2024 Schedule

Here it is!   

There won't likely be any more changes. No promises, though!

Workshop Groups

Go ahead, scroll down and look, but please come back up here to read this text! 

There a number of private and comfortable lounge-like nooks and crannies inside the Reid Campus Center where you could convene your workshop, but the decision about where you land will be up to your workshop members and will be on a first come first serve basis.

The protocol is usually that each member of the workshop is given ONE session out of the six for attention to their work, so the group spends two hours on the fiction, poetry, or manuscript of each writer. Your group may decide to do this differently. That is absolutely up to each group to decide, but if you vary from this suggestion, make sure you allot time equitably to each writer. 

It is also important to have conversations well before you land on campus about any protocols you wish to set up for giving careful, honest, and compassionate feedback to the writers in your group. If any of you have ever had a nightmare workshop, it would be wise to think about strategies or protocols to employ that will avoid a repeat, and conversely, it would be wise to think about protocols and strategies employed in previous workshops that served effectively to meet writers' needs while protecting their souls. 

Fiction Workshop

Neal Lulofs

Rebecca Friedman

Janet Crossen

Kim Ponders

Elle Napolitano

Mixed Genre Workshop

John Zic

Judith Dancoff

Patrick Martin

David Ruekberg

Sue Chenette

Megan Gillespie

Manuscript Review

dawn albeita

Anne McCrary Sullivan

Nan Cuba

Course Descriptions

Here is a link to a folder where you can upload and/or read any handouts for the following classes:

HANDOUTS 

Morning Meditation

Michael Jarmer

I’ll invite you to begin the day with some silent and mindful sitting and breathing. I’ll sandwich a 20 minute meditation session with a short reading suitable for the occasion and the ringing of a bell. No meditation experience required. Just close your eyes and breathe.

Generative Session

David Ruekberg, Rebecca Friedman, Michael Jarmer

David Ruekberg, Rebecca Friedman, and Michael Jarmer will be holding the space for focused group writing sessions. After a review of ground rules (no judgment of self or others, no cross-talking, no ringing cell phones), the sessions will proceed with optional one-minute check-ins from participants on where they’re at with their writing at that moment and/or what they might want to achieve in a generative session. Then David, Rebecca, or Michael will offer a prompt or two for those that want one. The next hour or so will be committed to silent writing, staring out the window in the service of feeding the muse, etc. We’ll end with an optional one-minute check-in. (If you like, send two or three of your favorite prompts to david@ruekberg.com.)  

Toolkit for a Literary Reading

Janet Thornburg

This class will offer techniques to make reading your work more effective and more fun. Drawing on theatre skills, public speaking principles, and recommendations from your fellow Wallies, we'll investigate what makes a literary reading shine. We'll look into selecting what to read, considering your audience, preparing your reading, and using your particular talents to give an extra dimension to your presentation.. 

Swimming with George

Judith Dancoff

In this two-day (maybe three-day) book shop, we'll ponder three, maybe four of the stories+critique in Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Master and Man will definitely be one), and try to glean some of his wisdom and craft. No expertise necessary, only an interest in diving in. I can facilitate, but offer no more special knowledge than you. We'll choose our final stories together.

A Cloud Went to Troy

Sue Chenette

Anne Carson’s verse play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is her translation of Helen – Euripides’s version of the aftermath of the Trojan war, in which Helen spent the war in Egypt, while a phantom copy, shaped by Hera, went with Paris. “The truth is,/” Carson writes, “a cloud went to Troy./ A cloud in the shape of Norma Jean Baker.” We’ll investigate her poems, and her pedagogical interludes that are lessons in “The History of War,” with attention to her language, and how she uses it to achieve what critic Maya Phillips has pointed to in Carson’s work as “translations of mythologies and meanings and experiences from one context to another.”

I’ll provide digital handouts. (A note for anyone who may be curious enough to do some Googling ahead of time: We’ll be looking at the book, not the theatre presentation.)

Eight Considerations of Hanif Abdurraqib's "Nine Considerations of Black People in Space"

Justin Gardiner

This class will be centered on a close reading of poet/essayist Hanif Abdurraqib's "Nine Considerations of Black People in Space"--from his 2021 collection 'A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance.' We will try to engage with the essay through eight different craft or subject lenses. Or maybe seven or ten. (The exact number is still a little in flux.)

Ideas Toward a Publishing Cooperative

Janet Crossen and company

Author Collective? Publishing Cooperative?  Are there ways in which we can better support each other’s works, helping both to get books in print and market them once they’re in the world? In this caucus, we will look at publishing cooperatives—how they’re organized and what they do for their members (and their members do for them). We will give an overview of the publishing process and seek your ideas on how we might work together to benefit each other’s literary endeavors. Dawn Abeita, Janet Crossen, Andrea Donderi. Michael Jarmer

What We Fiction Writers Talk About When We Talk About Poetry

Michael Jarmer

Even though I am a fiction writer who writes poetry, I still find myself sometimes having trouble talking about the stuff, especially when I encounter poems I find “difficult.” I imagine that this is true for a lot of fiction writers, whether they write poetry or not, even if they read poetry with some frequency. In addition, I feel (and I’ve had numerous conversations with fiction writers who feel) daunted by the prospects of trying to give a poet a critical response to their work. We don’t feel worthy or qualified. In this class, I would like to offer my fiction writing colleagues some avenues into conversations about poetry—and I would like to offer my poetry writing friends an opportunity to deepen those avenues by sharing with their fiction writing buddies the things they find most helpful from readers and/or the ways in which poetry can be appreciated beyond simply understanding “what it’s about.” Come prepared to talk about your experience with poetry—that’s all.    

Neal Lulofs 

Moonstruck: A Discussion of Alice Munro’s “The Moons of Jupiter”

This session is intended as an open discussion in which we’ll admire, analyze, annotate, and applaud elements of craft in this classic story. A PDF can be found here.