William Paterson University English Department

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"...the mind in the act of finding what will suffice." --Wallace Stevens
"Fiction is an act of revenge." --John Hawkes
"The real is always way ahead of what we can imagine." --Paul Auster
"Biography lends to death a new terror." --Oscar Wilde
"Read in order to live." --Gustave Flaubert
"Without sweat, without a daily, methodical effort, it is impossible to create and write." --Carlos Fuentes
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Spring Writer's Conference: Saturday, April 17, 2010


WRITING CHILDHOOD
with David Means

author of Assorted Fire Events;
The Secret Goldfish; and other works

 

The English Department of William Paterson University, in Wayne, New Jersey, is proud to continue its annual spring writer's conference, which in the past has hosted such writers as Terese Svoboda, Anthony Swofford, Russell Banks, Alison Lurie, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Yusef Komunyakaa, Chang-Rae Lee, Kimiko Hahn, Joyce Carol Oates, Sindiwe Magona, and Susan Sontag. Join us this year for a day of workshops, panels, and readings in creative writing, literature, and publishing. We welcome participation from scholars in all disciplines, creative writers, professional editors, secondary-, middle-, and elementary-level educators, both graduate and undergraduate students, and the general public—in short, anyone interested in writing and literature. We also offer Professional Development Hours to New Jersey Educators. This year's theme--"Writing Childhood"--will examine how childhood and adolescence are imagined in literature; discuss the current publishing market for children and young adult audiences; and explore strategies for writers daring enough to venture back into the strange land of youth in their own writing.

Keynote Speaker
David Means is the author of three short story collections: Assorted Fire Events, A Quick Kiss of Redemption and The Secret Goldfish. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Nyack, New York--as did one of his artistic influences, Edward Hopper--and teaches at Vassar College. Contemporary Authors writes: "With Means's second collection, Assorted Fire Events: Stories, he was compared favorably to such esteemed writers as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro and praised by critics for his sharp prose." James Wood, in The London Review of Books, notes that "Means' language offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality. Sentences gleaming with lustre are sewen through the stories. One will go a long way with a writer possessed of such skill. You can hear the influence of Flannery O'Connor in Means' prose: in the scintillating shiver of the beautiful imagery, in the lack of sentimentality, in the interest in grotesque violence, and gothic tricksterism." Means' newest book, The Spot: Stories, is forthcoming in May from Faber/FSG.

Special Guest
We are also very pleased that Nahid Rachlin will lead an afternoon writing workshop in memoir. Rachlin's publications include a memoir, Perisan Girls (Penguin), four novels, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E.P.Dutton), The Heart's Desire (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, Veils (City Lights). Her short stories have appeared in about fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, and Shenandoah. She has written reviews for The New York Times, Newsday, and The Los Angeles Times. She has held a Doubleday-Columbia fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). The grants and awards she has received include the Bennet Cerf Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Her work has been translated into Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, and Farsi. For more info, visit her website: http://www.nahidrachlin.com

Creative Writing Contest
This year we are glad to offer a $300 prize to the best manuscript we receive for our 2010 contest. Poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction submissions are all eligible--please see the Writing Contest link (in left column on this page) for details. The entry fee for the contest is included in the conference registration fee; you must be registered for the conference to enter the writing contest.

Cost
The fee for this all-day conference includes a light breakfast, the plenary reading, two workshops or panels (one in each session--afternoon & morning), and a full lunch--as well as the Creative Writing Contest entry fee. Regular: $50; WPU Alumni: $40; Registered WPU Graduate Students: $30; Registered WPU Undergraduate Students: $20; late registration (after April 7th): $60. The entry fee for this year's Creative Writing Contest is also included.

Schedule
9:00 AM - 9:45 AM Check-in, Registration, Orientation & Breakfast, in the Atrium Lobby
9:45 AM-11:15 AM Plenary Reading with David Means, in the Atrium Auditorium
11:15 AM - 12:45 PM Morning Session of Workshops and Panels, locations to be announced
12:45 PM - 2:00 PM Buffet Lunch, in the Atrium Lobby
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM Afternoon Session of Workshops and Panels, locations to be announced


Workshop Descriptions

MORNING WORKSHOPS & PANEL

Fiction, with David Means.
The songwriter Tom Waits once said: "In order to catch a song you have to begin thinking like one; they are illogical and unexpected and if they ask you to write them down, you'd better do it or they will get mad. . ." This workshop will center on the process of thinking and acting like a fiction writer in order to catch stories. How does one go about discovering his or her unique, individual, and ever changing process of finding ideas, creating drafts, and editing? Why is writing so easy and so hard at the same time?

 

AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS & PANEL

Memoir, with Nahid Rachlin.
To reach readers in a personal memoir, it is important to engage them with your story, as you would in writing fiction. In this workshop we will discuss how to make your own life story interesting, by giving it the right structure, voice, complexity. Students are asked to bring, if possible, 3-4 pages of their own pieces, focused on childhood experiences, some of which we will read aloud in class and comment on. The criticism will be constructive. We will point out strengths as well as weaknesses and make suggestions for improvement.

Panel: Publishing Adolescent Writing. Three young adult authors will discuss their own work and the vital, flourishing field of young adult literature. This panel offers an opportunity to learn more about the possibilities opened up by the young adult market and the exciting work that is being published in the field today. A question and answer session will conclude the discussion. The panel will be moderated by Marina Budhos.

 

Panel: Editing, Publishing & Marketing. This afternoon discussion, led by experienced, professional editors from Random House and HarperCollins, will focus on how books are edited, published, promoted and marketed. Following brief presentations, editors will respond to questions from the audience. The panel will be moderated by Martha Witt.

 

Remembering: Memoir, with Judith Broome. A memoir can begin with a single memory; or, in the case of childhood memory, with an image, a scent, a song. We will read one or two short memoirs that center around a childhood memory and gradually spin outward to connect the past with the present. We will examine the ways that a childhood memory can be developed into a reflection on our contemporary lives. Students will choose a persistent memory from childhood and explore the way that memory can be a catalyst for thoughtful and revealing writing. Judith Broome teaches British and Global literature in the English Department at WPU. Her translations of Latin American fiction have been published in TriQuarterly, Fiction, and Webster Review, and her short story, “The Effect of Light upon Water,” appeared in Primavera. Her book, Fictive Domains: Body, Landscape, and Nostalgia, 1717-1770 was published in 2007 by Bucknell University Press.

 

Advanced Editing for Grammar & Style, with Alice Deakins. Both teachers and writers need to know how to edit for grammar and style. Editing for sentence level grammar involves knowing the minimal structures of the English sentence as well as the conventions of sentence punctuation in formal written English. These—structures and conventions—are the foundations on which sophisticated writing is constructed by adding the mortar of cohesion, the architecture of information structuring, and the bricks of extra information that characterize published writing. By using a sentence model that is both pedagogically useful and stylistically sophisticated, this workshop will introduce participants to powerful editing practices that will produce both correct and powerful writing. Alice H. Deakins (PhD Columbia University) is a Professor of English at William Paterson University. Her areas of teaching and research are gender and language, mothers and daughters in literature, and pedagogical grammar.

Playwriting, with Brian Ó Broin. An introductory class on playwriting, focusing on one major element: dialogue. The seminar will particularly examine how to incorporate children and memories of childhood into a script. Brian Ó Broin, a professor of linguistics and medieval literature at William Paterson University, won first prize for his full-length play in the Irish national literary competition “An t-Oireachtas” in 2002.

 

Poetry, with Timothy Liu. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke famously remarks, "Even in prison, you would have a childhood." What does this sentence mean and how can it help us in writing poems? Does Rilke mean to suggest an actual prison and/or a metaphorical one? What does it mean to "have a childhood" as an adult? What might the relation be between incarceration and imagination? These questions (and more) will be explored. Timothy Liu is the author of six books of poems, including Of Thee I Sing (2004), selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year, and Vox Angelica (1992), which won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. His most recent book is Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse. Timothy Liu on the web

Prose Poetry, with Martha Witt. In this workshop, we will explore our own childhood memories through writing prose poetry. This border genre, particularly suited to rendering memory in both narrative as well as lyrical prose, will simultaneously challenge traditional notions about genre separation and offer writers a new entrée into old material. We will begin by attempting to define what constitutes a prose poem, read practitioners of the form such as Juan Felipe Herrera, Naomi Shahib Nye, and Charles Simic, and then address aesthetic questions that arise from our reading. With the majority of the workshop devoted to guided writing exercises, oral sharing, and feedback, writers should emerge with a deeper and broader sense of the possibilities for structuring their work. Martha Witt grew up in Hillsborough, North Carolina, the setting of her first novel, Broken As Things Are. She has received grants from the New York Times Foundation as well as the Thomas J. Watson Foundation and has held residencies at both the Yaddo and Ragdale artist colonies. Her translations and short stories have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies. She currently lives in New York City with her husband, daughter, and son. www.marthawitt.com

 

Coming of Age Fiction, with Marina Budhos. This workshop will explore how we mine the coming of age experience to create vivid fiction. How do we move from our own experience, with its particulars, to imagine a fictional creation? How do we evoke and stay true to the experience of childhood and adolescence? What is the role of the adult, reflective voice? We will be discussing coming of age fiction in adult works and in young adult works.  Participants should come with 5 pages of material, if possible; we will also perform in-class writing exercises. Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. She has published the novelsAsk Me No Questions (Simon & Schuster, 2006), an ALA Notable and winner of the first James Cook Teen Book Award, The Professor of Light (Putnam, 1999), and House of Waiting (Global City Press, 1995), as well as a nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers (Henry Holt, 1999). www.marinabudhos.com

 

 

 

 

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