We've just updated our afternoon-workshop page, but I'm also crossposting the (drumroll, please) freshly completed, brand-new, up-to-date afternoon workshop schedule here. The afternoon workshop offerings are contextualized below with the rest of the daily Conference schedule.
These workshops are free for those participants registered for a core morning workshop. For those not registered for a core morning workshop, afternoon workshops are available individually or for all six days. You can register for the afternoon sessions online, by calling us at 360.385.3102 x131 or x114. Please note that there will be multiple workshops happening at the same time, so you need to choose which one to go to!
THE 2010 PORT TOWNSEND WRITERS’ CONFERENCE
All faculty readings and lectures take place in the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater; all meals take place in the Fort Worden Commons.
Sunday, July 18
3:30-5:30—Check-in outside the Centrum office building; welcome gathering.
5:30—Dinner
7—Welcome at the Wheeler Theater
7:30—Readings by Martín Espada; Ana Menéndez
9:15—Welcome gathering in the Schoolhouse Building, Room H.
Monday, July 19
7-8—Morning Freewrite Room D
8-9—Breakfast
9-11:30—Morning workshop
• Room F Chris Abani
• Room M Ana Menéndez
• Room K Dana Levin
• Room D Martín Espada
• Room L Denise Chávez
• Room J Bich Minh Nguyen
• Room O Erin Belieu
• Room N Peter Orner
9-10:30—Morning Exercises
• Room H Ellie Mathews
12-1:00—Lunch
2-3:30—Workshops and lectures in special topics
• Susan Landgraf Room J
“What fills ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’?”
William Carlos Williams said: Nothing but in things. And James Dickey wrote that in writing poetry, “Connections between things…exist…in ways that they never did before.” What are these things? What are the things, which, put together in a poem, make a whole world? We’ll look at Williams’s wheelbarrow poem–what it’s made of, how it’s made, and how it moves; then there will be several exercises that lead to generating a poem of your own.
• Sam Ligon Room N
“Negative Space in Fiction”
While we’ve all heard the writing advice to “show, don’t tell,” just as important to fiction is what we don’t show or tell—what we reveal through absence or omission. Musicians and composers use silence in song to create tension and meaning and contrast against sound. Painters use negative space around a subject to create contrast and to heighten color and composition in the subject itself. In fiction, what’s not revealed, and how it’s not revealed, often creates a tremendous gravity of absence, or a kind of shadow effect, that informs character and meaning in story. In “Death in the Afternoon”, Ernest Hemingway wrote that “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” We’ll discuss Hemingway’s “iceberg principal,” or what Amy Hempel refers to as “negative space,” using two stories as examples of creating shape, meaning, and gravity through absence or omission—Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” and Hempel’s “Today Will Be a Quiet Day.”
• Susan Rich Room M
“Documenting the Lyric”
What is a chapbook? What is a narrative arc? Where can I find one? This workshop will examine the nature of book-length poetry projects and examine texts from Bang, McCombs, Tretheway, and Whitcomb. Then, we will try out different scaffoldings to order our own storm of obsessions. Playing with new exercises, you will extend your thinking of what makes a book of poems. This workshop is for those who are mid-project and for those who are merely curious about an extended lyrical format.
• Wendy Call Room D
“Ten Ways to Improve Your Nonfiction Prose”
This is a two-part workshop spanning the Monday and Tuesday afternoon workshop slots, although one does not need to attend each session. For this first session, we will discuss ten suggestions for strengthening the literary and narrative quality of your nonfiction prose. With examples from some of our best-loved (mostly nonfiction) word-workers—James Agee, Sandra Cisneros, Elizabeth Gilbert, George Orwell, and others—we will delve into different aspects of craft: from dialogue and description to sound and synesthesia. Many short writing exercises will get you thinking outside your normal writing boxes.
• Michael Schein Room K
“Baseball, Bicycling & Poetic Passion”
The love poem is so well known in the context of the Beloved that we sometimes forget our passion also extends to our pastimes—sports, hobbies, games. This session examines a different sort of love poem, in which the beloved is what we do for fun—baseball, bicycling, hiking, juggling, skiing, paragliding and more. Often, these “mere” pastimes are the moments in which we are most alive, and we borrow their rhythms to weave the arc of our own narrative. We’ll study examples of these special love poems, explore their rhythms, joys, triumphs, disappointments, insights. What are you passionate about doing? Is it more than just a game? Be ready to write it.
• Bill Ransom Room O
“A Writer’s Tool Box”
Bring poetry, fiction, or nonfiction prose manuscripts, a writing implement and a willingness to mark up your work. We will identify weak and strong elements of language and will apply what we’ve discussed to your writing. Strengthen your writing with this workshop, no matter which genre you bring or how much experience you’ve had; the art, however, is all up to you.
4-5—Craft lecture by Chris Abani
5:30—Dinner
7:30—Readings by Dana Levin, Peter Orner
10:00—The Ten O’Clock Open-Mike Readings (Room H of the Schoolhouse Building)
