Art and Craft: the Northwestern Summer Writers' Conference

The 2012 conference schedule is forthcoming. Join our contact list to be notified when the schedule is available.

Conference Schedule
August 3 - 5, 2011

Please also join us on Thursday evening for a special literary event sponsored by the Summer Writers’ Conference at the Northwestern University MA/MFA in Creative Writing

A Mix of Genres: the written essay, the video essay, and the poem
with Eula Biss, John Bresland, & Virginia Smith

Thursday, August 4
6:00pm
The Celtic Knot
626 Church Street
Evanston, IL

Eula Biss and John Bresland teach at Northwestern University in the English department and the MA/MFA in Creative Writing program. Virginia Smith is a graduate of the MA/MFA program.

Program Descriptions

Wednesday Faculty Panels - 9 to 10 a.m.

Panel A
Publishers Point of View: Inside Publishing
Henry Carrigan, S. Whitney Holmes, J. Alex Schwartz, Kathleen Rooney
Panel members will cover the entire editorial process: from concept or receipt of a manuscript, to review and approval (independent press style), contract negotiation, revision and delivery of the final manuscript, launching to manuscript editors and marketing, and the editorial-production process to bound book.

Panel B
Writing for Children/Young Audiences
Jim Aylesworth, Beth Finke, Laurie Lawlor
Authors of books for children and young adults will share their stories of writing and publishing for young audiences.

Wednesday Morning Sessions - 10:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.

Workshop A
Children's Books
Jim Aylesworth
Jim Aylesworth was a first grade teacher for twenty-five years. During that time, he read to his children nearly every single day, and he grew to love the books himself every bit as much as the children did. Here, Jim will describe how his many years as a teacher and reader gradually changed him into an author of more than thirty children's books.

Workshop B
Writing the Dramatic Scene
Elaine Romero
All forms of narrative rely on dramatic scenes to tell their stories.  For fiction, plays, or screenplays, what makes a scene successfully dramatic?  What techniques might a writer use to revise a scene to pack the biggest punch?  Writers are asked to bring works-in-progress for a workshop devoted to the art of revision.  Writers will give and receive constructive criticism and take multiple approaches to their scenes over the course of the workshop.  Writers should come ready to write.  Some new materials will be generated as well.  All narrative genres are welcome.

Workshop C
Insta-React: Nonfiction
S.L Wisenberg
Ever wish you could be there when the editor opens up your non-fiction piece? Experienced editors will read aloud the cover letter, first paragraph, or stanza you submit and will then share their immediate responses, simulating the submission and response process.

Workshop D
Insta-React: Fiction
M.M.M. Hayes
Ever wish you could be there when the editor opens up your story or novel? Experienced editors will read aloud the cover letter, first paragraph, or stanza you submit and will then share their immediate responses, simulating the submission and response process.

Wednesday Afternoon Sessions - 2 to 4:30 p.m.

Workshop A
Publishing Children’s Books
Beth Finke     
NPR commentator and children's book author Beth Finke shares her working knowledge of the children's book world. Leave class knowing how to get story ideas down on paper, where to look for publishers, whether or not to use an agent, and what to do about illustrations. This session is especially appropriate for new writers, but writers of all levels are encouraged to attend. Writers do not need to submit a writing sample in advance.

Workshop B
When To Sing & When to Growl: Understanding Poetic Voice
Alice George
Inspired by Tony Hoagland's essays on this topic, and informed by reading and brief discussion of several model poems, students will engage in a workshop in which their work is critiqued with an eye towards tone and voice.  Poetic strategies to be discussed include irony vs. sincerity, ecstasy vs. detachment, and when to deploy stable and unstable poetic language.

Workshop C
Capturing Character in Nonfiction Writing
Kevin Davis
What makes people interesting? How do you capture a person's essence? In this course geared for nonfiction writers, author and journalist Kevin Davis discusses various techniques that will help writers create better personality profiles and make them come alive. We'll cover interviewing, background research and the challenges – as well as opportunities – of writing profiles. Classroom exercises include interviewing and writing short pieces. Fiction writers may also find this course valuable.

Workshop D
Creating Characters in Young Adult Fiction
Laurie Lawlor
Young adult fiction has become one of the fastest growing, innovative genres published today.  Participants in this workshop will explore techniques for discovering and developing vivid fictional characters.  In addition to hands-on character exercises, workshop attendees will also examine how character development transforms plot.  This workshop will help individuals interested in jump-starting a new manuscript or taking a fresh look at a work-in-progress.

Workshop E
Dialogue: Subtext and Character Development
James O’Laughlin
In this workshop we'll explore the different ways dialogue can be a powerful vehicle for a story's development. We'll be especially interested in the ways writers control and develop what Stone and Nyren call "subtext," or the unsaid, in dialogue. We'll look at three or four examples from well-known writers, and explore the role of fragments, interruptions, digressions, tone, sentence length, etc., and then we'll try our hand at creating and revising a passage of dialogue with these features in mind. Examples may include passages from: Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Charles Baxter, Lee Smith, Denis Johnson, Grace Paley. The goal will be to identify approaches for developing your characters' complexity through dialogue.

Thursday Faculty Panels - 9 to 10:00 a.m.

Panel A
The Writer’s Online Presence
Veronica Arreola, M. Molly Backes, and Kate Harding
As the internet becomes an increasingly important part of the publishing world, working writers and editors have made it more and more a part of their professional lives. In this panel editors and writers will discuss the ways they have made use of the web, and its benefits and limitations. They'll cover blogs, on-line publications and websites.

Panel B
Crafting the Non-fiction Book Proposal
Kevin Davis, Alex Schwartz, and David Standish
Developing an idea into a full-length nonfiction book starts with a strong proposal. Solid research, good writing and a clear vision are essential to get editors to consider your pitch. In this panel, we’ll discuss how to turn your concept into a highly developed, professional quality book proposal.

Thursday Morning Sessions - 10:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.

Workshop A
Writing as a Collaborative Act: Call, Response and Reward
Engaging in collaborative forms from centos to ekphrastic poetry to epistles
Simone Meunch
This craft workshop will undertake several varied collaborative writing acts with both the living and the dead from the communal act of constructing epistolary poems to the cento’s art of language collage to the call-and-response of ekphrasis. We will discuss the writing, editing, publishing, and diversity of collaborative work—renga, bouts-rimes, erasures, exquisite corpses, centos, epistles, postcard poems, and others—while viewing selections from current collaborations including the anthology Saints of Hysteria: A Half Century of Collaborative Poetry, Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton’s Exquisite Politics, John Gallaher & G.C. Waldrep’s Your Father on the Train of Ghost, and Kevin Young’s two anthologies of musical ekphrasis, Blues Poems and Jazz Poems.

Workshop B
Discovering the Soul of Your Character
Roger Rueff
At the core of every great story lies a main character with a well-defined want. In this workshop, you will use a new technique, developed by the instructor, for dissecting the wants of your characters, especially the main character - not for the purpose of sterile classification but as a means of laying bare their inner workings, guiding your story events along organic paths, and unveiling your story theme. Participants should come prepared to examine and share their in-progress stories.

Workshop C
Your Narrative: Writing Your Personal Story
Michele Weldon
Join award-winning author and assistant professor Michele Weldon in an active and fascinating workshop on how to artfully and masterfully write the narrative of your life. Whether you intend to write essays, blogs or a book, you will learn key techniques for articulating the details to move them from personal to universal by understanding skills from organization to description and much more.

Workshop D
Beyond First and Third: Mastering Point of View
Kathleen Rooney
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 for free-writing exercises in which they will get to explore first, second, and third person points of view. Students will be able to share these exercises with the class for critique and improvement, and will walk out at the end of the evening with at least three concrete voices in which to tell the stories of their choosing.

Thursday Afternoon Sessions - 2 to 4:30 p.m.

Workshop A
Poetic Rhythm: Meter and Free Verse
Reginald Gibbons
Words in sequence create rhythms of language, and these rhythms can be (and should be) even more expressive in good poems than they are in speech or prose.   The rhythms of language in a poem are as important as anything else the poem does, and more important than a lot of other things.  In our discussion, we will look at examples that illustrate some of the different ways poets have used such poetic rhythm--from traditional metrical verse to completely free lines, and lots in between.  Participants should bring with them a poem of their own so that on it they can make personal notes regarding new ideas, during our session.

Workshop B
A Flash in the Pan: Getting Started on Short Short Stories
Kathleen Rooney
The flash fiction, the short short story, the micro-tale, the mini-essay: whatever you call them, it is in these tightly compressed forms that the techniques of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction meet and merge to create exciting new modes of expression. Through brief (under 1,000 words, and in many cases under 500) in-class readings by such authors as Robert Shapard, Kim Chinquee, Deb Olin Unferth, Shouhua Qui, and Pamela Painter, students will see how such tiny stories can pack a huge punch. 

After discussing how these narratives-in-miniature are structured, as well as what they can teach us about longer forms, students will have the chance to do in-class exercises, and will walk out with rough drafts of a few very short stories that they can continue to hone, as well as with a new sense of how to bring economy to their sentences in writing of all lengths and genres.

This workshop may interest prose writers of both fiction and nonfiction seeking to jump-start their imaginations and experiment with shorter forms, as well as busy writers who don’t have the time right now to spend on the Great American novel, but who want to keep their writing chops fresh.

Workshop C
My Family, My Memoir
Cornelia Maude Spelman
Memoir is usually about memory and reminiscence. The point of view, therefore, is the writer's - it is her or his memory and reminiscence. What are the implications of this when a memoir is about the writer's family?  Must a memoir be only about the writer's memory?  What is the historical truth of a family, and how can it be determined?  What are the resources available to the writer that can take her or him beyond the limits of her/his memory and reminiscence?  To whom does the story or stories of a family "belong"?  How can a writer be faithful to the truth and yet respect others' privacy? These questions will be the basis for a discussion and suggested guidelines about researching and writing a family memoir.  Participants are asked to bring an object from their families that has a particular meaning for them.

Workshop D
Reporting and Research 101
Miles Harvey
Fact gathering and interviewing are vital skills for writers of all genres. In this workshop, a veteran journalist conducts a boot camp on reporting and research for essayists, memoirists, novelists, and poets. Participants will learn how to conduct effective interviews, how to use the Freedom of Information Act and how to find data buried deep in archives. They will also take part in a discussion of journalistic ethics.

Friday Faculty Panels - 9 to 10 a.m.

Panel A
Writers Point of View: How I Got Published
Scott Blackwood, Miles Harvey, Christine Sneed
Panel members are published writers who will share their personal stories of getting published, and the steps involved in the process: manuscript review, contract negotiation, revision, delivery of the final manuscript, and marketing.

Friday Morning Sessions - 10:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.

Workshop A
Finding the Story
Garnett Kilberg Cohen
How does a writer find and generate material to write about? And, once the material is located, how does a writer go about mining and shaping the material into a compelling narrative? This seminar will devote time to both of these questions. Also, about one fourth to one third of the session will be spent writing in response to creative prompts. Class participants are also free to bring in a piece that they have already written, and would like to see discussed (whether or not these pieces are uses in the session will depend on time constraints), and everyone will have an opportunity (if he/she chooses) to have at least a portion of his/her in-class work critiqued.

Workshop B
A Mind for Dialogue
Kate Harding
As literary critic James Wood put it, praising a writer's "ear for dialogue" makes it sound as though the only craft involved is accurate transcription. In reality, good dialogue depends on character and conflict, just as every other part of the story does. In this class, we'll look at how dialogue works and why "natural-sounding" dialogue only bears a passing resemblance to the way people really talk.

Workshop C
Nonfiction: First Chapter/ Pages Diagnostic
S.L. Wisenberg
What's the best way to begin a story? Addressing the difficulty of hooking your reader from the first line, this workshop will focus on issues of point of view, voice, character development, conflict, and the dramatic scene as it pertains to the opening sections of novel-length material. Participants will read from their first chapters, and fellow attendees will discuss the strengths of these beginnings, and then respond with specific questions with an eye towards rewriting.

Workshop D
Fiction: First Chapter/Pages Diagnostic
Suzanne Clores
Does your novel begin in the most effective place in relation to the main events of the plot?  How well does the opening chapter succeed in conveying tone and atmosphere, and introducing the issues that will be covered in the plot?  As a new novelist who has previously written short stories, have you made enough of a break from techniques that pertain more to shorter forms?  This workshop will focus on some of the differences between novel chapters and short stories and between opening chapters and later chapters.  The participants will present parts of their manuscripts, which will be discussed in terms of the roles played by the first sentence and paragraph in drawing a reader into the opening chapter and by the chapter’s final sentences in launching the rest of the novel.  Emphasis will be placed on steps that novelists can take in order to discover the tone and shape of the opening chapter, especially through revising.

Friday Afternoon Sessions - 2 to 4:30 p.m.

Workshop A
Fiction: Object Lessons
Audrey Petty
In this workshop, we'll focus on object lessons: how objects can lend great works of prose immediacy, texture and dramatic weight. Through prompts and exercises, you'll unpack artifacts from your own life. Discover how a keepsake or a shelved leftover can unlock a vital story.

Workshop B
Not Me: Creative Nonfiction without the “I”
S.L. Wisenberg
So often we think of creative nonfiction as memoir, as a record of the experience of the author. This workshop will serve as introduction to creative nonfiction that has voice and point of view, but is not about the life and travails of You. We will look at and discuss examples, brainstorm, and write a few beginnings.

Workshop C
Fiction: Plot climax
Fred Shafer
Are you certain that you have carried the plot of your short story or novel far enough?  In answering this question, workshops often focus on final paragraphs or sentences.  This workshop will concern a moment that tends to occur before that: the scene or passage in which the plot arrives at its peak, climax, or breaking point.  We will discuss various kinds of plots, looking at decisions the writers have made in finding climaxes that enable stories to reach their potential, then applying them to your manuscripts. 

Workshop D
Freelancing
Kevin Davis, David Standish
Do you have what it takes to do freelancing work? David Standish and Kevin Davis will lead this energetic panel wherein they share their experience as successful freelancing writers. The authors will give advice about how to break into freelancing, do's and don'ts of the profession, and will reveal other tips for writers who are curious about what freelancing is like, who want to give it a try themselves, or who are already freelancing themselves and would like to learn more about this challenging career.