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If you forgot to register and would like to purchase the recording for the previous session you may sign up here. These recordings will be available to purchase on the Saturday right after the session at noon. If you purchase it before noon on Saturday you will receive the wrong link. All recordings will be automatically deleted at midnight the Friday of the session's following week regardless of when you register (available one week from the actual session only). Sorry, but no refunds.
Bio: Kimmery Martin is an emergency medicine doctor-turned novelist whose works of medical fiction have been praised by The Harvard Crimson, Southern Living, The Charlotte Observer and The New York Times, among others. A lifelong literary nerd, she promotes reading, interviews authors, and teaches writing seminars, speaking frequently at libraries, conferences, and bookstores around the United States. Kimmery completed her medical training at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She lives with her husband and three children in Charlotte, North Carolina. For the last two years, she’s been working on a novel about a group of female doctors on the frontlines during an emerging viral pandemic; it will be released from Penguin Random House in 2021. Her latest novel, The Antidote for Everything, is available now.
We offer free student memberships at a discounted rate of $5.00 per session. You must send verification of your student status. Please contact Claudia Katz at ckatz17755@aol.com for details.
9:00-9:30 Socializing & Registration
9:30-12:00 Program
Remote (OCWW may add a live event with separate registration)
Clichés take hold for a variety of reasons: they are apt, they are (prior to overuse) vivid, they are memorable, etc. The trouble is that their familiarity can make them the first phrase we reach for—and even if they adequately convey our meaning, they do not capture the imagination of the reader. Becoming thumb-worn from excessive use, clichés cease to impart anything particular or immediate—they have been reduced to approximations, vestiges of the concepts and feeling states they once evoked. As a tool of revision, a productive filter for sharpening prose is to review each draft with a focus on identifying and excising phrases, images, and ideas that a reader will have encountered before and to be fully deliberate in our literary decisions about them. Sometimes, clichés or familiar images have a place and serve a purpose, so a blanket prohibition makes no sense—the aim is that every choice serves our goals for the piece we're making. Where a cliché is simply serving as a placeholder—as they so often do—we must exercise our ingenuity to substitute something livelier and more interesting. We will walk through an exercise using a passage I'll provide to practice this specialized kind of revision.
Bio: Ian Belknap is the founder of WRITE CLUB, a competitive readings series that's been monthly in Chicago since 2010, and has chapters in 3 other US cities. His essays, criticism, and satire have appeared in The Rumpus, Chicago Reader, Chicago Tribune, Crain's Chicago Business, New City Chicago, and elsewhere. He is pursuing a Creative Writing MFA at Bennington College. He is a longtime writing instructor and coach. - https://www.writerianbelknap.com/
Ian will accept manuscripts for critique in fiction and nonfiction. Please see manuscript guidelines on our website: ocww.info
Place is more than a physical location, and setting is more than just historical coordinates. The origins of a piece of writing can be the physical realities of the world or a casually spoken phrase that asks for further explanation. In this brief talk, we’ll begin with the question “Where are you from?” and then try to follow the answers home.
Eudora Welty stated that place was not only a source of inspiration in her writing:
“It is a source of knowledge. It tells me the important things. It steers me and keeps me going straight, because place is a definer and a confiner of what I’m doing. It helps me to identify, to recognize and explain. It does so much for you of itself. It saves me. Why, you couldn’t write a story that happened nowhere. I couldn’t, anyway. I couldn’t write anything that abstract. I wouldn’t be interested in anything that abstract.” - From “The Art of Fiction No. 47”Paris Review Fall 1972
“Without even leaving one’s door, one can know the whole world.” - Lao Tse
“Without even leaving one’s door, one can know the whole world.”
- Lao Tse
Reading: Bryan Washington’s short story “Alief,” but I highly recommend the entire collection, LOT, if participants have time to read it. It is one of the best examples of how place and setting enliven, deepen, and even define an author’s work.
Bio: Elizabeth Wetmore variously tended bar, taught English, drove a cab, edited psychology dissertations, and painted silos and cooling towers at a petrochemical plant before becoming a writer. A West Texas native who lived in a one-room cabin in the woods outside Flagstaff, Arizona while she worked as a classical music announcer, she is most at home in the desert, near the sea, or on the side of a mountain. She lives in Chicago, but she dreams of being bicoastal (Lake Michigan and Lake Travis).
She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council as well as a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation. Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals including the Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and others. Her novel, VALENTINE, published on March 31 by HarperCollins, debuted at #2 on the New York Times Bestseller List and has been long-listed for the Center for Fiction's 2020 First Novel Prize.
9:00-9:30 Socializing
Do you have a backlog of abandoned stories and essays? Have you revised the life out a piece, trying to make it perfect? In this course, we’ll discuss some less common ways of waking up your prose and unlocking narrative energy. Toward this end, we’ll examine thrilling turns in several stories and essays. Some of the strategies we’ll cover include: finding and fanning hotspots; using transitions as transport; modulating register, diction, and rhythm; and making space for rough edges and mischief.
Optional: Bring a few "unworkable" pages from a work-in-progress.
Bio: Rachel Swearingen is the author of How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, winner of the 2018 New American Press Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was named one of 30 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex. Swearingen holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a PhD from Western Michigan University, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.
The flash fiction, the short short story, the micro-tale, the mini-essay: whatever you call them, it is in these tightly compressed forms that the techniques of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction meet and merge to create exciting new modes of expression. Through brief (under 1,000 words, and in many cases under 500) readings by historical and contemporary writers, we'll see how such tiny stories can pack a huge punch, and will explore what these “smokelong” tales can teach us about longer forms. We'll also discuss Rose Metal Press, an independent publisher dedicated to literary work in hybrid genres, and what editors are looking for when it comes to work of this sort. You'll have the chance to do in-session exercises, and will walk out with rough drafts of a couple very short stories you can continue to hone, as well as with a new sense of how to bring economy to your sentences in writing of all lengths and genres.
Bio: Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her most recent books include the novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte .Her World War I novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey was released by Penguin in August 2020, and her criticism appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.
Kathleen will judge a member only 500-word Short Short Contest. Entries are free and due March 11. Please see Manuscript and Contest Guidelines on our website for details.
More than four decades passed since Esther Hershenhorn attended her first OCWW Writing for Children Workshop and officially took up residence in the ever-changing Children’s Book World. Her award-winning books led to her current success in teaching and coaching children’s book writers, and her work with the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators as an advocate for children’s book creators. In this workshop, Esther shares in Show, Don’t Tell fashion what’s new – as well as not-so-new, in stories, formats, publishers, agents and markets as well as Reader needs and Reader connections. Two submitted participants’ manuscripts will be presented for group discussion.
Bio: The descriptive appositive TeachingAuthor describes Esther Hershenhorn perfectly. She authors picture books, middle grade fiction and nonfiction while teaching Writing for Children at Chicago’s Newberry Library and the University of Chicago’s Writer’s Studio. Helping others tell their stories, especially to children, is truly her story. She proudly considers her writers and students her “storied treasures.” Esther is also honored to serve as the Illinois Regional Advisor Emerita for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
Individual critiques are not available. However, two manuscripts from those submitted will be selected for group presentation and discussion. Writers can submit – between March 15 and March 22, 2021 - up to 5 pages of a picture book or the first chapter of a chapter book (early chapter, mg, YA, nonfiction) + story description/summary. Email the pages as an attachment to: esthersh@aol.com Label the subject head “Manuscript for April 8, 2021 OCWW Presentation.”
Remote Session (out of town speaker, so remote only)
One of the most important decisions we make as fiction writers is point of view. What are the limits and advantages of each? How do we choose, and after we do, what other things about our chosen perspective should we consider? In this session, we will examine various stylistic and formal strategies of first-person narration in particular and the way these strategies relate to characterization, voice, description, narrative distance, retrospection, narrative occasion, present action, and emotional stakes. We will explore various ways of inhabiting a first-person voice, examining how the telling of a story is inextricable from the story itself, with a particular attention to story beginnings.
Bio: Natalie Bakopoulos is an assistant professor at Wayne State University and the author of Scorpionfish (Tin House, 2020) and The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Her work has appeared in Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan. In 2015, she was a Fulbright scholar in Athens, Greece.
At some point in a project, whether at the start or 100 pages in, it can be helpful to step back, consider what we have, and give it an essential dramatic shape that either directs or illuminates all the promise in the material. This means formulating a premise, a clarifying statement of what the project is about, which requires that we ask ourselves crucial questions about the characters, the design principle, the central conflict, and the central dramatic question. We’ll examine this process, which ultimately involves an examination of ourselves and the “essential something" that we want to express about who we are.
BIO: Vu Tran's first novel, Dragonfish, was a NY Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Books of the Year. His short fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, Ploughshares, and other publications. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, and has also been a fellow at Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. He is a criticism columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice in English & Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, where he directs the undergraduate program.
9-9:30 Registration
9:30-12 Program
Remote Session (out of town speaker, so this session will be remote only)
In this lecture, I’ll explain the all the reasons that life is so strange (hat-tip to William Maxwell’s “The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice.”) After that, we’ll examine the energy that options, or a lack of them, can bring to dramatic narratives. lyric essays, and confessional poems. You don’t need to read anything ahead of time, but we’ll likely look at excerpts from the novels “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid, “Salvage The Bones” by Jesmyn Ward, and “The Secret History" by Donna Tartt, as well as poems by Danez Smith, Paige Lewis, and Louise Gluck. You don’t need to read all these texts ahead of time, because some of this is subject to change. Let’s keep our options open.
Bio: Dean Bakopoulos is an author from Detroit, Michigan. He is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. Dean’s third novel, Summerlong, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in June 2015. He is currently at work on a nonfiction book called Undoing, as well as a screenplay and a television pilot. Dean’s first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (Harcourt, 2005), was a New York Times Notable Book; his screenplay adaptation of the novel is being developed for the screen by James Franco’s Rabbit Bandini productions; His second novel, My American Unhappiness, published in 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was named one of the year’s best novels by The Chicago Tribune. He received his BA from the University of Michigan and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to teaching fiction and creative nonfiction workshops at Grinnell, Dean has taught creative writing at UW-Madison, Iowa State University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. The winner of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Dean also reviews books for The New York Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Special Two Part Zoom Session
First Half: Confessions: A story where every character acted with goodness, a level head, self-knowledge, and self-acceptance, would likely be dead in the water. Fiction is fueled by conflict, both interior and exterior, and contains characters who make mistakes feeling everything from guilt to glee. In this session we’ll look at stories and novels where narrators openly confess to their misdeeds. How does a writer inspire and maintain the reader’s loyalty despite, or perhaps because of, a character’s fictional offenses? How do we create empathy for prickly people, and why write about prickly people in the first place? Through examples, discussion, and exercises, we’ll harness the power of empathy for characters making even the messiest of mistakes.
Bio: Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This is Not Your City, and the novel The Vexations, named one of the 10 best books of 2019 by the Wall Street Journal. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, as well as other journals and anthologies. Former fiction editor of the Kenyon Review, she currently teaches at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Second Half: Caitlin is joined by Christina Baker Kline for a Question and Answer Panel on Writing Historical Fiction and General Craft Questions.
Bio: A #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, Christina Baker Kline is published in 40 countries. Her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other prizes, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities and schools as “One Book, One Read” selections. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the NYT Book Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, and Salon.
9:30-12:00 Session
Remote Session (WCH not available, so session will remain remote only)
The paths to publication are profuse and this session aims to inform you of your full range of options. In addition to outlining the process for bringing longer works—novels, short story and poetry collections, nonfiction book proposals—to the attention of agents, editors, and the reading public, we’ll discuss some of the advantages of aiming individual essays, stories, and poems at magazines and contests. There’s no single right answer for how to pursue seeing your work in print or online and this session will take a holistic approach to helping you decide when and where to send your work, how to prepare your materials, and what to expect when submitting.
Zachary Martin is the former Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts and currently teaches courses in creative writing, editing, and publishing in the Lake Forest College Department of English & Creative Writing. He has previously held editorial positions at Fiction Collective Two, Sugar & Rice, and The Southeast Review. His work has appeared in Fourth Genre, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Washington Square, The Louisville Review, and elsewhere.
Zachary will accept manuscripts for critique. Please see manuscripts guidelines on our website.
In this time of ongoing public crises, many of us feel a tension between creating fictional work and engaging directly with the problems we face. Ideally, we find ways of bringing these concerns into our fiction. But even if the issue affects us directly, how should we approach writing fiction about large social and political concepts, including public health and education, #blacklivesmatter, immigration, LGBTQ rights, and #metoo? How do we make the political particular to our characters and their time and place? And how do we balance our righteous indignation with the curiosity and humility necessary to writing good fiction? In this generative workshop, we begin by looking at examples of politically and socially engaged fiction by Lucia Berlin, Edward P. Jones, and Leila Slimani before we turn our attention to the concerns most pressing to each of us. Through prompted freewriting and exercises, we will each develop a bank of socially- and politically-related objects and images to draw from in our fiction, as well as develop a character, setting, and situation specific to a social or political issue.
Bio: Jennifer Solheim’s short stories and essays have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Confrontation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Pinch, among others, and received Honorable Mentions from Glimmer Train. The author of The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture (2018, Liverpool University Press), she also serves as a Contributing Editor at Fiction Writers Review. She holds a PhD in French from the University of Michigan and an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars; in 2019-2020, she was a BookEnds Fellow in the StonyBrook novel completion program, co-directed by Susan Scarf Merrell and Meg Wolitzer. She currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Jennifer will accept manuscripts for critique. Please see the Manuscript Guidelines on our website for details.
We talk a lot about a story’s point of view—who’s telling it, why, under what circumstances. But there’s a flipside to that POV question: Who is the story’s implied listener? Are you casting your listeners as people who already know this world or people who need to be filled in? And what are the political and artistic implications of glossing a culture or setting for readers who don’t know it?
Bio: Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novel The Great Believers, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, one of the New York Times’ Top Ten Books for 2018, winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Award, the Heartland Prize, the LA Times Book Prize, the Chicago Review of Books Award, and was a New York Public Library’s 2018 Best Books pick. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime, from which four stories appeared in The Best American Short Stories. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Visit her at RebeccaMakkai.com or on Twitter@rebeccamakkai.
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