2025 Schedule
June 22-28
Subject to Change
Sunday, June 22, 2025
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
2:00 - 5:00 PM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Check-in |
6:00 - 7:00 PM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Welcome Dinner |
7:00 PM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Welcome, Crystal Oliver |
7:15 - 7:45 PM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Keynote Address |
8:00 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Monday, June 23
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 9:00 AM | Great Room | Breakfast |
8:30 - 9:30 AM | Campus Center 205 | Teachers’ Pedagogy Session |
9:45 - 10:45 AM | Blackistone Room, | Lecture: Crystal Oliver On Making an Artful Life We’ll begin the week considering the artful commitment to a writer’s life, exploring the power of curiosity, trusting your voice and vision, and cultivating a personal “algorithm’ for creative fulfillment. Find and focus on what inspires you, embrace your passions (even Stevie Nicks!), and prepare to make your time at this conference—and your writing—truly transformative. |
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Blackistone Room, | Craft Talk: Jerry Gabriel Where to Start: On Beginnings in Fiction In this craft talk, we'll talk about exemplary beginnings to novels and short stories—what makes them good and what they tell us about what is to come. Next, we'll look at some strategies for getting a story off the ground, and then, finally, armed with these, I’ll ask everyone to try their hand at coming up with a new beginning to a novel or short story. |
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | All Workshops Begin |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | TBA | Fiction Workshop with Jerry Gabriel Reading and Refining This workshop will be two-pronged. First, we will respond to the draft manuscripts submitted before the conference. In our responses, we will be more concerned with describing than with prescribing, doing our best to help writers understand the readers’ experience of their draft. In my workshops, I veer toward answering three questions:
Second, we will do a series of short, in-class writing exercises designed to tap into your creative self, to help you understand your process better, and possibly to serve as raw material for future stories. |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | TBA | Fiction Workshop with Matt Burgess Fiction Fundamentals This workshop class will focus on the essential elements of fiction writing. Participants will be asked to read and discuss classic short stories, support one another through peer workshops, and work on short in-class writing assignments designed to generate future material. Throughout the week, our focus will be on creating an artistic community that encourages everyone to nurture their own individual creative voice. Outside of class, participants will also have an opportunity for individual meetings with the instructor. |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | TBA | Creative Nonfiction Workshop with Angela Pelster Nonfiction is an incredibly flexible form, capable of bending and contorting itself into any shape needed to hold what you want it to hold, but the heart of this genre is an attempt to make art out of the real. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to tell true stories even if we have incomplete information, flawed memories, or only partial archives to base our writing on. We’ll consider how other writers have approached this dilemma, what our options are when trauma, secrets, war, forgetting, death, or erasures leave us with truncated stories, and how we want to approach these choices in our own work. |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | TBA | Poetry Workshop with Heather Green Poetry: Elegies, Odes, and the River In this intensive poetry workshop, framed by a consideration of “elegies and odes,” poems of loss and poems of celebration, and lyric time, we’ll read and discuss participants’ poems alongside model poems (chosen in relation to participants’ poems), in search of a deeper understanding of poetic possibility, both within the poems at hand and in a broader context. Students will also write several new poems in response to generative prompts, which we’ll share near the end of the week. |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | TBA | Youth Workshop with Robin McCullough In this workshop, students will explore the mosaic nature of memoir, short story, and poetry. We will begin by reading mentor texts, digging into the craft elements of each genre. Focusing on those elements, students will participate in writing exercises practicing various craft moves with the aim of drafting their own pieces of writing*. We will focus our workshop on mosaic-style writing and how to tell a story, piece by piece. In the end, students should leave with a portfolio of work that includes elements of memoir, short story, and poetry. While we will generate new material, students are encouraged to bring their previous written works (poems, essays, or short stories) during the workshop. |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:15 - 8:45 PM | Blackistone Room, | Faculty Reading Heather Green |
8:30 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Tuesday, June 24
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 9:00 AM | Great Room | Breakfast |
8:30 - 9:30 AM | Campus Center 205 | Teachers’ Pedagogy Session |
9:45 - 10:45 AM | Blackistone Room, | Craft Talk: Matt Burgess How to Plot a Novel As a group, over the course of an hour, with much second-guessing and argument, we will plot an original novel from start to finish. |
11:00 - 11:45 AM | Blackistone Room, | Craft Talk: Robin McCullough The Role of Fragmentation in Poetry In an interview with The Adroit Journal, poet Ocean Vuong says “fragmentation in language is perhaps the most human moment in our speech.” He goes on to posit that “there’s a certain honesty in the ability of poetry to consider breaking not as a flaw but as a strategy.” In this talk, we will discuss various understandings of fragmentation from the perspective of psychology, philosophy, language, etc. and how those ideas function and possibly intersect in a poem. We will explore poems which utilize these notions of fragmentation, of “breaking,” as a writing strategy, and discuss the ways in which we, as writers, can use the fragments which surround us (and flood our notebooks!) as a tool to open up space for that “human moment” in a poem. |
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | All Workshops Continue |
TBA | Fiction with Jerry Gabriel Fiction with Matt Burgess Creative Nonfiction with Angela Pelster Poetry with Heather Green Youth Workshop with Robin McCullough | |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:15 - 8:45 PM | Blackistone Room | Faculty Reading |
8:30 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Wednesday, June 25
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 9:00 AM | Great Room | Breakfast |
8:00 - 9:00 AM | Campus Center 205 | Teachers’ Pedagogy Session |
9:15 AM - 12:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | Genre Workshops Continue |
TBA | Fiction with Jerry Gabriel Fiction with Matt Burgess Creative Nonfiction with Angela Pelster Poetry with Heather Green | |
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | TBA | Youth Workshop Continues |
1:00 - 5:00 PM | Free Time/Excursions | |
4:30 - 5:30 PM | Campus Store | Book Sale & Signing Event |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:30 - 9:00 PM | Blackistone Room, Anne Arundel Hall | Participant Reading |
8:30 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Thursday, June 26
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 9:00 AM | Great Room | Breakfast |
8:45 -10:15 AM | Cole Cinema | Publishing Panel Discussion with Q&A |
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM | Aldoum Lounge | Individual Publishing Meetings |
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Campus Center 205 | Teachers’ Pedagogy Session |
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | Workshops Continue |
TBA | Fiction with Jerry Gabriel Fiction with Matt Burgess Creative Nonfiction with Angela Pelster Poetry with Heather Green Youth Workshop with Robin McCullough | |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:15 - 8:45 PM | Blackistone Room, Anne Arundel Hall | Jerry Gabriel |
8:30 -10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Friday, June 27
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 9:00 AM | Great Room | Breakfast |
8:30 - 9:30 AM | Campus Center 226 | Teachers’ Pedagogy Session |
9:45 - 10:45 AM | Blackistone Room, | Lecture: Angela Pelster The Art of Failure It is impossible to be a practicing writer or artist without becoming intimately familiar with failure and rejection. For many of us, the fear of these things keeps us from becoming the writers (and humans) we want to be. This talk will explore the reality of failure as an element of artmaking. We will consider how other artists have responded to the pain of failure and rejection and how we might approach this unavoidable, sometimes overwhelming, element of the artist’s life. |
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Blackistone Room, | Lecture: Heather Green Five Lessons for Writers from the Artist’s Studio What can writers learn from visual arts practitioners? How does a “studio practice” differ from or overlap with the writing life? After six years of teaching in a visual art school, collaborating with and interviewing artists from around the world, I present five ideas for and perspectives, which I’ve gleaned from these practitioners, and discuss the ways they relate to creative writing. Bring a short work of your own for a creative revision exercise within this interactive craft talk. |
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | Workshops Continue and Conclude |
TBA | Fiction with Jerry Gabriel Fiction with Matt Burgess Creative Nonfiction with Angela Pelster Poetry with Heather Green Youth Workshop with Robin McCullough | |
4:45 - 5:30 PM | Blackistone Room, | Faculty Panel Discussion with Q&A Matt Burgess Angela Pelster Heather Green |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:00 - 9:00 PM | Lawn in front of | |
8:30 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Saturday, June 28
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 10:00 AM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Continental Breakfast |