Conference Schedule
All workshops offered online only.
Friday, July 19, 2024
| Time (CT) | Title | Instructor |
| TBA | TBA | TBA |
Saturday, July 20, 2024
| Time (CT) | Title | Instructor |
| TBA | TBA | TBA |
Last Summer's Workshop Descriptions
Friday, July 21, 2023
9:30 – 10:30am CT
It’s Not All About You (But Some of It Is!)
Featuring Paula Carter
In this workshop, we will explore how to push personal narratives beyond “navel gazing” and into investigations of public issues and larger human concerns. We will discuss how to use research and interviews to deepen the meaning and understanding of a writer’s experience. We will look at how writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Lyanda Lynn Haupt braid together these two components — a personal story and a public topic — to impart information without forfeiting narrative and personal connection. And we will do some exercises to help you begin to formulate an essay that it not all about you, but some of it is!
11:00am – noon CT
Make Sh*t Happen: On the Necessity of Conflict in Stories
Featuring Faisal Mohyuddin
There’s that well-known advice about how to write a story: stick your protagonist way up in some tree, throw lots of rocks at them, and then eventually get them down. But what does all this really mean for a writer? In this workshop, we’ll translate that advice into something more practical and more strategic by turning our attention to conflict—to when unexpected shit happens to a protagonist. By examining a few short texts as well as revisiting some of our own work, we’ll discuss how conflict is essential to developing narrative structure and to both revealing and facilitating characterization and character development. We’ll also investigate how if we as writers don’t make enough shit happen for our characters, we risk writing stories that feel unfinished, flat, and perhaps even a bit boring.
12:30 – 1:30pm CT
A Whole Mood: On Humor & Horror
Featuring Juan Martinez
We neglect the importance of affect when working on our drafts. We build characters, we engage imagery and plot and language, but we forget to exploit the comic or horrific possibilities in what we're building. In this session on affect, we'll talk about how to tune a piece so that it's funnier, or scarier, or sadder. Mostly, we'll reengage with one of our earliest, most primal early reading experiences, when we sought stuff out because it made us feel a particular way (remember R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike? Beverly Cleary? Madeleine L'Engle? Garfield?). We'll talk about how to deliberately aim for a general effect, and how you can choose to revise to actually heighten that effect or altogether reverse it (turn something sad into something comic, for example, or mix the horrific with the humorous), and I'll share some tricks and theories to help you make your readers cry, shudder, and laugh.
2:00 – 3:00pm CT
Urgency and the Personal Essay
Featuring Megan Stielstra
This workshop starts with the gut; the memories, fascinations, and questions that live not in our head but our bones. Then: craft—how to tell our personal stories in ways that are equally urgent to an audience. Pulling from both literary and oral storytelling traditions (adapted for Zoom!), we’ll engage in activities to get our stories out of the body and onto the page, generating new work and digging deeper into material you're already exploring. All levels and genres are welcome.
3:30 – 4:30pm CT
Intimacy: Writing from the Inside Out
Featuring Gina Frangello
Many writers cringe at depicting the intimacies of sex, physical ailments, and other topics that are--surprise--largely sanitized, sensationalized, or censored in our larger culture. In this participatory workshop, we will look at stepping away from self-consciousness and writing more deeply embodied work by approaching the prose "from the inside out" instead of from the outside in. We will also focus on what is gained when we allow the reader to see our own and our characters' messy humanity, giving them the opportunity to experience radical recognition above more distanced experiences like admiration or aspiration.
Saturday, July 22, 2023
9:30 – 10:30am CT
The Art of the Interview
Featuring Natalie Moore
11:00am – noon CT
The Short Story: A Writing and Publishing Tutorial
Featuring Christine Sneed
The short story form has been with us for a long time—some attribute its debut in American letters to Edgar Allan Poe. Whatever its true origins, it’s a much beloved fictional form, although it often (unfairly!) lives in the novel’s shadow. In this workshop, we’ll review traditional short story structure before moving on to the topic of publication. Participants will be given a short tutorial on writing a cover letter for literary journal submissions, and we’ll discuss how to assemble a short story collection for contests and agent queries.
12:30 – 1:30pm CT
Ekphrastic Writing: Transforming the Visual into the Literary
Featuring Donna Seaman
Writing in response to a work of visual art is an ancient practice meant to deepen and expand the viewing experience and inspire a search for connection or meaning. Ekphrastic writing sharpens perceptions, enhances concentration, improves descriptive and analytical skills, and engenders ideas. Ekphrastic poetry is the most traditional form, but ekphrastic prose is equally enlightening. Participants will respond to works of visual art shared on the screen in the literary genre of their choice—poetry, essay, or short fiction—leading to discussions of this spontaneous act of observation, discovery, and expression.
2:00 – 3:00pm CT
Writing with Your Nose
Featuring Miles Harvey
Scent is a portal to the past. Of our five senses, smell is the one most closely linked to memory but also the one most difficult to put into words. In this workshop, we'll learn to bring our writing alive on the page through scent. The goal is to sharpen one of the most crucial skills in the writer's toolkit: the difficult art of sensory description.
3:30 – 4:30pm CT
First Lines, First Moves: A Multi-genre Workshop
Featuring Rebecca Morgan Frank
What are your opening moves for getting writing? And how do you eventually revise them to have the most effective first lines once you know where a new work is going? In this generative workshop, we will read, discuss, and write different modes of first and last lines and see where they lead us. We will move through prompts that allow opportunities for generative inspiration and effective revision. Come prepared to write and to walk away with a toolbox for when you are stuck with starting (or revising!) your poems, stories, and essays.
Please note: schedule is subject to change.