinnati Review, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Henfield Foundation, University of Virginia, and Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches on the permanent creative writing faculties of the University of New Mexico and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Queens University of Charlotte and has served as a visiting writer at Dartmouth College, Centre College, and Western Michigan University.
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Organic Unity: the Marriage of Form and Content in the Short Story (Intermediate & Advanced) – Antonya Nelson - Two spaces remaining
This workshop will focus on the ways in which form (shape, voice, style) participates in content (theme, psychology, meaning) in the short story. The best stories are ones that the reader can imagine no better way of telling; they are hermeneutically radiant, and as a result continue to offer up new riches upon every re-reading. Practically speaking, how does one accomplish this task? Our chore will be to discuss the possibilities for revising work in progress, aiming toward the synthesis of form and content. Workshop members will receive comments on their own work, while also reading exemplary published stories for inspiration.
Antonya Nelson, photo by Marion Ettlinger
Antonya Nelson is the author of six short story collections, including Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009), and three novels, Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell. Her work has appeared in TheNew Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books of 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston, Texas.
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Getting Started – Finding the Sound (All Levels) – Elizabeth Strout - Closed
This workshop is designed to help you find the way to begin a story or a novel. Most likely this involves, as Fitzgerald said, “a hundred false starts.” We may not get to all hundred, but we will have fun going through a number of them. We will try and find the proper pitch for the narrative you want to tell; we will learn how to sense the tone that will take you where you need to go. Therefore it will focus on voice, authority, and character. There will be a variety of exercises to help you find new sounds to your voice.
Elizabeth Strout, photo © Miriam Berkley
Elizabeth Strout is the author of the critically acclaimed Olive Kitteridge, a novel in stories. She is also the author of two previous novels, Abide with Me and Amy and Isabelle, A New York Times Bestseller. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker, as well as Best American Mystery Stories.
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The New Nonfiction: What Everyone is Reading but MFA Programs Aren’t Teaching (Intermediate) – Mark Sundeen - Closed
In the past decade, three of the historical giants of American fiction–GQ, Esquire, and The Atlantic–have stopped running monthly short stories. The space has largely been filled by a new narrative nonfiction that combines memoir, reporting, and the storytelling techniques of a fiction writer. Authors like Jon Krakauer, Elizabeth Gilbert, and David Sedaris have parlayed their magazine writing skills into best-selling books. This workshop will explore this new genre with a focus on landing your work in magazines. Participants will submit memoir, literary journalism, personal essay and travel writing–or any combination thereof–with the goal of enriching it with the style suspense and structure of fiction.
Mark Sundeen
Mark Sundeen is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Car Camping and The Making of Toro, and is a correspondent for Outside magazine. His nonfiction appears in the New York Times Magazine, the Believer and National Geographic Adventure.
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Writing the Where of It (All levels) – Summer Wood - Two spaces remaining
Every writer has to grapple with the Where of the story, and meeting that challenge head-on can yield depth and muscle to the work. Why do some places resonate so deeply for us, and how can we convey that to our readers? How is it possible to describe a place with intimacy and grandeur at the same time? How can landscape function metaphorically in narrative writing? We'll tackle these questions and others through discussion and via masterful examples, and we'll try our hands at accessing that power in writing exercises that travel deep into our personal geographic memories. Three days will find us inside at the conference table; the other two we'll head out into Taos and environs to explore this particular place from the standpoint of story. Writers of fiction and creative nonfiction of all levels are welcome.
Summer Wood photo © Miriam Berkley
Summer Wood is the author of Arroyo, a novel set in the fictional terrain of northern New Mexico (Chronicle Books, 2001). The 2007 recipient of the $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation, she has completed her second novel and is at work on a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Cutthroat, and other places. A long-time resident of Taos, she is an accomplished adobe builder and a green chile fanatic. She and her partner Kathy Namba have raised three sons and three dogs.
Weeklong Master Classes (July 13-17)
Novel – Jonis Agee - Closed
You have a story. You throw your heart, your time, even your loved ones and the dog into writing a draft of your novel–then what? You have the 300-pound rabbit sitting on your desk, blinking its pink eyes at you. In this workshop, we take your novel through its final stage before submitting it for publication. I will read each novel closely before the conference, and we will spend our time in class and in individual meetings addressing any issues that need work. We will develop specific revision strategies for characters, narration, point of view, voice, plot, setting, scenes, and dramatization, all with an eye to answering the $25 question–will someone buy this book?
Jonis Agee
Jonis Agee was born in Omaha, Nebraska and grew up in Nebraska and Missouri, places where many of her stories and novels are set. She was educated at The University of Iowa (BA) and The State University of New York at Binghamton (MA, PhD). She is Adele Hall Professor of English at The University of Nebraska - Lincoln, where she teaches creative writing and twentieth-century fiction. She is the author of thirteen books, including five novels – Sweet Eyes, Strange Angels, South of Resurrection, The Weight of Dreams, and her most recent, The River Wife – and five collections of short fiction – Pretend We've Never Met, Bend This Heart, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, Taking the Wall, and Acts of Love on Indigo Road. She has also published two books of poetry: Houses and Mercury. In her newest novel, The River Wife (Random House, 2007), five generations of women experience love and heartbreak, passion and deceit against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century South. The book was selected by the Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild, and as a main selection by the Quality Paperback Book Club.
Jonis Agee's awards include the Gold Award from ForeWord magazine for Acts of Love on Indigo Road, 2004; the NEA grant in fiction; a Loft-McKnight Award; a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction; the Nebraska Book Award for Weight of Dreams, 2000. Jonis also received the Mark Twain Award for Contributions to Midwestern Literature and The John Gardner Fiction Prize for The River Wife. Three of her books – Strange Angels, Bend This Heart, and Sweet Eyes – were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times.
Jonis owns twenty pairs of cowboy boots, some of them works of art, loves the open road, and believes that ecstasy and hard work are the basic ingredients of life and writing.
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Novel – John Dufresne - Closed
This is a course obviously designed for people who are interested in exploring the art and craft of fiction. A large part of the course will function as a writing workshop in which student work-in-progress will be read and discussed. Critical reading is as important as creative writing in a workshop. Good fiction writers are almost always strong critics. One cannot be a writer without first being a reader. The aim of the workshop discussions is to enable the writers to improve their work with the editorial and critical assistance of the readers. Our goal is to help the novel in question to be the best novel it can be. In addition to the workshop discussions, we’ll do writing exercises in class and talk about various narrative techniques, such as plot, characterization, point of view and setting. We’ll also be looking at the structure of the novel itself, at what a novel can be and what it ought not to be. We’ll discuss the novel as a time machine, clock, and calendar. We’ll talk about presentation and trajectory in novel writing. We’ll also discuss the practical matters of writing and marketing novels as well as the writing process and the habit of writing.
John Dufresne
John Dufresne is the author of two collections of short stories, four novels – most recently, Requiem, Mass. – and a book on writing fiction, The Lie That Tells a Truth. He teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
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Poetry – Valerie Martínez
This weeklong master class is an intensive workshop for advanced poets with a book-length manuscript. During the week, we’ll undertake the exciting and challenging process of readying the manuscript for possible publication. To do this, the class (limited to six poets) will focus on holistic issues: the overall concerns of the collections, the general quality of the work, the arrangement and progression of poems, beginnings and endings, etc. As a group, we’ll also address the strongest and weakest poems in the collection, providing guidance for major and minor changes. And, if necessary, we’ll undertake creative exercises that allow each poet to see her/his manuscript with a fresh perspective. The class will include workshop sessions and individual conferences. Manuscripts must be no more than 60 pages, single-spaced. Participants are strongly encouraged to bring five additional poems that can serve as additions or replacements. Hard copies of manuscripts must be mailed to Valerie and other participants ahead of time, postmarked on or before June 12, 2009.
Valerie Martinez
Valerie Martínez is the author of Absence Luminescent (Four Way Books)—winner of the Larry Levis Prize and a Greenwall Grant from the Academy of American Poets—as well as World to World (U. of Arizona Press), A Flock of Scarlet Doves (Sutton Hoo Press) and Each and Her (forthcoming). Her poetry, translations, and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies and she has taught poetry at the undergraduate and graduate level for 18 years. She is currently associate professor of Creative Writing and English at the College of Santa Fe and the Poet Laureate for the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Memoir – Rob Wilder - Closed
This is a workshop for writers who have finished a full draft of a book-length memoir. Now that you have a complete draft, it is now time to examine the entire work in order to pursue substantive revision for the next draft. You are ready to revise (and take risks) for structure and shape, for voice and persona, characterization and plot. In this class, we won’t be polishing and tinkering in our daily discussions; better, we will be suggesting ways to overhaul a draft that is still full of unrealized possibilities. We will be looking at each memoir as both writer and reader in order to see what can be done in the next revision, what the writer can do to successfully bring out the intent of the work. In this class, you and I will read the other participants’ drafts, and together we will offer encouragement and constructive criticism. Because this is a class on the memoir, we will also discuss how memory and forgetting shape us, and shape our writing about real places, lives, and events. We will explore the blurred boundary where memory is both truth and invention. We will explore how the memoirist must balance an obligation to storytelling with an obligation to real lives: to their subjects and to their readers. In our week together, in our discussion of two published memoirs and our discussion of your manuscripts, we will explore these questions, and we will explore how craft informs and guides our process.
Rob Wilder
Robert Wilder is the author of two critically acclaimed books of essays: Tales From The Teachers’ Lounge and Daddy Needs a Drink, both of which have been optioned for television and film. He has published essays in Newsweek, Details, Salon, Parenting, Creative Nonfiction, Working Mother and elsewhere. He has been a commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition and On Point and other national and regional radio programs including the Daddy Needs a Drink Minute which airs weekly on KBAC FM. Wilder’s column, also titled “Daddy Needs A Drink,” is printed monthly in the Santa Fe Reporter. Wilder lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Lala, and their two children, Poppy and London.
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Weekend Workshops
Playing with Your Inner Child: The Art of Children’s Book Writing (All Levels) – Ana Baca
Have you always wanted to write for children but don’t know how to get started? This weekend seminar will explore the process of children’s book writing: from conception, development of age-appropriate topics, characters and themes, to finding a publisher and marketing your work to parents, teachers and children. Through a series of experiential exercises, writing exercises, and discussions, you will discover your inner child again and harness that knowledge and energy to write for children and to make a difference in their lives.
Ana Baca
Ana Baca’s first novel, Mama Fela's Girls, was honored with the New Mexico Book Award for “Best Historical Fiction” in 2007 and was first runner up for the 2007 Zia Book Award given by New Mexico Press Women. She is also the author of three children's picture books, Benito's Bizcochitos, Chiles for Benito, and Benito's Sopaipillas.
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Finding Your Voice, Writing Your Life: On Memoir (Beginning) – Rus Bradburd - Closed
Perhaps you’ve lived through something remarkable and you want to share it. Or, perhaps the experience itself is everyman’s (or every woman’s), but you want to convey it in a remarkable way. This weekend workshop will consider the craft elements nonfiction writers borrow from the craft of fiction: scene, dialogue, structure and narrative arc. We will also discuss some of the questions that nonfiction writers often have: Is your memoir a variation on an archetype, and if so, how can you make the best use of the tried and true? Can you use your job as a jumping off point in a memoir? How do you subvert the need for plot in nonfiction? Expect lively discussion and brief in-class exercises.
Rus Bradburd
Rus Bradburd is the author of With a Hammer in My Hand (HarperCollins, November 2009) and the acclaimed Paddy on the Hardwood: a Journey in Irish Hoops (UNM Press, 2006). His nonfiction has appeared in SLAM, Bounce, Houston Chronicle, and LA Times. His fiction has appeared in the Southern Review and Colorado Review, Aethlon, and Puerto del Sol. He coached college basketball for fourteen seasons and now teaches in the writing program at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
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Creative Journaling: The Collection of Soulful Stirrings (All Levels) – Charlene Geiss - Cancelled
There are as many ways or reasons to keep a journal as there are people, or specifically, diarists. Your intention, whether you want to record your life experience and meaningful insights, explore your inner world, or plan for the future, should determine the approach. How do you imagine your personal book? Is it bulging with writings and ephemera, sketches and notes? What do you want it to include?
In this class, specific journal writing techniques are practiced that provide diverse and appropriate narrative for articulating your experiences. Because not everything is best expressed in words, you also discover easy ways to incorporate images and visual clues that enhance your entries. Learn to keep a journal that will free your imagination and become an exciting sourcebook for future writings and projects while representing the creative life that you are!
This workshop is for the beginner who is faced with seemingly endless blank pages or the experienced diarist who is stuck in a rut of repetitive themes and methods.
Charlene Geiss
Charlene Geiss is the founder of the Diarists’ Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With a M.A. in Education, she is an experienced teacher who imparts practical advice and a contagious enthusiasm for creating a conscious, healthy, and soulful life through journaling. She is a mixed media diarist whose innovative personal journals and book art has been exhibited in solo and group shows. Geiss is the co-author and artist of Inner Outings: The Diarist's Deck and Book of Exploration and is one of the featured diarists in Signatures: The Art Journal Collection and the 2004 Art Journal Calendar. In the spring of 2008 she released her first DVD, Creative Journaling with Charlene Geiss.
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The Process of Publishing (All Levels) – Elizabeth Hadas - Two spaces remaining
Most unpublished writers view book publishing as a blank wall that they must scale without a ladder. This workshop offers some windows into that wall. It is intended to help participants understand the way editors and publishers of fiction and nonfiction read and respond to queries and submissions. In the course of the workshop we will critique student query letters, proposals, and manuscript materials from the editor’s point of view. We’ll cover other practical details of the publishing business as time and participant inclination permit.
Beth Hadas
Beth Hadas is an independent editor in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For many years she was director of the University of New Mexico Press, where she is currently an advisory editor of the Literature and Medicine Series. Novelists whose work she has published include Rudolfo Anaya, Dagoberto Gilb, Gene Guerin, Arturo Islas, Patricia Santana, and Gary Soto. Especially interested in memoir and creative nonfiction, Beth has worked with nonfiction by Keith Basso, Stanley Crawford, William deBuys, Robert Hine, Patricia Limerick, and John Nichols among many others.
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Secret Hearing: Revision as a Transformative Art (Intermediate & Advanced) – Carol Moldaw
It is the rare poem that comes out fully formed; the rare poem that doesn’t shift shape many times before gelling. Often, poets divide the writing process into the separate categories of “inspiration” and “revision,” but in this workshop, geared toward experienced poets who want to take their work to the next level, we will explore ways in which revision itself can be inspired and inspiring. To turn revision into a re-envisioning, we will explore ways to listen to and work with the secrets inherent in our drafts. Looking closely at one poem-in-progress by each participant, we will examine questions of conscious and unconscious intent, voice, gesture, strategy, and craft. Primarily a hands-on workshop, we will also spend time discussing and understanding foundational issues and techniques of revision. To stimulate and inspire, I will bring in statements and poems by a diverse array of writers.
Carol Moldaw, photo by Jane Bernard
Carol Moldaw’s lyric novel, The Widening, was published in the spring of 2008. She is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, The Lightning Field, and 2002 winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in AGNI, Conjunctions, FIELD, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker and Threepenny Review.
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Fiction and the Creative Process: Overcoming Barriers and Finding your True Voice (All Levels) – Sean Murphy - Closed
My philosophy of teaching writing is simple and direct: focus on the process; do a variety of explorative exercises to stimulate ideas and get the creative flow going; work on organizing and structuring what we come up with; and enjoy the process. Our particular goal for these two days together is to investigate whatever challenges, barriers, or problem areas you may be facing in your writing, and explore a variety of creative techniques that will help you free your natural writing voice, inspire new ideas, and overcome barriers so you can work effectively with the challenges that inevitably come your way. All theory will be grounded in the actual practice of writing, so please come equipped with writing materials and be ready to use them. The amount we're able to accomplish in this time period will depend largely on how prepared you are when you arrive, and how deeply you're willing to devote yourself to the work.
Sean Murphy
Sean Murphy's most recent novel, The Time of New Weather, was released in mass market paperback by Bantam Dell in spring 2008. His debut, The Hope Valley Hubcap King, (Bantam/Dell, 2002/2004), was a BookSense 76 pick and won the Hemingway Award for a First Novel. He is also the author of the Pulitzer-nominated The Finished Man (Bantam/Dell 2004), as well as One Bird, One Stone (Renaissance/St. Martins 2002), a nonfiction chronicle of Zen practice in America. A Zen meditation practitioner for over 20 years, he is the founder of the Creativity and Consciousness program at The University of New Mexico-Taos Campus, where he teaches meditation, creative writing and literature. He also leads writing workshops for a variety of organizations and his own Big Sky Writing Workshops. Learn more at his website: www.murphyzen.com
He taught for five years with Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, and now teaches creative writing and literature for the University of New Mexico-Taos as well as leading workshops for a variety of organizations, including his own Big Sky Writing Workshops. He recently has taught master classes in fiction for The North Carolina Network Writers Conference, the Tony Hillerman Writers Conference, and the UNM Taos Summer Writers’ Conference.
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Duende: Blood and Mystery in Poetry (All Levels) – Connie Voisine - One space remaining
Federico Garcia Lorca, an early 20th century Spanish poet, borrowed the word duende from Spanish folk tales. “It is a struggle, not a thought,” writes Lorca. “I heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.” In this workshop we will try to connect with our own spirit of duende, the wild place of writing. By reading examples of poems Lorca might have loved and through writing exercises we will work to untame the way we write.
Connie Voisine
Connie Voisine is the author of Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, published by University of Chicago Press in 2008. Her first book, Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2001. She has poems published in The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Her work has won a Joseph Campbell Award and was recently featured at The Lab at Belmar, a museum show pairing prehistoric stone tools with poems. Educated at Yale, UC Irvine and University of Utah, she is an associate professor of English in New Mexico State University’s creative writing program. Dr. Voisine also coordinates La Sociedad para las Artes, the outreach organization for the creative writing program. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with her husband, the writer Rus Bradburd, and their daughter, Alma.
Writing Around Taos (All Levels) – Summer Wood - Limited space remaining
Whether your story is set in the savannahs of Africa, a barrio in Miami, or a basement in Des Moines, there’s no mistaking the power a vividly-realized place can lend any piece of writing. In this workshop we’ll examine the role of place in narrative writing as we explore - pen in hand and boots on the ground - the heart of one particular place. This is your chance to get out of the classroom and into the bean fields, the back roads, the plazas and churches and kitchens of Taos. We’ll sweep from the grand to the intimate and back again as we explore the natural and cultural truth of this area. Taos will be both backdrop and laboratory for writing sessions that focus on the particulars of place and aim for the resonant intersection of memory and geography. A UNM van will pick us up at the Sagebrush at 10 a.m. and return us at 4 p.m. each day. Lunch will be part of the adventure.
Summer Wood photo © Miriam Berkley
Summer Wood is the author of Arroyo, a novel set in the fictional terrain of northern New Mexico (Chronicle Books, 2001). The 2007 recipient of the $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation, she has completed her second novel and is at work on a collection of short stories. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Cutthroat, and other places. A long-time resident of Taos, she is an accomplished adobe builder and a green chile fanatic. She and her partner Kathy Namba have raised three sons and three dogs.
