SUBSCRIBE
Remote Session (OCWW is remote through Dec. 2020)
Most of us have been told this at some point: “Show, don’t tell.”
In a nutshell, this all-too-common phrase means “Use scene, not summary, in your writing.” But many writers struggle with this idea, both conceptually and practically. What is the difference between scene and summary? How can each be used to greatest effect? What does a well-paced story look like? Award winning author Abby Geni will provide guidance on pacing, story speeds, how to balance scene and summary in your writing, and why telling is just as important as showing. Includes handouts and exercises.
Bio: Abby Geni is the Chicago-based author of The Wildlands (September 2018), The Lightkeepers, winner of the 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction and the Chicago Review of Books Awards for Best Fiction, and The Last Animal, an Indies Introduce Debut Writers Selection and finalist for the Orion Book Award. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Iowa Fellowship. Her website is www.abbygeni.com
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.
9-9:30 Socializing
9:30-12 Program
We know how essential revision is to our writing. Some authors make ongoing revisions while working on their drafts, while others prefer to wait until their drafts are complete, yet others put it off until courage comes knocking. No matter, there is no single magic way, and we must revise, because rewriting always brings us closer to a refined work. Or does it? And how often must we revise? How do we know when we are finished? In this craft lecture, we will take on these questions. Ignatius will share strategies, and frame revision as a journey of discovery, wrong turns, and surprises that breathe fresh life into our stories. Ignatius will show us that revising is not so much an act of taking up a shovel and digging through the draft as it is employing a deep-well augur to find our true source. Come with notebook and pen at hand.
Bio: Born and raised in India, Ignatius Valentine Aloysiusearned his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University. He is a lecturer, designer, and musician, and author of the novel Fishhead. Republic of Want (Tortoise Books, 2020). Ignatius was selected as a 2020-21 Creative Writing Fellow by the Ludington Writers Board and the Ludington Area Center for the Arts in Michigan. He serves on the curatorial board at Ragdale Foundation, and was a featured July 2020 author for Ragdale’s By-and-for-Artists Series. Ignatius is also co-curator of Sunday Salon Chicago, a bi-monthly literary reading event series in Chicago. He is currently at work on his next novel and lives with his wife in Evanston, IL.
9:00-9:30 Socializing
9:30-12:00 Program
Remote Session (OCWW may add access to a live session with separate registration)
Matt returns to preview his upcoming book from Penguin Random House, which is provisionally titled Believe Care Invest: How to Make Anyone Care About Your Hero in Ten Pages or Less. Most gatekeepers will only commit to reading your first ten pages, so how do you grab them and compel them to read the whole thing? As usual, Matt will bring lots of examples showing off various tips and tricks.
Bio: Matt Bird has a Masters in Screenwriting from Columbia University. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Secrets of Story: Innovative Tools for Perfecting Your Fiction and Captivating Readers. He lives in Evanston with his wife (author Betsy Bird) and two adorable children.
Remote Session (OCWW may add a live session with separate registration)
Every novel or short story, no matter what genre, contains an element of suspense. It's one of the universal "drivers" of fiction. It's also important to know for non-fiction work, such as true crime or investigative journalism. Learn how to incorporate suspense into your writing in a workshop from an award-winning suspense/crime fiction author.
Bio: Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago over 35 years ago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. Fifteen novels and twenty-five short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and crime writing community and has even won a few. She has been a finalist twice for the Anthony and four times for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. She has also been nominated for the Agatha, the Shamus, the Daphne, and has won the IPPY and the Readers Choice Award multiple times.
Libby will be judging a Suspense Scene Contest. Please see the Manuscript and Contest Guidelines on our website for details.
9:00-9:30 Socializing & Registration
This workshop will encourage writers from all genres to discover compelling material through memory, observation, and imagination. Guided writing activities expose you to your own unique and (extra)ordinary content; explorations in ways of telling, structure, and form will help you identify and make work that resonates. Whether you are creating imagined new worlds or writing autobiographical pieces, fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry, these explorations in emotional veracity, specificity, and universality will feed your muse.
Bio: Patricia Ann McNair has managed a gas station, served as a medical volunteer in Honduras, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and now teaches in the English and Creative Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award, and a nomination for Carnegie Foundation’s U.S. Professor of the Year. McNair’s The Temple of Air received Southern Illinois University Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award and the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award. And These Are The Good Times was a Montaigne Medal finalist. Responsible Adults, a Cornerstone Press Legacy Series selection, is scheduled for release in December 2020.
Whether you are writing a play, screenplay, teleplay, or adapting a novel or memoir into one of these dramatic forms, riveting scenes are the key to a gripping story intended to be performed by actors.
This workshop will deep dive into your scenes. Participants are invited to submit their scenes ahead of time to the instructor, who will critique them and select the most compelling to be read by professional actors at the workshop.
The workshop will begin with a brief overview of what elements make for great scene work:
***Conflict doesn’t mean people shouting at each other! Because that doesn’t usually get a person what they want. Ask yourself: What’s getting in the way of what my characters want, and how does each of them go about getting that? (Hint: Oftentimes, they try this, that, and the other thing.)
We’ll then jump right into reading your scenes, followed by a Q&A with the instructor and the professional actors. (Much can be gleaned from their perspective on how they approach scene work.) If your scene doesn’t make the cut, you will still have a hard copy critique from the instructor.
Submission criteria: Comedy, Drama, Dramedy Plays, Screenplays, Teleplays Aim for no more than 3 characters (but no worries if there are more) Maximum 6 pages, less is better
How to format a play: Here’s the formatting criteria for the Dramatists Guild: https://www.dramatistsguild.com/script-formats
How to format a screenplay or teleplay: Here’s a good guide: https://screenwriting.io/what-is-standard-screenplay-format/ (especially the link to John August’s site)
This workshop is for playwrights, screenwriters, teleplay writers, as well as novelists and memoirists.
Please see Manuscript and Contest Guidelines on the OCWW Website for details.
Mary Ruth Clarke co-wrote and starred in the original Meet the Parents and co-adapted it into the blockbuster version, starring Robert De Niro. Her play Bonhoeffer’s Cost has been produced at The Agape Actors Co-op in Austin, Texas, Philadelphia's Beacon Theater, and the Provision Theater in Chicago. Agape also produced her farce Suffer The Long Night, co-written with her “Meet The Parents" partner, Greg Glienna, as did the Meta Theater in LA.
Her play Address Unknown was produced in Chicago by 20% Theater Company, and Fury Theater; her solo performance, I Could Kill Him For Dying, ran at Three Cat Productions in Chicago, and her musical, Fay Burns! had a 28 Hour Workshop and two staged readings at Chicago Dramatists, where she is a Resident Playwright and heads up the screenwriting and television classes.
Recent Saturday Series staged readings include Alice and Celia and Whatever It Takes, a comedy screenplay, directed by Second City’s Pat McKenna, and her play Right In Front of Us.
Mary Ruth is a screenplay consultant for clients in LA and Chicago, a Resident Playwright at Chicago Dramatists, where she heads up the screenwriting program, and teaches screenwriting at Story Studio. She lectures regularly at the Chicago Screenwriter’s Network, and has presented workshops for the Off Campus Writer’s Group, the Chicago Independent Film Project, and Renaissance Theaterworks Milwaukee. She is a member of the Writer’s Guide of America East and the Dramatists Guild.
Mary Ruth will accept Comedy, Drama, Dramedy, Plays, Screenplays, and Teleplays up to 6 pages for critique. Please see manuscript guidelines on the website: ocww.info.
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
Remote Session (Out of town speakers, so remote only)
How does a manuscript go from query to submission to acquisitions to contract? In this session, (pictured left to right) editor Terri Bischoff and literary agents Saba Sulaiman and Abby Saul will give an overview of the submission process from both the publishing house and agent perspectives, including how agents work with their clients and what editors really discuss at acquisition meetings.
Saba Sulaiman is an agent at Talcott Notch Literary Services, a boutique agency located in Milford, CT. She holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MA from the University of Chicago, where she studied modern Persian literature. In children’s fiction, she is looking primarily to build her Picture Book, Middle Grade, and Young Adult lists, and is particularly interested in contemporary realistic stories. In adult, she's open to literary, upmarket, and commercial fiction, category romance (all sub-genres except paranormal), tightly plotted, character-driven psychological thrillers, cozy mysteries à la Agatha Christie, and memoir. A first-generation immigrant who is constantly negotiating her identity and sense of belonging in a place she now calls “home,” she is committed to highlighting more diverse voices with compelling stories to tell; stories that demonstrate the true range of global perspectives and address urgent and often underexplored issues in both fiction and non-fiction with veracity and heart. Follow her on Twitter @agentsaba. Website: sabasulaiman.com
Abby Saul founded The Lark Group after a decade in publishing at John Wiley & Sons, Sourcebooks, and Browne & Miller Literary Associates. She's worked with and edited bestselling and award-winning authors as well as major brands. A zealous reader who loves her iPad and the ebooks on it, she still can’t resist the lure of a print book. Abby’s personal library of beloved titles runs the gamut from literary newbies and classics, to cozy mysteries, to sappy women’s fiction, to dark and twisted thrillers. She’s looking for great and engrossing adult commercial (including mysteries/thrillers, women's, and historical) and literary fiction. She's not looking for fantasy, sci-fi, or political thrillers - and no kids' books. A magna cum laude graduate of Wellesley College, Abby spends her weekends—when she’s not reading—cooking and hiking with her husband and son. A longtime OCWW contributor, you can follow her @BookySaul on Twitter.
Saba Sulaiman will critique up to 15 single-page, single-spaced query letters on a first-come basis.
Terri Bischoff will accept up to 15 20-page manuscripts on a first-come basis. Please see the manuscript guidelines on our OCWW Website for details.
How do we write about grief right now, when there are so many (and simultaneous) forms of grief to address? Can poems speak to job loss, loss of everyday routines, loss of future plans, missing friends we don't know when we’ll get to see again? And what if we simply can’t write poems or prose at this moment—what do we do with the loss of our sense of being poets or writers? In this generative workshop, we’ll make space for all these questions, looking to a range of elegies not for neat answers (which don’t exist anyway) but a deepening of our attention to where we are, who we are, in the midst of crisis.
Bio: Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers’ Award, and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and named one of the Best of 2017 by the Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Library Journal, and others. His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, Bettering American Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Chen earned his MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing as an off-site Texas Tech University student. He lives in frequently snowy Rochester, NY with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles. Chen is the 2018-2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in Residence at Brandeis University.
Remote Session (OCWW may add a live event with separate registration)
Have you ever wondered how memoirists and essayists capture such vivid details from their past? Join author and writing coach, Nadine Kenney Johnstone, for a morning of memory mining. Nadine will lead writers through visualization exercises to resurrect crucial details from their past. During in-class writing time, the group will take those memories and morph them into engaging scenes that will captivate any reader.
Bio: Nadine Kenney Johnstone is the author of the memoir, Of This Much I'm Sure, which was named Book of the Year by the Chicago Writers Association and received press coverage in Cosmopolitan, Today’s Parent, MindBodyGreen, and Metro, among others. Nadine teaches at Loyola University and received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Her other stories and interviews have been featured in places such as Chicago magazine, The Magic of Memoir, the Author2Author podcast, and the Don't Keep Your Day Job podcast. She is a writing coach who works with authors around the globe, and she lives near Chicago with her family. You can find her at nadinekenneyjohnstone.com.
Nadine will accept manuscripts for critique. See our website ocww.info for guidelines.
Writing that surprises the reader with unexpected or compound-complex formal structure also surprises the reader with unexpected emotions and images, helping them identify and engage with our writing on a much deeper level. What’s the difference between “The rusty old car sat in the neighbor’s yard,” and “The old Grand Am, rust-bitten and cushion-torn, has languished for years in the neighbor’s yard”? In this seminar, we will examine different ways of writing sentences to appeal to the pathos of our readers, write more fluid and cumulative scenes and descriptions, as well as better writing that editors want to publish. We will look at specific devices, such as apposition, syntactic ordering and clustering, and cumulative layering. We will engage with these devices on their own and in relation to other imaginative and lyric devices, including simile, metaphor, personification, and overall character building. We will talk through how to think more deeply about our own writing processes and how to properly revise our work, making it more engaging, emotive, and lush. We will look at examples from award-winning writers, including Judy Jordan, Carl Phillips, Vievee Francis, James Kimbrell, Julia Levine, Louise Gluck, and Shane McCrae in a mix of lecture, discussion, and generative exercises. Handouts will be provided before or during the event. No prior prep work is required. While most examples will be pulled from narrative poems, the examples and lessons are equally applicable to any mode of writing. Additional learning resources will also be provided.
Bio: John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which won the Jake Adam York Prize; and Ghost County (Midwestern Gothic Press, 2016), which was named a Best Poetry Book of 2016 by The Chicago Review of Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets 2015, Copper Nickel, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Journal, New Poetry from the Midwest 2017 and 2019, Pleiades, and TriQuarterly. He is the 2016 winner of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry. John is an Associate Editor at RHINO Magazine and lives in Evanston, Illinois.
John will accept poetry and prose for critique. Please see the manuscript submission guidelines on our website ocww.info for details.
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.
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.
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 500-word Short Short Contest. Entries are 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.
What exactly is a writer’s “voice”? Is it a unique prose style or formal approach, a distinct tone or atmosphere in the writing, a set of thematic concerns that frames a particular point of view on the world? And what does it mean to “find” one's voice? How does one actually do that? This craft talk will address these questions by first dispensing with the notion of originality in a literary voice, or that there is any mystery or magic in its development. We will look at it as nothing more—and nothing less—than the process of writing sentences that you truly believe in, which involves something even more difficult: understanding who you think you are, who you want to be, and who you might inevitably and irrevocably be.
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
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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