Events for 2025
In addition to the following lectures and craft talks, participants can enjoy readings by our esteemed faculty, who will share their published and in-progress work throughout the week. A special mid-week Participant Reading also gives workshop participants an opportunity to share their own writing. See the schedule for details.
Making an Artful Life
Crystal Oliver
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, keep a notebook, embrace your passions (even Stevie Nicks!), and prepare to make your time at this conference—and your writing—truly transformative.
How to Plot a Novel: Craft Talk
Matt Burgess
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.
The Great Art of Writing Trauma
Eva Freeman
There has been a recent spike in narratives that deal with intergenerational trauma. Voices that we have never heard from 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.
Five Lessons for Writers from the Artist’s Studio
Heather Green
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.
Where to Start: On Beginnings in Fiction
Jerry Gabriel
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.
The Role of Fragmentation in Poetry
Robin McCullough
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.
The Art of Failure
Angela Pelster
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.