Afternoon Sessions Descriptions
The truth is that seasoned editors can discern, within a very few pages (even paragraphs) what the relative experience level of a writer might be, and what developmental challenges he or she faces. Carol Houck Smith, an editor-at-large with W. W. Norton, will examine the first page of actual manuscripts and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.
Note: Students may submit the first page of their fiction or nonfiction work, in advance of the conference, to be considered for possible inclusion in this panel. Submit your first page, double-spaced, to Lisa Peterson at Writers at Work no later than May 15, 2008.
Can the realistic tradition of American literature coexist with the sort of magical and surreal narratives we expect from writers in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe? In this lecture, novelist Dean Bakopoulos examines a uniquely American form of writing that he calls "gritty mysticism," and the political, socio-economic, and cultural forces that brought it into being. He also discusses how writers can use elements of the mystical and the magical to infuse their own stories with suspense, weight, and style.
As developing writers know, preparing to become “published” can seem a maze of contradictory and confusing information. This panel of professionals from various walks of the literary world will attempt to demystify the process of bringing one’s early, but accomplished, work into print.
How did it sound in your kitchen? What were the rhythms of talk, the syntax of daily life? How do we as writers begin to locate this language to make use of it in our prose? In this talk we'll consider ways we can make, use, or push against our natural first ways of hearing language.
Memory, Imagination, Truth, Art
Kim Addonizio, Abigail Thomas, Katherine Coles, Kit Ward
Moderated by Dawn Marano
How do our memory styles inform our work and shape our writing? Why do we remember something the way we remember it instead of (perhaps) the way it happened or the way it was. Bad memory, good memory, imperfect memory, faulty memory. Is there discovery in total recall? This cross-genre panel, including fiction, nonfiction and poetry writers, will discuss how we take pieces of our lives and weave them into our artistic work.
Using the work of Denis Johnson, Frank O’Connor, and others, we’ll explore when and how writers employ the lyric register, those moments when time seems to slow down, sensual and emotional detail intensify, and the prose rises toward song. We’ll focus on making sure such moments evolve from the world of your characters, rather than being imposed by the author.
Literary theory and creative writing are often considered divided, rather than symbiotic. Traditional and experimental writers will benefit from a great appreciation of texts that push narrative limits and a greater understanding of how theory informs these texts and our own writing, regardless of personal aesthetic. By dissolving the illusory divide between craft and theory, this panel will suggest new strategies for generating creative work.
Whether it is a small detail (the neighbor's habit of picking up his morning newspaper in nothing but his boxer shorts) that inspires a fictional character, or the rendering of a family member with faithful accuracy in a memoir, writers have their individual methods for making characters out of real people. Three local writers working in different genres tell their stories and discuss their techniques for representing people they know on the page.