2008 Workshops and Faculty
Weekend (July 12-13)
Weekend (July 19-20)
Weeklong (July 14-18)
Weeklong Master Classes (July 14-18)
Weekend Workshops (July 12-13)
Playing With Your Inner Child: The Art of Children’s Book Writing – 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 graduated from Stanford University (B.A.) and the University of New Mexico (M.A.) with degrees in English literature. Her 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). Through her writing and as Marketing, PR and Communications Manager at Bueno Foods, she hopes to help celebrate and preserve a piece of New Mexican culture.
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So the Story Goes: Building a Dynamic Story — Evelina Zuni Lucero —Closed
Fiction is all about evoking emotion in readers, getting them involved in characters’ lives so that they keep turning the page. This workshop will help you develop your story to its utmost. We will look closely at the narrative arc of story by focusing on conflict, crisis and resolution. What drives your character? What does he or she want? Do things get worse before they get better? Is your character forever changed by story’s end? Through writing exercises, and discussions of craft and short readings, we will explore all aspects of crafting a story that packs emotional punch.
Evelina Lucero
Evelina Zuni Lucero, a native of New Mexico (Isleta/Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo), is the author of Night Star, Morning Star, which won the 1999 First Book Award for Fiction from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. She received a residency at the Hedgebrook Women Authoring Change program at Widhbey Island in June 2006 and was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri International Artist Center in Umbertide, Italy, in 2004. Evelina is the chair of the creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She is working on a second novel, Silicon Coyote, in which the reservation casino becomes the point of intersection of history, myth, and imagination, the point of discovery for the narrator.
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Screenwriting: An Introduction – Matthew McDuffie
Intended to give you an understanding of the craft of screenwriting, much of the class will focus on the structure of storytelling: three act construction, plot and subplot, conflict and crisis, character motivation and scene design, the basic building blocks of the screenplay. Formatting, dialogue, visual description and genre also will be discussed. We will breakdown contemporary films and compose our own stories as well as workshop students’ ideas. The hope is that each participant will have mapped out their story by the end of the weekend.
Matthew McDuffie
Matthew McDuffie is a professional screen and television writer who has written feature films for Warner Brothers, and Twentieth Century Fox, which produced his script for A Cool, Dry Place. He has written television movies for HBO, Showtime, USA Networks and Lifetime. Surrender, Dorothy, his adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel, aired on CBS, starring Diane Keaton. For his work on Anne Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, Matthew was nominated for a Writers’ Guild Award for Best Adapted Long Form. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in screenwriting at the University of New Mexico.
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Publishing 101: A Writer's Guide – Jane von Mehren–Closed
An editor and publisher with more than 20 years experience will take you through the entire publishing process from submission to publication revealing what you need to know to make you more likely to get a contract and what to do to ensure that your book is published as effectively as possible. We'll look at the role of agents, what an editor can and cannot do for your book, as well as how you can play an effective role in the marketing of your work.
Jane von Mehren
Jane von Mehren is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Trade Paperbacks and Modern Library at the Random House Publishing Group. She is in charge of the Random House Trade Paperbacks, Ballantine, One World, Presidio, and Villard Trade Paperback lines; Modern Library a hardcover and paperback imprint; as well as a working editor who acquires both hard covers and paperbacks.
Myth, Memory, and the Muse: Poetry – Diane Thiel —Limited space remaining
When we write poetry, we tap into a wellspring which is the source of all the arts and which reflects the breadth of our human experience. In this course, we will explore different sources of inspiration, such as myth, history, and visual art in the making of a poem. We will read poems from different cultures and eras which respond to such sources of inspiration, by poets such as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sherman Alexie. We will engage in numerous creative exercises to inspire new poems and incorporate some workshop of participants’ writing.
Diane Thiel
Diane Thiel is the author of seven books of poetry, nonfiction and creative writing pedagogy: Echolocations (Nicholas Roerich Prize), Writing Your Rhythm, The White Horse: A Colombian Journey, Resistance Fantasies, Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres,Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry, and Winding Roads: Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction. Thiel’s translation of Alexis Stamatis’s novel, American Fugue (a project that received a 2007 NEA International Literature Award) will be published in 2008 by Etruscan Press. Her work appears in many journals including Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Best American Poetry 1999, and is re-printed in over 30 major anthologies. A recipient of numerous awards including the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers Awards, and a recent Fulbright Scholar, she is Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico. For more information, please visit her webpage: www.dianethiel.net
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Mining Memory: A Workshop in Memoir – Rob Wilder – Closed
One of the ways a writer uncovers a story is by examining memory through different lenses. Whether it’s insight surrounding an early tragedy or observations about the different groups that gather daily on the playground, the writer must examine the memory from all sides to unveil the story within. In this two-day intensive, we will use varied exercises, prompts, and assignments to generate new material or ignite a fresh view of the story that’s been gnawing at you for years. We will also discuss successful published pieces to examine issues of craft, technique, and ideas that we may try in our own work.
This workshop (and instructor) welcomes writers of all levels. The goal of the group is to meet each writer on his or her own terms while encouraging the generation of new work (and have a little fun along the way).
This is an active workshop dedicated to purposeful prose. This workshop provides space, place, and keys to motivate and incorporate that which we must do with the artistic vehicle we so choose to maneuver with. This workshop is for active living through the word while committed to concerns beyond. Particular focus on labor writing. The essence of cultural sensibility is easily detected within parameters of meaningful engagement relative to inherent and learned passions of living.
Rob Wilder
Robert Wilder is the author of two critically acclaimed books of essays: Tales From The Teachers’ Lounge and Daddy Needs a Drink, which was optioned for sitcom adaptation. He has published fiction and nonfiction 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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Miniature Madness: A Weekend Workshop in Three Genres—Jesse Lee Kercheval – Closed
I admit it. I’m crazy--three genres in two days? But I write fiction, memoir and poetry. and I want to encourage other writers to go a little mad and work in more than one genre too. To this end, I have invented a workshop that uses in-class exercises and an overnight assignment to produce tiny but whole short short stories, short personal essays and prose poems. This workshop is designed to be supportive, productive and helpful for every level of writer— beginner to advanced—and is especially suited to writers who want to
explore a new genre or to shake up and revitalize their writing by taking on new challenges.
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including the writing text Building Fiction and the poetry collection Dog Angel. Her most recent book is The Alice Stories, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in the fall. She was the founding director of the University of Wisconsin MFA Program in Creative Writing. 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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Weekend Workshops (July 19-20)
Playwriting – Elaine Avila–cancelled
In this class for writers of all levels, we will explore the skills unique to playwriting. Playwrights tell stories using only dialogue and stage directions to create an entire world. This discipline creates enormous fun, pioneers new forms, and has a strong relationship to community. Because plays hold the audience’s attention in real time through powerful, exciting situations, this form is useful for writers who work in fiction, film/tv and new media. We will use innovative exercises to create dynamic situations, new characters and original worlds.
Elaine Avila
Elaine Avila’s plays have been performed across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Some of her favorite projects include Lieutenant Nun (based on the true story of a woman conquistador), Burn Gloom (a music-theatre collaboration involving writers from 14 cities, including Malawi, Santiago, Tasmania, Bali, New York City, Montreal, and Belle Ile, France) and Good Fooling (the story of Shakespeare’s Clown). She is the recipient of numerous awards including The Victoria Critic’s Circle for Best New Play, a Canada Council Millennium Grant, “New Works for Young Women” Award/Residency from Tulsa University, the A.S.K. Theatre Projects Scholarship, and the Alden B. Dow Fellowship. Her plays and articles have been published in numerous publications, including Canadian Theatre Review, by the Playwrights Guild of Canada, Northwest on Stage and The Open Page ( Denmark). She has taught in universities from British Columbia to Tasmania, and has recently been appointed the Robert Hartung Endowed Chair of Dramatic Writing at the University of New Mexico, heading the MFA Program. Her play, Quality, a dark comedy about women’s footwear, recently premiered in Canada and London, England.
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Poetry and the Unconscious: A two-part workshop – Dana Levin – Closed
“Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,” says poet Wallace Stevens. Day One, we will explore how to “make sense” of poetry’s relationship to the unconscious and the use we can make of this relationship for poetic composition and revision. We will discuss the notion of associative logic, look at poems by poets such as Charles Simic, Tomaz Salamun, Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, and embark on a poetry exercise that engages the unconscious, source of our wildest visions. Day Two, we'll discuss poetic resistance, how the unconscious can help us work around that resistance, and give fresh eyes a chance to help each of us move forward with our workshop poem. Each participant will submit two poems for Day Two workshop (in case we can get to two), and is encouraged to submit, for one of them, his or her most resistant-to-completion, messy, half-baked poem!
Dana Levin
Dana Levin’s first book, In the Surgical Theatre, won the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive nearly every award available to first books and emerging poets. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Conduit and the Iowa Review, and has received numerous fellowships and awards, including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and poetry teacher for over fifteen years, Levin teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program and at the College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her second book is Wedding Day (Copper Canyon Press).
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Challenges and Opportunities for Beginning and Advanced Authors Seeking Publication: An Editor’s View (All Levels) – Alan Rinzler - Closed
Publishers are eager to acquire new authors, especially less experienced writers with a promising future. Authors, on the other hand, often feel bewildered and rejected by publishers, especially more commercial companies that are in the best-seller business. This course will confront both sides of that breach and attempt to debunk the myths and close the gap regarding:
- How authors can understand what a publisher is looking for in the volatile and precarious world of the book business today
- What authors can do to present their work in the best light, given the commercial culture of avoiding risk, overcoming competition, exploiting both new and traditional marketing channels and techniques
- Why authors need to market themselves, no matter how reluctant they may feel about such activities, before, during and after publication within a long term plan for career advancement
- What kind of proposals authors need to prepare as a tool for selling their book. (It’s not what you’ve been told.)
- How digital technology and the internet have changed forever the art of being an author, and the new opportunities for literary success that are now available
The workshop will consist of case histories, exercises in formulating a strategy for new projects, scenarios incorporating insider information on the dynamics of publishing companies today, and candid appraisal of the major changes in the process of becoming a more successful writer. The point of view of an active acquisition and development editor from a big house with 46 years on the job.
Alan Rinzler
Alan Rinzler is an acquisition and developmental editor who began as Robert Gottlieb’s assistant at Simon and Schuster in 1962. He then worked as a Senior Editor at Macmillan and Holt, as the Editorial Director for Trade Publishing at Bantam Books, as West Coast Editor for Grove Press, and as the VP and Associate Publisher of Rolling Stone magazine and president of its book company, Straight Arrow Books. For the past 15 years he has been Executive Editor of Jossey-Bass, the west coast imprint of John Wiley & Sons. Along the way, he has edited and published Toni Morrison, Claude Brown, Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins, Jerzy Kosinski, Irvin Yalom, Shirley MacLaine, Robert Ludlum, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, and Clive Cussler.
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Mapping Memory: Writing About Place – Diane Thiel –Closed
Whether you are writing about your childhood home or an exotic locale where you have traveled, finding the right way to render your sense of place is a crucial element. This course will focus primarily on nonfiction, though it will certainly be useful to poets and fiction writers as well. Readings will include works by Bruce Chatwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and contemporary Greek writer Alexis Stamatis, among others. We will engage in discussions and numerous writing exercises to address various concerns and techniques of nonfiction, such as mapping your memory of the place and the experience, the blurring of memory and imagination, the discoveries of form and structure, and the selection and honing of image and detail.
Diane Thiel
Diane Thiel is the author of seven books of poetry, nonfiction and creative writing pedagogy: Echolocations (Nicholas Roerich Prize), Writing Your Rhythm, The White Horse: A Colombian Journey, Resistance Fantasies, Crossroads: Creative Writing Exercises in Four Genres,Open Roads: Exercises in Writing Poetry, and Winding Roads: Exercises in Writing Creative Nonfiction. Thiel’s translation of Alexis Stamatis’s novel, American Fugue (a project that received a 2007 NEA International Literature Award) will be published in 2008 by Etruscan Press. Her work appears in many journals including Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Best American Poetry 1999, and is re-printed in over 30 major anthologies. A recipient of numerous awards including the Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers Awards, and a recent Fulbright Scholar, she is Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico. For more information, please visit her webpage: www.dianethiel.net
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Underdogs: Creating and Changing Worlds through Storytelling Craft – Franci Washburn
Storytellers create worlds, change worlds, and through that process affect the lives of people who read their stories. If that is always true, then why do some stories leap from the pages like racing hounds to wring our hearts and change our minds, while others just lie on the pages like lazy old mutts scratching fleas? The answer lies in the ways that writers utilize and manipulate the elements of craft—dialogue, narration, point of view, poetic language, precise word choice and more. This class examines those elements in depth through analysis of excerpts from great pieces of writing, through intensive in-class exercises and discussions, and work shopping your own short pieces of writing. Pre-conference work consists of short writing assignments and some reading. Suitable for beginners just learning the elements of craft, it is also useful for more advanced writers who want to take their craftsmanship to a higher level. Learn how to make your mutt as world changing and heart grasping as any racing hound.
Franci Washburn
Franci Washburn writes fiction, poetry, and scholarly journal articles. She is the author of Elsie’s Business, a novel published in 2004 by the University of Nebraska Press, which is a modern re-telling of the Lakota Deer Woman story. A second novel, The Sacred White Turkey, is finished and due out within the year. This novel is a tragic-comic look at the intersections of Christianity and traditional Lakota spiritual practice. A third book, A Place at the Table: Post-colonialism and American Indian Literature, is a non-fiction work in progress. She has also edited Dancing with the Wind, a collection of poetry by American Indian children and published numerous articles in journals such as American Indian Quarterly, Studies in American Indian Literature, and American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
Her work draws upon her own life experiences growing up in, on, and around Pine Ridge Reservation (Oglala Lakota) in South Dakota as well as more recent life experiences within dominant American society and the academic world. Washburn is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona where she holds a dual appointment in the American Indian Studies Program and the Department of English. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing (fiction) and a Ph.D. in American Studies, both from the University of New Mexico.
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Outrageous Fortune: A Sense of Risk in Creative Nonfiction – Rob Wilder–Closed
How many times have you sat before the page and felt as if your prose was as flat as an unwashed head of hair? Do you want to add some sorely needed spice to your seemingly bland essay casserole? This workshop will seek to push all that we propose by writing creative nonfiction. Through rigorous exercises, assignments, and prompts, we will risk all that we know about writing in order to shake up our present and future work. We will also closely examine successful published pieces to study the craft, technique, and possibilities we may attempt in our work.
This workshop (and instructor) welcomes writers of all levels. Please come with an open mind, willingness to meet writers on their own terms, and a wide sense of humor and wonder.
Robert Wilder
Robert Wilder is the author of two critically acclaimed books of essays: Tales From The Teachers’ Lounge and Daddy Needs a Drink, which was optioned for sitcom adaptation. He has published fiction and nonfiction 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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Building Fiction Bootcamp—Jesse Lee Kercheval– Limited space remaining
We won’t be doing push-ups, but we will take two days to build our fiction writing muscles. We’ll use in-class writing exercises and an overnight short writing assignment to practice story beginnings and endings, and elements of fiction such as dialogue, character and plot and to write at least one complete but very short short story. This workshop is designed to be supportive, productive and helpful for every level of writer--beginner to advanced--and is especially suited to writers who want to come away from the conference with stories they can expand or complete in the long months away from the heaven that is Taos and the Writing Conference!
Jesse Lee Kercheval
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including the writing text Building Fiction and the poetry collection Dog Angel. Her most recent book is The Alice Stories, which won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in the fall. She was the founding director of the University of Wisconsin MFA Program in Creative Writing. 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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Week Long Workshops
Intermediate Novel: Finishing the First Draft (Intermediate) — Laura Dave– Limited space remaining
You've been working on your novel for awhile now. Maybe you have three chapters--maybe ten---but why is it still so hard to get to the end? This class will help you work through some of the narrative hurdles that make it feel impossible to get from page 1 to page 301. We will work on ways of maintaining voice and strengthening structure as well as finding your way through "the murky middle" of your novel. We will also talk about the importance of the first twenty pages, and how to create that elusive excellent ending. Lastly, we will spend some class time considering what to do when you are ready to send your novel out into the world: how to find an agent and editor, how to write for literary journals and magazines, and how the book-to-film world works. Please bring the first chapter of your novel-in-progress (15 page manuscript limit, double-spaced), and the very last page of your favorite novel.
Laura Dave
Laura Dave is the author of the novels London Is The Best City In America and The Divorce Party. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Five Points, The New York Observer, SELF, ESPN the Magazine and Blueprint. She lives in New York City. To learn more about the author, please visit her website www.lauradave.com
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To See the Unknown from Vision to Re-vision: Writing, Yoga, Consciousness – Jeff Davis–Two spaces remaining
When we enter writing’s dark terrain (memory, imagination, insight), pre-conceptions can narrow vision more than we realize. Characters act predictably. Plots plod. Verse has no verve. But what happens to our writing when Yoga hones outward perception and inner focus and also grants us access to our underground imagination and deep memory? Perhaps we can begin to see the unknown and write from a source of wonder, adventure, and fearless authenticity. Perhaps we can grow more confident in navigating those uncertain places. Consciousness shapes craft; craft, consciousness. Each session will integrate Yoga into a writing or re-writing process. We will heighten our inner and outer senses that in turn help us create our reader’s virtual world; train our inner eye for insight; go blindly when we draft; and trust our intuition when re-shaping a piece’s organic form. Via dialogue about process and craft, study of others’ works, and Yoga, writers will generate and re-vision fresh material. Don’t sweat the Yoga: It works for any body.
Jeff Davis
Jeff Davis is author of The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga Philosophies and Practices as Muse for Authentic Writing (Penguin, 2004; Spirit One Book Club Choice; Monkfish Publishing 2 nd edition, 2008) and City Reservoir (Barnburner Press, 1998). His essays, articles, short stories, and poems have appeared in publications around the country and in London including Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, The Comstock Review, Common Ground, Conscious Choice, Upstate House, and Wisdom Publication’s You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction. He is on faculty at Western Connecticut State University’s MFA in Professional Writing Program. He has studied Yoga with Sri TKV Desikachar in South India and through two teacher training programs. He resides with his wife Hillary near Woodstock, NY, where he is writing his next book Tracking Wonder and restoring their small farm with permaculture principles.
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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. How do you give voice to forgetting as well as remembering? Balance the demands of the story with responsibility to the people whose lives that you bring to the page? Incorporate research, artifacts, or speculation? Manage chronology when memory insists on being nonlinear? Ride that cutting edge between fact and imagination? Uncover those organic images and structures that will bring your story to that mysterious moment when it finds its own life separate from yours? These are just a few questions you may be asking yourself as you grapple with the unique demands your story is making in the process of becoming art. 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.
Minrose Gwin
Minrose Gwin is 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. She also has just completed a novel, What I Didn’t See. 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 — 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 Coloado. 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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Into & Out of Silence: A Multi-Genre Workshop – Laurie Kutchins – Limited space remaining
Silence is sometimes thought to be the uninvited or unwelcome guest at our writing table, yet it is integral to all creative process. It even can become the most immediate and palpable measure of a powerful piece of writing, the hush as it sweeps across an audience or a reader. This workshop will invite the silence even as we demystify it. Through a series of playful and evocative exercises we will explore silence as impasse, resistance or obstacle to our best creative potential, while at the same time we welcome its stillness as a necessary generative space, as alchemical ground for our creativity. We will examine what silences us when we write, and how to manage the ruckus of our own resistance. We also will try some constructive techniques to mute our most intentional surface voices in order to usher in what is most mysterious or unexpected in our writer selves. As a multi-genre workshop with a focus on creative process, participants will be able to shift or blend genres in the writing done during the week.
Laurie Kutchins
Laurie Kutchins’ books of poems include Slope of the Child Everlasting, published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2007; The Night Path, recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry and nominee for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and Between Towns, winner of Texas Tech’s first-book poetry series. She is a recipient of the Virginia Commission for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Literature. Currently a professor in the Department of English at James Madison University, Laurie also has served as Visiting Writer at the University of New Mexico and Visiting Professor at Bucknell University.
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To Tell the Truth: Telling Family Stories – Aaron Raz Link & Hilda Raz–cancelled
Family connections provide a passport into territories both foreign and familiar. They connect us across categories of experience and identity - young and old, male and female, rich and poor - and ask us
to discover a larger context that contains them all. Like other forms of literary border-crossing, writing about family has unique challenges and rewards.
We will use a variety of exercises on and off the page to help writers discover the core of their own - and their readers' - interest in family experiences and histories. Topics will include truths, lies, and creative non-fictions; working with existing materials (family documents, photographs, and so on); multiple perspectives; ethical questions; and the literary and social context of the story. This generative workshop is suitable for writers interested in beginning a project, and for those with a manuscript in process.
Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz
Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz have worked together on a number of projects, including Living on the Margins; Women Writers on Breast Cancer (Persea) and, most recently, What Becomes You, a collaborative memoir in two voices published in the American Lives Series edited by Tobias Wolff (UNP).
Aaron Raz Link is a historian and philosopher of science, teacher, performer, and curator as well as a writer. He worked for a decade as a scientific educator for several major American museums. Currently, he is director of the Museum of Nature in Portland, Oregon, and a visiting teacher at venues from the San Francisco School of Circus Arts to the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program. As a performer, Aaron writes his own material and collaborates with other artists to create shows that reinvent old genres and take on tough subjects with a sense of humor. His work has appeared at festivals, conferences, and theatres across the country and in Canada and Britain. He is a graduate of the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre. Aaron also is curator of two traveling exhibits; Other Visions; Art and Culture of the Outremer retells stories of difference in personal, historical, and scientific voices, and FAMILY is an interactive collection of objects and stories inspired by the word family. Aaron's work has been honored with awards from the Equity Foundation, Oregon's Regional Arts and Culture Council, Outside In, and the Pride Foundation.
Hilda Raz is the author of Divine Honors, Trans, and her new books, All Odd and Splendid (all in the Wesleyan UP Poetry Series), and What Is Good (University of Nebraska Press) - all poetry. A professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska, she is the Luschei editor-in-chief of Prairie Schooner and director of the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes in Short Fiction and Poetry.
As well as professional collaborators, Hilda Raz and Aaron Raz Link are mother and son.
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The Art of the Sentence, the Art of the Paragraph – Priscilla Long – One space remaining
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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The Centrifugal Poem – Valerie Martínez– Closed
Do you find yourself writing poems, even good poems, which unfold in the same ways, over and over again? Do you want your poems to expand further, provoke more, surprise? W.C. Williams (in “The Poem Analysis”) wrote: “ It's all in/the sound. A song./Seldom a song. It should//be a song—made of/particulars, wasps,/a gentian—something/immediate, open//scissors, a lady's’/eyes waking/centrifugal…” Centrifugal poems counter the impulse to make our poems focus inward, toward a center, in favor of spinning out. Centrifugal poems can be short (Emily Dickinson), longer (Dylan Thomas), or book-length (Jane Miller). They also encompass a range of styles, from formal poetry to free verse lyric to experimental collage. In this workshop we will read and discuss the centrifugal in poetry, engage in creative and experiential exercises to spark new poems, and workshop your new work. The class is for experienced poets who want to spark change and evolution in their poetry, for those who are willing to take risks .
Valerie Martínez
Valerie Martínez’s first book of poetry, Absence, Luminescent (Four Way Books, 1999) won the Larry Levis Prize and a Greenwall Grant from the Academy of American Poets. Her second book, World to World, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2004. Martinez’s poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in many literary journals and magazines including Parnassus, The Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, The Notre Dame Review, Luna, Tiferet, The Bloomsbury Review, and AGNI. Her poems appear in many anthologies of contemporary poetry including The Best American Poetry (1996);New American Poets: A Breadloaf Anthology; American Poetry: Next Generation; Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance; Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred and JUNTA: Contemporary Latino/a Poetry of the Avant-Garde. Valerie has a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.F.A. from The University of Arizona and is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.
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Beginning Memoir – Barbara Robinette Moss – One space remaining
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 DavidRothenburg 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 ArtDrawing Midwest. Though she is presently living in Iowa, Barbara grew up in Alabama; consequently, her art and writing are rooted in the Deep South.
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Fiction as Art Form: An Intermediate Fiction Workshop – Daniel Mueller – Two spaces remaining
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.
Daniel 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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Travel Writing as Literature – Mark Sundeen – Limited space remaining
This workshop is not about service journalism—that is, the reviews of hotels and restaurants that might appear in in-flight magazines or the local paper. Rather, we will approach travel writing as a storytelling art, a literary tradition that spans from Mark Twain and Jack London to Joan Didion and Elizabeth Gilbert. With an emphasis on the techniques that enrich all writing—tone, voice, lyricism, suspense, narrative structure, and character development—students are encouraged to incorporate travel into other genres such as literary journalism, memoir, and the personal essay.
This course is primarily a workshop, in which we discuss one another’s work. However, we will also analyze award-winning published work, and discuss queries, proposals, and strategies for getting your work published.
Mark Sundeen
Mark Sundeen is the author of two books: Car Camping and The Making of Toro. He is a correspondent for Outside magazine, and his travel writing has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, and Men’s Journal. His political reporting and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Believer and McSweeney’s. He was the visiting writer at University of New Mexico in 2007, and since 2005 has been writer-in-residence at the MFA program at Western Connecticut State University. He lives in Montana.
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Beginning Novel – Lisa Tucker – Two spaces remaining
In this workshop, we will consider what makes a successful first chapter. As readers, we know when the opening of a novel is working because we feel immediately engaged with the characters and curious about their lives. But how does the writer do that? How does he or she manage to give us the necessary background while keeping the plot moving forward? How does she find the right tone and pace to keep us in the story? How does she make us care desperately about people who exist only in the shared imaginative space between writer and audience? Whether you’re just starting your book or struggling with yet another draft, you will find that scrutinizing the first chapter will make your novel stronger. Studying the opening can also reveal the promise of your story and even help you determine the direction your novel “wants” to go. Please bring the first chapter of the manuscript you’re working on (up to twenty pages) and the latest novel you’ve read (from any genre).
Lisa Tucker
Lisa Tucker is the bestselling author of The Song Reader, Shout Down the Moon, Once Upon a Day and The Cure for Modern Life. Her novels have been published in ten countries and selected for Borders Original Voices, the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Clubs, People magazine Critic’s Choice, Redbook Book Club, Amazon Book of the Year, Barnes & Noble Reading Group program, Target “Breakout” Books, Books A Million Fiction Club, the American Library Association Popular Paperbacks, the Book Sense list and the Book Sense Reading Group Suggestions. Her short work has appeared in various anthologies and in Seventeen, Pages and The Oxford American.
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Characterization in Crime Fiction – Judith Van Gieson
Complex characters are essential to crime fiction. This course focuses on creating unforgettable characters and integrating them into suspenseful plots. We will discuss how a writer gets a sense of character by reflection and observation as well as techniques for bringing characters to life for readers through description, dialogue, action and reaction. Conflict and resolution are necessary to fiction and the workshop will explore ways to achieve these through dynamic interactions between protagonists and antagonists. Since crime novels deal with the best of human nature and the worst, we will work on developing the qualities that are essential to protagonists (such as intelligence, curiosity, integrity and persistence), the motivations of those who commit crime and the traits of people who work in law enforcement. Protagonists often have sidekicks, and we will consider how to balance the two as well as how to create believable suspects. Students will be asked to submit samples from works in progress for discussion. I will meet individually with every class member.
Judith Van Gieson
Judith Van Gieson is the author of thirteen award-winning mystery novels set in New Mexico, as well as a children‘s book and a collection of short stories and poetry. Her first series (published by HarperCollins) featured Albuquerque lawyer/sleuth Neil Hamel. The protagonist of the second series, Claire Reynier, is an archivist and librarian at the University of New Mexico. The Reynier series was published in paperback by Signet and in hardcover by the University of New Mexico Press. Books in both series have been regional and IMBA (Independent Mystery Booksellers Association) bestsellers. The Shadow of Venus, the fifth book in the Reynier series, was given the Zia Award by New Mexico Press Women in 2004. Van Gieson has taught creative writing at the University of New Mexico and lectured in the Voices of the Southwest Series.
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Master Classes
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 has been 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. 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 is the author of the short story collections The Way That Water Enters Stone and Johnny Too Bad, the novels Love Warps the Mind a Little and Deep in the Shade of Paradise, three chapbooks, and various screenplays. His novel Louisiana Power & Light was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1994. His work has been selected for the Yankee Magazine award for fiction and the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award. He teaches creative writing at Florida International University.
Poetry – Greg Glazner
This weeklong master class is for writers interested in revising a poetry manuscript toward possible publication. During the week, we’ll focus on large-scale issues: ordering the manuscript for flow, effect, coherence, and variety; discussing the relative strengths of the manuscript’s poems, with an eye toward consistent quality; and creating (or revising) titles and section divisions. We’ll do some tight-focus work as well, looking at two or more poems for detailed revision. The class will involve both workshop sessions and individual conferences. The manuscript page limit is 60 pages, single-spaced. Participants are encouraged to submit five additional “alternate” poems as well, as possible additions to the manuscript or as replacement poems in a subsequent draft of the book.
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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Memoir — Gregory Martin –One space remaining
This is a writing workshop for writers who have finished a draft of a book-length memoir. Stephen Koch, in his great book, The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop, writes, “The operational word here is whole. A completed movement from beginning to end defines a draft. Until you have gone that distance you won’t have a draft.” Whole, however, does not mean, finished. When you have a complete draft, you are ready for substantive revision of that whole. You are ready to revise for structure, for persona and characterization and plot. Koch writes, “In a second draft, you are going to be hauling huge hunks of prose to completely new places, cutting whole chapters, banishing irrelevant characters, and adding relevant ones.” In other words, you won’t be polishing and tinkering, you will be performing an overhaul of a draft that is still full of unrealized possibilities. This is a class designed to guide in that overhaul to your next draft’s possibilities. 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 also will 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 drama 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.
Gregory Martin
Gregory Martin is the author of Mountain City, a memoir of the life of a town of thirty-three in remote northeastern Nevada, which received a Washington State Book Award and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Martin's work has appeared in such magazines as Image, Storyquarterly, Orion, and Creative Nonfiction. He received an MFA from the University of Arizona in 1997. He joined the University of New Mexico English Department Creative Writing faculty in 2001, where he teaches creative nonfiction and fiction and directs the Poets & Writers Reading Series. Martin is currently at work on a novel, The House of Bedlam.
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