William Paterson University English Department

MORNING WORKSHOPS

Fiction: Where the Story Starts, with Terese Svoboda. The story starts when the reader stops saying, "So?" In both experimental and traditional writing, the only goal is to get the reader to turn the page, to read on. He needs the smallest amount of backstory, that prose you read on the screen before Star Wars starts, and everything that happened before the detective arrived. How little you can get away with is our elegant question. In this class we'll look at DeLillo, Spark, and other writers' beginnings, we'll listen to your beginnings, and we'll try an exercise. Also bring 5 copies of no more than a 5-page story for possible discussion. Terese Svoboda on the web.

Editing and Publishing, with George Witte. What do book editors do? How do they decide what they want to publish? And how can writers most effectively approach and work with editors? These and other questions will be addressed in a workshop led by George Witte, editor in chief of St. Martin’s Press. Witte has worked at St. Martin’s for twenty five years, editing literary fiction, thrillers, and mysteries as well as nonfiction across a range of subjects, including current affairs, investigative journalism, biography, history, travel, memoir, sports, business, and politics. Books he has edited have won or been finalists for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN Award, Edgar Award, and various regional awards. He also is the author of two collections of poems: Deniability (Orchises Press, 2009), and The Apparitioners (Three Rail Press, 2005). His work has been published in a range of journals, including Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Southwest Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2007.

Location: Atrium Auditorium

Form and the Breaking of Form: The Case of the Sonnet, with Rachel Wetzsteon. Can poets write in traditional forms and also be innovators? How much variation can a poetic form stand before it ceases to be that form? In this course we'll brood on these questions by looking closely at one poetic form -- the sonnet -- and the many ways that poets over the years have experimented with its constraints. Fifteen-line sonnets, sonnets with unusual (or no) rhyme schemes, fourteen-word sonnets and other formal adventures will keep us busy during the first part of the course as we examine the work of such poets as Frost, Auden, Bishop, Heaney and Gluck; and we'll wrap things up with several in-class writing exercises in which students try their hand at experimental sonnets of their own. Rachel Wetzsteon's books include The Other Stars, Home and Away, and Sakura Park. She has received an Ingram Merrill grant, as well as the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Breaking the Rules in Journalism: Writing your passions into personal essays, travel writing, and op-eds that sell, with William Powers. Participants in this learning-packed workshop will feel energized to write and successfully sell something within one month. Using the author's own published work, we'll explore the art and business sides of rule-bending freelancing that both increases writing income and builds synergistically toward a winning book proposal. William Powers has freelanced for the New York Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, The Sun, and Slate, among other publications. He is author of two memoirs: Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge (Bloomsbury, 2005) and Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia's War on Globalization (Bloomsbury, 2006), which was featured on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross and in Newsweek and now in its second print run.