Conference Schedule - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

Workshop and Panel Descriptions

The Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference will return in Summer 2021

Go to workshop and panel descriptions for 2019:

Thursday, August 15Friday, August 16Saturday, August 17

THURSDAY, AUGUST 15

Morning Workshops 9:30–11:00 a.m.

In this interactive workshop, we will explore the ghost story from old urban legends, to the Victorian era up through contemporary literary fiction. We’ll identify the best techniques, most thrilling tricks and greatest literary moves writers can employ to create excellent creepy tales. We’ll also talk about what not to do, clichés to avoid and ideal places to submit ghost stories for publication. In the second part of the workshop, we’ll generate the start of a story or a full draft of a flash ghost story.

Genre: Fiction

When the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante sent advice by email to the director who was crafting a television series from her book, My Brilliant Friend, she urged him to teach the actresses that hidden under everything they do and say, there is a river, “whose roar is muted,” and they must always stay in touch with this river. Some fiction writers prefer to call the river, which consists of a character’s deepest thoughts and feelings, the internal plot. The notion that novels and short stories have two plots, running closely together, can help writers to avoid believing that they have found all they need to know about their characters’ inner lives in the physical actions, details, and dialogue that make up the external plot. In this workshop we will study the interplay that often takes place between the two plots, with an emphasis on the process of finding the internal plot. Using examples taken from contemporary fiction, we’ll look at ways of recognizing the presence of this underground current, of asking the questions that can carry you down inside it, and of deciding when to bring it to the surface in words and sentences, or to keep it hidden but still felt, by your readers as well as the characters themselves.

Genre: Fiction

Since the dawn of the written word, humor has been a tool to tell the truth and target our humanity with brevity and a masterful air of ease. In fact, writing humor is no joke: there are a lot of complex principles and ideas that can make or break a potentially comedic piece of writing. This workshop will focus on the nuts and bolts of the ever-expanding genre of humor writing, while allowing participants to practice inside the form. We'll differentiate between satirical writing, deadpan or dry humor, situational comedy, and short-form humor writing for publication. Sophie Lucido Johnson is the former editor-in-chief of a humor literary magazine, has toured her stand-up nationally, and has had her work published in the New Yorker's Shouts and Murmurs and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. She really doesn't mean to brag, but she does want you to know that she has a few proven tricks up her sleeves.

Genres: Fiction, Nonfiction

No matter your genre, creating a world that draws readers in is essential to effective storytelling. In this interactive session, writers will explore key aspects of world-building and scene-setting, reflecting on how sensory details, language, dialogue and history (real or imagined) help authors create their own unique worlds. Through excerpts of published novels and short writing exercises, writers at any level will develop their skills to create authentic and imaginative worlds of their own.

Genres: All

In this workshop, we'll look at listservs and websites that will help you to organize your work to help you strategize submissions. We'll review Duotrope, Submittable, and other submissions-organizing sites that make the regular, organized sending out of your fiction, nonfiction, or poetry 100 times easier. Some time will also be devoted to agent searches, and the best practices for targeting your market.

Genres: All

Whether you intend to write personal essays, opinion, commentary or even reviews, this dive into the mechanics of highly effective literary nonfiction essays can help you reach diverse audiences as there is a strong appetite for this content. Michele Weldon is the award-winning author of five nonfiction books, emerita faculty at Northwestern University , senior leader with The OpEd Project and a regular contributor to scores of sites including Narratively, Slate, The Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Pacific Standard Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books and many more with her narrative essays and opeds. Learn how to brainstorm for story ideas and discover a toolbox of ways to make your writing fresh and engaging in 1,000 to 2,000 words.

Genre: Nonfiction

Although it is often overlooked or taken for granted, point of view is perhaps the single most important technique that an author can master in order to excel in writing of any kind. This workshop will explore the various techniques of perspective and the creation of a narrative voice, as well as the influence that these decisions have on all literary forms, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Through brief in-class readings from such authors as John Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Marguerite Duras, attendees will survey the wide range of choices each genre offers in establishing a narrator, including first, second, and third persons, as well as omniscient versus limited, distant versus close, singular versus plural, and reliable versus unreliable. After discussing the implications that these choices have on style, voice, and form, students will also receive in-class prompts in which they will get to explore assorted points of view, walking out with strategies for how to continue to explore those possibilities further on their own.

Genres: All

Morning Panel Discussion 11:15 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

In an age of comment boards and Twitter, it seems like everyone is a critic. Considering this, we'll discuss what makes critics' opinions valuable and estimable. We'll also discuss the critic's role in our time: to endorse a subject (book, play, film, etc.), tear it down, or help readers see it from multiple perspectives. Critics and opinion writers of all genres can sometimes carry a reputation of being elitist and esoteric snobs. Since it seems the general public forms its own opinion of a subject even before it is released, how can modern critics scale the walls of readers' biases and gain more respect? 

Lunch and Keynote 12:15–1:45 p.m.

Keynote Reading and Discussion
Writing Chicago: Never a Lovely So Real
with Miles Harvey, Natalie Moore, Renee Rosen, and Gerald Brennan (moderator)

“Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Nelson Algren’s famous words about Chicago speak to the city’s beauty, and its flaws—of which it has both in ample measure. A beautiful city, laid-out incredibly well, with miles of beaches, beautiful bridges, and an excellent public transit system, Chicago is a city that works. But it doesn’t always work as well as it should—racially divided, with more crime than other large cities, and ample measures of political dysfunction and corruption.

How can we, as writers, do justice to this great city and its massive contradictions? How have other writers gotten it wrong, and right? Do the city's flaws hurt or help its artists? Or is it neutral, artistically--just another fact of life that must be dealt with and explored honestly? What more can we say about Chicago—and what can Chicago tell us about the human condition?

Afternoon Workshops 2:00–3:30 p.m.

Here’s a terrible truth: Not everything you write will be great. Not everything that you publish will be great either. We all aim for greatness. We shouldn’t. Greatness is not a useful metric for what we do, so it’s a bit of a puzzle why we obsess over it. What we’ll do, in this talk and generative workshop, is to try to understand how to get over our own greatness meter, and how doing so can let us enjoy what we’re doing, how we can truly dive into a state of play, how to relax into work that is good enough. Good enough for the time being, at least. Good enough to let us move into the next bit of our project or our writing life. Because that’s the other, more mysterious truth about the writing life: we stumble and play through good to arrive at great.

Genres: All

Whether writing a first draft or editing a piece you've worked on for years, being able to balance giving the reader striking details and specificities while maintaining a well-paced narrative can be difficult. Understanding when to focus on information delivery, action, characterization, setting, exposition, and most importantly, how to stop thinking of these components as distinct and cordoned off from one another will be discussed in this class. We will be looking at a variety of openings and character introductions from novels and short stories, as well as student examples.

Genre: Fiction

Realism is great, but there’s no law that says you have to stick to it. This workshop will consider the ways authors have long represented their experiences or ideas in unreal, odd, and downright absurd ways that blend humor and pathos. We’ll read a few short examples and then move into workshop mode and pen a few absurdist sketches. Ideally, participants will leave with ideas for future development that are a bit more unusual than the average story.

Genres: All

If you ever find yourself dragging your feet before you sit down at your writing desk, unsure of yourself and what the page will yield up on that particular day, this workshop is for you.  We'll focus on writing prompts and other tips designed to help you rediscover the sense of play in your writing. The prompts are formulated with both poets and prose writers in mind. Bring your notebooks and get ready to write!

Genres: All  

In P.D. Eastman’s classic children’s book “Are You My Mother?” a young bird goes on a quest to find his mother. One problem: he has no idea what his mother looks like. Simple, right? If you feel like your plots get muddled because you’re trying to keep too many balls in the air, maybe it’s time to go back to basics. Participants will focus on this classic book along with more contemporary short stories as a model of basic plot structure and will use in-class activities to generate their own plot-driven pieces of flash fiction.

Genre: Fiction

In this workshop, we will examine the ways in which a poem's form and content can be answered by line spacing and line length. We will discuss this relationship in the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Robert Hayden, Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, Mary Oliver, Carolyn Rodgers, and Angela Jackson. Students are welcome to bring one or two of their own poems to work with in the session.

Genre: Poetry

Afternoon Panel Discussion 3:45–4:45 p.m.

What is a creative residency and is it right for you? This panel discussion will discuss the benefits of the residency experience, as well as focus on the how-tos of applying for creative writing, art, music, and related residency programs. Learn about the applications process, costs (if applicable), resident activities and expectations, and ways to better your chances with an effective application letter, artist statement, purpose, samples, and recommendation letters. Panelists will include Amy Sinclair, admissions director from Ragdale, Kathryn Kruse (of Residency on the Farm), Simone Muench of Lewis University, and Ignatius Valentine Aloysius, an interdisciplinary resident of Ragdale, who will also act as moderator.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 16

Morning Workshops 9:30–11:00 a.m.

In the Poetic Turns and Last Lines Workshop, we will look at the turns and concluding stanzas (or lines) of published poems and how they establish the particular to the universal and open for the poem itself. We will identify what makes interesting and compelling endings to poems and what engenders rereading. We will also discuss what endings make a reader put a poem down and never revisit it. We will discuss approaches some editors and poets take when thinking about what makes engaging work.  In our workshop will write poems (or revise already existing work) and discuss the participants' turns and concluding stanzas. Everyone will receive brief feedback on how the stanza works to help the reader re-vision the first part of the poem.   This workshop is designed to generate new work and to guide and inform participants in thinking about their work and the that of others. 

Genres: Poetry

Have you ever said, "My life could be a novel." If that's true, it should be easy to write an autobiographical novel, right? But what scenes are important? What scenes might need to be shelved? From James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Tim O'Brien (& many authors in between), writers craft fiction using elements from their lives. Some authors, like Nora Ephron, write scenes so close to reality that readers can see through the author's thin veil. Others, like Zora Neale Hurston, cherry-pick elements from their experience and fictionalize scenes to fit their novel's narrative arc. This workshop will guide each participant to identify the most compelling material from what often seems like an overwhelming abundance of experiences. Digging? Excavating? Yes. We'll prod beneath the surface of your life to lift and draw out. We'll experiment with point of view, structure, and form to get each participant's most compelling material on the page. We will try new things to push brand new work or work in progress in useful directions. Hopefully, this poking and prodding will lead to new discoveries. And since the autobiographical short stories share elements with the novel chapter, this workshop will be helpful to those writers developing short stories too.

Genre: Fiction

Why do you decide to buy a book in a store after just reading the first paragraph?  Why do you put other books back on the shelves? This workshop will focus on writing opening sentences/paragraphs/scenes to short stories and novels that hook readers. We will examine some of the best—and worst—openings in fiction, and discuss why they do or don’t work. We’ll discuss the writer’s “contract” with the reader, how writers help readers connect to characters right from the first page?  Participants should either submit first pages (100-250 words) of stories or novels they are writing a day prior to the workshop or, if not possible, bring them to the workshop.

Genre: Fiction

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.  

Genres: Prose (Fiction and Nonfiction)

This craft workshop focuses on how to vividly create the world and atmosphere around our characters in a variety of genres, from historical fiction and fantasy to realistic fiction and science fiction.  Designed for beginning and advanced fiction writers, this session explores challenging questions for works in-progress and first-draft fiction in deep revision stage. How do we make sure the setting we’ve created is fully helping the story and deepening characters?   We will examine sensory details and tight, lyrical language in published works. Research tips will be explored. Participants will complete and share a writing exercise that explores the landscape through their characters’ eyes.

Genre: Fiction

In 2018 I committed to creating a painting or comic each day. Through daily practice, I wanted to stretch myself artistically and to develop what the writer and visual artist Flannery O’Connor calls “the habit of art.” Not only was I successful, I was transformed personally. My writing and storytelling were transformed. I wanted to explore new ways of storytelling that included images, and through daily practice, I found new techniques, new metaphors, and new visual language. Daily painting became a time of meditation, and the contemplation of my subject was something akin to developing a character in a story. My career was also transformed through new opportunities and new connections. I’ll tell you how I did it, and why I think everyone should do it! I’ll share tips for success, examples, and inspiring anecdotes.

Genres: All

Having an idea for a story is one thing, but how do you establish patterns of action while building suspense and allowing room for surprise? In this workshop we’ll look at examples of these elements of structure and put them into practice. If you’re struggling to get a story off the ground, this workshop will give you a way to begin. If you have a draft, but it feels flat, these tactics will help add dimension. If you are feeling uninspired, you’ll come away with new possibilities for exploration.

Genres: Fiction, Nonfiction

Morning Panel 11:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m.

In this this panel, we'll discuss the hows and whys of branding for writers. Specifically, panelists will share tips and their experiences with staying "on brand" by knowing--and trusting--their points of view, and considering what their audiences wants to see and hear.

Lunch and Keynote 12:15–1:45 p.m.

In this keynote, three celebrated writers read from and discuss work that addresses the complicated crucible of family--the ways our lives are defined in no small part by our relationships with the people with whom we share blood or intimate ties.

Afternoon Workshops 2:00–3:30 p.m.

To create compelling fiction, writers need to know their characters inside and out. It's critical that fictional have a well developed voice and personality that comes across on the page. Yet, it's not enough. Characters need to have a deep sense of desire--a "yearning," as author Robert Olen Buter says--that motivates everything they do, and thus can help drive your plot forward. In this session, we'll explore characterization through the lens of inner desire and how to wield this as a tool in your stories. The session will include readings, discussion, and writing exercises.

Genre: Fiction

This workshop addresses the pitfalls that arise when writing disabled characters (in fiction and memoir). There are numerous issues in writing from that perspective, even for writers with impairments. Attendees are required to bring one to six pages of text or a series of questions for discussion.

Genres: Fiction, Memoir

When writing about your own life, sometimes it can be hard to know where to start. What to include and what to leave out. In this workshop, we will look at the flash nonfiction form as an entryway into personal writing. Distilling things down into a few hundred words can help clarify what is important and this short form is something of a pressure cooker: insisting that the moment, language and imagery all intensify within the small space.

We’ll read masters of creating a moment, discuss what events in life lend themselves to the flash form, identify key craft elements in powerful flash pieces, and discuss magazines and publications where you can read and publish flash nonfiction. Students will leave the workshop with the beginnings of 2 flash nonfiction pieces.

Texts: Selections from Brevity, Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction by Dinty W. Moore, and Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly.

Genre: Nonfiction

I don’t know how you all feel about dialogue, but I can promise you this: you won’t be able to write very long—at least not well—without getting good at it when you need it, and without putting your hand over your characters’ mouths when you don’t.

This workshop will address all kinds of dialogue in fiction and creative nonfiction, but Billy knows a thing or two about poetry as well, and if your speakers can’t keep their mouths shut in your poems, we’ll take a look at that, as well.

We’ll tackle speaker tags, realistic vs. great dialogue, swearing in fiction, when to summarize and when to present it directly. And why you’re never, never, almost never going to find a great opening line of a story that starts with dialogue.

We’ll be looking closely at the short story, Silver Water, in which Amy Bloom puts on a dialogue clinic that you’ll want to have at your side the next time you sit at the table. It’s stupid good.

Participants should bring an example of a few lines of their original dialogue, preferably one they’re struggling with. The workshop will include close reading, writing exercises, discussions, and Q & A.

Genres: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry

It’s a slippery fiction, hard to pin down, replete with contradictions, and it goes by many names, including, but not limited to:  a novel-in-stories, a composite novel, linked stories, a short story cycle, and a short story sequence. At its finest, a book crafted in this manner offers readers not one, or the other, but the best pleasures of both the short story and the novel. In this workshop, we will consider a few successful examples of novels-in-short stories, such as Improvement, by Joan Silber, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, and There, There, by Tommy Orange, to better understand how and why the form works, and ways we might harness the structure for our own fiction.

Genre: Fiction

In this time of ongoing domestic political 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 effects us directly, how should we approach writing fiction about large social and political concepts: immigration, LGBTQ rights, #metoo, #blacklivesmatter? 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. 

Genre: Fiction

Maintaining a private journal (or diary) can provide catharsis, self-discovery, and historical documentation for any individual. Though conceived for an audience of one, a journal can also be vaunted into the public sphere through publication. For creative writers, particularly those who write memoir or creative nonfiction, the journal can be a potent resource that can form the core of any publishable work of prose. This workshop provides writers a chance to read and discuss excerpts from famous diarists such as Virginia Woolf, Christopher Isherwood, and Joe Orton, as well as a discussion of candor, secrecy, risk, and the various ways journaling can be integrated into a writer’s daily life. The workshop also allows those new to the craft of journaling—or skittish about it—an opportunity to try their hand at the craft.

Genre: All

Afternoon Panel Discussion 3:45–4:45 p.m.