Conference Class Descriptions

Faculty and Class Descriptions

The “Works in Progress” workshops are designed for advanced participants who want to have pre-existing work workshopped in a traditional format. The faculty is Chris Abani (fiction), Kim Addonizio (poetry), and Lesley Hazleton (creative nonfiction).

The “New Works” workshops are designed for both beginning and advanced participants who want to think about their writing in new, fresh ways and create new work. The faculty is Kathleen Alcalá (fiction and nonfiction), Gary Lilley (poetry), and Selah Saterstrom (nonfiction, fiction, and cross genre). These workshops

The “Start Here” workshop is for beginning writers who have never taken a creative writing workshop before, as well as those looking for a fresh perspective on their writing. This workshop will allow you to sample a bit of everything. Brian Evenson leads this workshop.

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Chris Abani, a former Nigerian political prisoner, has recently published two new books: the poetry collection Hands Washing Water and Song for Night, a devastating novella about a child soldier in Africa. The Los Angeles Times called Abani’s novel Graceland, the story of an Elvis impersonator, one of the best books of 2002. His other novels and novellas include The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, and Masters of the Board.

Class Description: This workshop will explore layering in fiction to see where thematic issues connect with narrative and where the linear narrative can be interrupted to apply the notion of the lyric dip. We will explore the line where epic concerns intersect with the personal narrative, discuss questions of morality, fight over the idea of the compassionate imagination, and question deep song. These discussions are meant to help each writer uncover the heart of their own aesthetic, to get a handle on it. The workshopping will concentrate more on this than on line breaks or narrative continuity.

Kim Addonizio, long admired as a poet (Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award), has branched out into fiction with two recent novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street, each of which looks at the lives of women and men down on their luck—homeless, jobless, with kids to raise—in devastated modern urban America. Kim’s last book of poetry is What Is This Thing Called Love?

Class Description: This is a workshop about taking inspiration from other writers—from their structures, ideas, syntax, subject matter—whatever will launch us into new and self-surprising territory. We’ll read closely, do in-class writing, and workshop from one to three previously written poems by participants. Some writers whose poems we will explore include Yeats, Larkin, Ginsberg, C.K Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Linda Gregg, and others. After this workshop, you'll be more conscious of how to “read like a writer” and how to launch yourself into your own explorations.

Kathleen Alcalá is the author of numerous books—including Spirits of the Ordinary, The Flower in the Skull, Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist—that play with conventions of magic realism and while telling the stories of Mexican and Mexican-American lives. She is also the author of The Desert Remembers My Name, a book of essays about family and writing.

Class Description: Anyone born or adopted into a family has plenty of material. Some stories will work best as memoir, while others should be in the novel or short story form. This class is for writers just beginning to explore the topic, as well as those who have already begun to write. Through a series of workshops, writing exercises, and discussions, we will attempt to bring family chaos into the calm, cool realm of ink and paper. Questions we will explore will include: Why write fiction about family? Why write nonfiction about family? How do you organize your research material?

Brian Evenson is the author of eight books, most recently, The Open Curtain. Other titles include The Wavering Knife, Father of Lies, and Contagion. His work is chilling, disturbing, and funny, with a language of its own. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions, one of the foremost magazines of innovative literature in the USA. His work has received the O. Henry award and an NEA. He used to live in Seattle and now teaches at Brown.

Class Description: This workshop is for beginning writers who have never taken a creative writing workshop before, as well as those looking for a fresh perspective on their writing. This workshop will allow you to sample a bit of everything.

Lesley Hazleton’s most recent book, Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen, looks not only at the life of the Bible’s most notorious “bad girl” but also at Middle Eastern history, various cultures’ perceptions of women and ‘foreigners’ and how religious wars begin and never end.  Her previous book, Mary, received much critical acclaim as a “revelatory look” at the lives of healers, politicos and other rabble rousers during Jesus’ era.  In her own bad-girl past, Lesley wrote about riding around in fast cars.

Class Description: My emphasis is less on perfecting work in hand (what is perfection anyway?) than on playing with ideas and approaches to move you forward in your work. Emphasis on the word playing. I think of a workshop as a safe place to experiment, and fall flat on your face to get up and start again with a big grin. Whether we're working on material brought in by you, or brief readings which I’ll hand out in class (I favor Joan Didion and Harry Crews), or in-class and overnight assignments designed to loosen things up, I'll be focusing on three things: trusting your own voice, re-creating the moment on the page, and playing with the possibilities of creative nonfiction.

Gary Lilley is the author of four books: Black Poem, Alpha Zulu, The Reprehensibles, and The Subsequent Blues. Lilley has been a poet-in-residence at WritersCorps, Young Chicago Authors, and The Poetry Center of Chicago, and received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He teaches Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College.

Class Description: this poetry workshop will be fueled by the premise that truths are more important than facts, and that poems represent the blurring of real experience with those that are completely created. Actual occurrences are the frames, or the skeletons of poems, but a pulse, a layered muscularity, and the presence of fluids, the sparks of the imagined, if you will, give poems the power to walk us down the street into the discovery within situations that we personally have not seen. Too often we are told to write what we know, facts, instead of what we can believe, truths. This workshop will explore tactile and concrete details, syntax and diction, as well as other tools to use in making your poems come alive. It is expected that draft poems will be created daily. This workshop is appropriate for beginning and experienced poets.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Meat and Spirit Plan and The Pink Institution. She currently lives in Denver where she is on faculty in the University of Denver's Creative Writing Program. She is a frequent guest editor of literary journals and in high demand across the country reading her work.

Class Description: This workshop is designed for both beginning and advanced participants who want to think about your writing in new ways and create new work. We will create new fiction and nonfiction work, and also create new work that pushes across genre barriers.

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