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CWC Chesapeake Writers' Conference 2025 Schedule
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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
Eva Freeman
Writer-in-Residence

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
(Teachers only, or by permission)

9:45 - 10:45 AM

Blackistone Room,
Anne Arundel Hall

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,
Anne Arundel Hall

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
(see below to find your workshop)

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:

  • What sticks with you (as a reader) about the story?
  • Where is the story hitting on all cylinders?
  • And where could the story be more itself?

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
Making Art from the Real

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
Piece by Piece: A Youth Writing Workshop

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,
Anne Arundel Hall

Faculty Reading

Heather Green
Robin McCullough

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,
Anne Arundel Hall

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,
Anne Arundel Hall

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
Anne Arundel Hall

Faculty Reading
Angela Pelster
Eva Freeman

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
Robin McCullough

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
with professionals from St. Martin’s Press,
Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency,
and
Stanchion Books

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
Matt Burgess

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,
Anne Arundel Hall

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,
Anne Arundel Hall

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,
Anne Arundel Hall

Faculty Panel Discussion with Q&A

Matt Burgess
Jerry Gabriel

Angela Pelster

Heather Green
Robin McCullough

5:00 - 6:30 PM

Great Room

Dinner

7:00 - 9:00 PM

Lawn in front of
Townhouse Greens

River Concert Series

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
and Goodbyes