THE LITERATURE OF WAR
with Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead and Exit A
The English Department of
Keynote Speaker
Author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir, Jarhead, A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (Scribner, 2003), Anthony Swofford served as a lance corporal in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the 1991 Gulf War. After finishing his military service, he attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and in time, wrote a book about his experience in the Marines that rushed him to the forefront of media news and literary fame. Published on the eve of the Iraq War, Jarhead reveals Swofford as an eloquent and brazenly honest spokesman for the “grunt” who is as aware of the political realities of the war as he is of warfare’s seduction over him.
Anthony Swofford on the web | Anthony Swofford fact sheet in pdf
Cost
The plenary reading with Anthony Swofford is free and open to the public. For all workshops, registration and payment is required; the fee includes a light breakfast, the plenary reading, two workshops (one in each session), and a full lunch with beverages and dessert. Fees are: Regular, $40.00; WPU Alumni, $30.00, Registered WPU Graduate Student, $25.00, Registered WPU Undergraduate, $15.00. To register, please click on the Registration button to the left, fill out the registration form, and send with payment to address indicated.
| 9:30 AM - 10:00 AM | Registration and Orientation -- Breakfast for registrants |
| 10:00 AM-11:30 AM | Plenary Reading with Anthony Swofford -- Free and Open to the Public |
| 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM | First Session of Workshops -- registration required |
| 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM | Buffet Lunch -- registration required |
| 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM | Second Session of Workshops --registration required |
|
MORNING WORKSHOPS |
AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS
|
| Fiction, with Phil Cioffari. This workshop, in addition to discussing basic elements of fiction, will focus on ways of creating narrative tension. Students are asked to bring, if possible, 3-4 pages of their own fiction for discussion. Philip Cioffari’s short story collection, A History of Things Lost or Broken (Livingston Press, 2007), won the Tartt Fiction Prize as well as the D.H. Lawrence Award for fiction. His novel, Catholic Boys, has just been published (Livingston Press, 2007). Cioffari is a Professor of English at William Paterson University.
|
Peopling Our Fiction, with Martha Witt. This course will explore techniques of fiction writing with a particular focus on character construction. Combining workshop experience with writing exercises, readings, and craft discussions, we will shape story-worthy characters and listen to them talk. Martha Witt is the author of Broken As Things Are (Holt; 2004/Picador; 2005). Her short stories and translations have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals. She is the recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Traveling Fellowship, a New York Times Fellowship in Fiction Writing, a Spencer Grant, and residencies to the Yaddo Artist Colony.
|
Poetry of Crisis, with Rachel Wetzsteon. How do poets, writing about intense personal experiences and
situations, both honor
this intensity and make their poems accessible and interesting to
readers? In this class
we'll explore some ways of doing this. We'll discuss such literary
devices as flashback,
allusion and figurative language, examine the work of such poets as
Wilfred Owen, Elizabeth Bishop,
Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Charles Wright, and do some writing |
The Poetry of War and the Overwhelming Subject, with Douglas Goetsch. Wallace Stevens wrote, "The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination." In this workshop we will consider Stevens's idea about the poetry of war, test its validity by examining some poems, and see how it might apply to our own writing. Nearly all writers have a war--an overwhelming subject that is as hard to enter as it is to escape. We will also try some "wartime" writing strategies. Douglas Goetsch's books of poetry include Nobody's Hell (Hanging Loose Press, 1999), The Job of Being Everybody (Cleveland State, 2004), winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Competition, and four chapbooks. He is the recipient of the Aldrich Award, the Paumanok Prize, the Permafrost Prize, awards from Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, The Chautauqua Literary Journal, two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, ONTHEBUS, The Threepenny Review, The New England Review, online at PoetryDaily and Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, on the air at NPR, and in many anthologies.
|
Teaching War through Literature, with Donna Perry. How/what do we teach about war? In this hands-on workshop we will examine writing assignments, readings, primary source materials, and group activities that can help our students understand how war is experienced, imagined and remembered beyond the battlefields -- from different sides and vantage points. While the workshop focuses on World War II, the questions raised about that war can be applied to others. A Professor of English at William Paterson University, Donna Perry is the author of Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out (1993) and coeditor of Bad Girls,Good Girls: Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties (1996). She has published on the teaching of writing, feminism and feminist theory, and contemporary writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Valerie Miner, and Adrienne Rich. She was a Fulbright Lecturer in 2004 in Italy and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New Jersey Council on the Humanities, and the Association of State Colleges and Universities. She recently developed and currently teaches the course "Imagining War" with Theodore Cook at WPU.
|
Death in Children's Literature, with Maureen Martin. We will share ideas on questions such as: Should children’s authors address the topic of death? Should we protect young children from the sad fact of human mortality? Do we help or harm children by telling them stories that don’t end in happy-ever-after? How have children’s authors dealt with death? If you are (or would like to be) an author, how and why might you incorporate or avoid the issue of death in a story for children? Maureen Martin teaches classes in Children's Literature at WPU. She has researched and published on nineteenth-century children's novels, yet her interests encompass children's literature of all periods and genres.
|
Biography, with Linda Hamalian. After discussion of some reasons for writing biography in the first place, participants will consider various approaches they can take to get started and maintain momentum. Guidelines for conducting interviews, composing introductions and prefaces, and observing copyright laws will be provided. Linda Hamalian is the author of two biographies: A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (W.W. Norton, 1991), and The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby (Southern Illinois UP, 2005). Chair of the English Dept. at WPU, she teaches courses in modern literature and biography.
|
Marketing & Promoting Your Book, with Maryann McFadden. How can you make your book stand out from the thousands of titles released each year? By knowing how to market and promote your book—and yourself.
In this workshop, you’ll find out why writing your book is just the first step in making it in today’s publishing world. Participants learn how to put together a marketing plan specifically designed to promote their own book—whether fiction or non-fiction, self-published or with a major publisher. Maryann McFadden’s first novel, The Richest Season, will be released in hardcover by Hyperion in June. McFadden, who originally self-published the novel, sold so many copies, and garnered enough reviews, to capture the attention of a major literary agent who went on to sell the book at auction. It’s also being published in |
|
Ghostwriting and Collaborative Authorship, with Theresa DiGeronimo.
|
Advanced Editing for Style, with Alice Deakins. This workshop will demonstrate how to advance from competent to sophisticated non-fiction writing. We will look at writing samples on a variety of levels, using a model of the sentence which enables us to see complexity in the rhetoric of others and to improve our own prose. Dr. Alice Deakins, Prof. of English at WPU and author of The Tapestry Grammar, does research on pedagogical grammar, on gender and language, and on mothers and daughters. |
