2023 Schedule
Subject to Change
Sunday, June 18, 2023
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
2:00 - 5:00 PM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Check-in |
6:00 - 7:00 PM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Dinner (catered) with your workshop participants and faculty mentors |
7:00 - 7:15 PM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Welcome |
7:30 - 8:30 PM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Keynote Address |
8:30 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Monday, June 19, 2023
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, | Craft Talk, Angela Pelster “Raising the Dead: This talk will explore research as a creative act to consider how the personal and the scientific, the factual and the imaginative are not at odds with one another. Instead, we will discuss how research can be a source of inspiration and an answer to the erased, forgotten and ignored stories we want to write. |
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Blackistone Room, | Lecture: Crystal Oliver |
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | Workshops Begin |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | Kent Hall 212 | Fiction, Patricia Henley Writing the Memorable Short Story This workshop is about possibilities and choices short story writers make. You may bring a draft of a story already written or you may come with only an idea for a story. In early drafts, everything you write should feel malleable. We will focus on how to use the tools of craft—point-of-view, sensory description, character development, your sense of place, and structure--to make your story publishable and unforgettable. |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | Kent Hall 317 | Creative Nonfiction, Angela Pelster This workshop will be a supportive discussion and examination of participants’ writing, as well as an exploration of some of the major forms and styles within the genre. |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | Anne Arundel W115 | Poetry, Phillis Levin Powers of Syntax This poetry workshop explores the shape-shifting powers of syntax across lines, stanzas, and entire poems. Syntax, the arrangement of words forming a sentence, is inseparable from what those words convey and how they behave in relation to each other. Since a poem’s primary unit is the line, not the sentence, composing a poem generates creative tension between its lineation and sentence structure. In the poems you bring in draft to workshop we will consider, among other things, the forces your syntax sets in motion; and through several writing exercises, we will experiment with the fragment, if/then construction, parallelism, and the rhetorical pattern called anaphora. A packet of touchstone poems (circulated in advance) will highlight syntactical strategies that offer ways to suspend time, increase expectation and surprise, and re-orient the reader’s experience. Be ready to play with possibilities of the line as a measure of breath, rhythm, and thought. |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | River Center | Youth Workshop, Eva Freeman Sailing From This to That: In this workshop, high school aged conference attendees will explore poetry, fiction, personal narrative, and playwriting. Students will read and write in traditional forms such as sonnets, villanelles, short stories, standard memoirs, and plays as well as read and use less traditional forms and techniques— prose poems, automatic writing, cut-ups, magical realism and first-person journalism as well as writing scripts for television, movies, and graphic novels. This workshop’s fast-paced and wide-ranging literary tour will help young adult writers discover the literature, which truly inspires their lives and writing. |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room
| Dinner |
7:00 - 7:45 PM | Blackistone Room, | Faculty Reading Phillis Levin |
8:00 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
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, | Craft Talk, Phillis Levin Calling Forth: Direct Address/Apostrophe This craft talk explores the power of direct address, a rhetorical device that creates a dramatic yet intimate dynamic. The act of speaking to (rather than of or about) a person, a thing, or an idea opens the writer and the reader to a real or an imagined Other—and to a new engagement with language. Unfamiliar elements within oneself are called forth and previously untapped possibilities of diction, tone, and style emerge in the process. The poems at the heart of this talk will exemplify different ways of deploying direct address, including apostrophe. In some cases, an absent or present You is addressed from the outset; in other cases, a poem becomes an apostrophe only when approaching closure, introducing a change of voice that re-orients our experience. To conclude, we will consider “A Part Song,” a lyric sequence by the British poet and philosopher Denise Riley, in which direct address functions as a major literary strategy. |
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Blackistone Room, Anne Arundel Hall | Craft Talk, Tre Johnson “Cultural Nonfiction Writing: Making Connections Between History and Culture" A writer on race and culture, Tre Johnson will explore how he makes meaningful connections between contemporary and historical conversations, using a variety of artifacts and questions. This talk will explore the implications of race, culture and history as he constructs various components of his first book nonfiction project, BLACK GENIUS. |
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | Workshops Begin |
Kent 212 Kent 317 River Center Anne Arundel W115 | Fiction, Patricia Henley Creative Nonfiction, Angela Pelster Youth Workshop, Eva Freeman Poetry, Phillis Levin | |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:00 - 7:45 PM | Blackistone Room | Guest Reading: Wayne Karlin
Set in wartime Vietnam and contemporary Vietnam, in wartime America and in America today, the stories that comprise Memorial Days were written from 1973 to the present. As our continuing reappraisals of the war’s shadow have unspooled over the last half-decade, so too has Wayne Karlin returned to the subject in his fiction, collected and published together here for the first time. |
8:00 - 9:00 PM | Blackistone Room | Participant Reading |
9:00 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Wednesday, June 21, 2023
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 9:00 AM | Great Room | Breakfast |
8:00 - 9:00 AM | Campus Center 226 | Teachers’ Pedagogy Session (Teachers only, or by permission) |
9:15 AM - 12:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | Workshops Begin |
Kent 212 Kent 317 River Center Anne Arundel W115 | Fiction, Patricia Henley Creative Nonfiction, Angela Pelster Youth Workshop, Eva Freeman Poetry, Phillis Levin | |
11:00 AM - 2:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:00 - 5:00 PM | Free Time/Excursions | |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:00 - 8:30 PM | Blackistone Room, Anne Arundel Hall | Faculty Reading Angela Pelster |
9:00 - 10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Thursday, June 22, 2023
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 9:00 AM | Great Room | Breakfast |
8:45 -10:15 AM | Cole Cinema | Publishing Panel Discussion TBA |
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM | Aldom Lounge | Individual Publishing Meetings |
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Campus Center 226 | Teachers’ Pedagogy Session (Teachers only, or by permission) |
11:00 AM - 2:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | Workshops Begin |
Kent 212 Kent 317 River Center Anne Arundel W115 | Fiction, Patricia Henley Creative Nonfiction, Angela Pelster Youth Workshop, Eva Freeman Poetry, Phillis Levin | |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:00 - 8:30 PM | Blackistone Room, Anne Arundel Hall | Faculty Reading |
8:30 -10:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Friday, June 23, 2023
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 9:00 AM | Great Room | Breakfast |
8:30 - 9:30 AM | Campus Center 226 | Teachers’ Pedagogy Session (Teachers only, or by permission) |
9:45 - 10:45 AM | Blackistone Room, Anne Arundel Hall | Lecture, Eva Freeman “The Great Art of Writing Trauma” There has been a recent spike in narratives that deal with intergenerational trauma. Voices that we have never heard before are articulating these experiences in vivid detail. And yet they find themselves very much within an ongoing American literary tradition. This lecture will explore Faulkner, Morrison, Ward, and that master of writing trauma, Hemingway, in an effort to identify hallmarks of the form and perhaps most importantly, the impact writing this material has on the writer. |
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Blackistone Room, Anne Arundel Hall | Craft Talk: Patricia Henley “Bending Your Truth”
Anyone who writes fiction (or poetry, for that matter) relies on primal scenes or “moments of being” ( Virginia Woolf) from childhood onward that feel like great material. And, let’s face it, writers are always seeking their best material, sort of like stand-up comics, although our job is easier. Maybe. In this talk, Patricia will discuss the pros and cons of writing your biography into your fictions. She will unpack examples from her own work. And she will elicit from you various ways forward using your own life story. |
11:00 AM - 2:00 PM | Great Room | Lunch |
1:15 - 4:15 PM | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | Workshops Begin |
Kent 212 Kent 317 River Center Anne Arundel W115 | Fiction, Patricia Henley Creative Nonfiction, Angela Pelster Youth Workshop, Eva Freeman Poetry, Phillis Levin | |
4:30 - 5:30 PM | Cole Cinema | All Faculty Q&A |
5:00 - 6:30 PM | Great Room | Dinner |
7:00 - 9:00 PM | Lawn in front of | Social Time: |
8:00 - 11:00 PM | River Center | Social Time |
Saturday, June 24
TIME | LOCATION | DESCRIPTION |
7:30 - 10:00 AM | Daugherty-Palmer Commons | Continental Breakfast |