WRITING ON THE DOOR

A can’t-miss, multi-genre conference for writers at every stage

FRIDAY AND SATURDAY, APRIL 24 AND 25, STONE HARBOR RESORT, STURGEON BAY

A two-day conference for writers of all genres and at all levels of experience. Hear from agents, editors, publishers, and authors about their journeys through the writing world. Featuring Tina Jenkins Bell, Steven Espada Dawson, Tamara Dean, Eric Diekhans, Katie Dublinski, Chris Fischbach, Marianne Fons, Roland Jackson, Catherine Jagoe, Karol Lagodzki, Kyle Tran Myhre, Tiffany Rodriquez-Lee, Kathleen Rooney, Martin Seay, Angie Trudell Vasquez, and Liza Wiemer.

Single day registration is available for Friday and Saturday. To register, please leave this page and click on the date you want to register for on our calendar.

Housing: Contact Stone Harbor Resort if you prefer to stay on-site for the conference. For other accommodation options, please visit Destination Sturgeon Bay.

SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE

Friday, April 24

8:00 – 9:00 am

Registration and continental breakfast

9:00 – 10:15 am

Panel Discussion: The Writing Life with Eric Diekhans, Roland Jackson, Tiffany Rodriquez-Lee, and Angie Trudell Vasquez

10:30 am – noon

Track A: Beginners: Getting Naked: How to Use Personal History in Your Fiction with Eric Diekhans

Track B: Prose: Tension and Compression: Story Lessons from Tree Work with Roland Jackson

Track C: Poetry: Poetry of Witness: Past, Present & Future with Angie Trudell Vasquez

Track D: Career: Beyond the Book with Chris Fischbach

Noon – 1:30 pm

Lunch on your own

1:30 – 2:45 pm

Panel Discussion: Our Books’ Journeys with Steven Espada Dawson, Marianne Fons, Catherine Jagoe, and Martin Seay

3:00 – 4:30 pm

Track A: Beginners: Ideas, ideas, ideas! What Should I Write? with Liza Wiemer

Track B: Prose: Make Gravity Do the Work: Achieving Suspense in Fiction with Karol Lagodzki

Track C: Poetry: Strangeness as Survival with Steven Espada Dawson

Track D: Career: Behind the Scenes at Graywolf Press with Katie Dublinski

4:45 – 7:00 pm

Welcome reception and reading

Saturday, April 25

9:00 – 10:15 am

Keynote: Curiosity and Community: What I Write and Why with Kathleen Rooney

10:30 am – noon

Track A: Beginners: Writing with Consistency and Courage with Tamara Dean

Track B: Prose: Whose Story is It Anyway: Experimentation with Point of View with Tina Jenkins Bell

Track C: Poetry: Poetry, Protest, and Possibility: What Writers Can Offer in Times of Crisis with Kyle Tran Myhre

Track D: Career The Winding Path to Publication: A Persistent Novelist’s Story with Marianne Fons

Noon – 1:30 pm

Lunch on your own

1:30 – 2:45 pm

Panel Discussion: Inside Publishing with Katie Dublinski, Chris Fischbach, and Kathleen Rooney

3:00 – 4:30 pm

Track A: Beginners: Writing from the Root with Tiffany Rodriquez-Lee

Track B: Prose: What to Leave Out: Using Research Effectively with Martin Seay

Track C: Poetry: From Image to Poem: Strategies for Writing About a Photograph or Artwork with Catherine Jagoe

Track D: Career: Social Media and Beyond Social Media with Kyle Tran Myhre

4:45 – 5:00 pm

Closing remarks

WRITING ON THE DOOR WRITING CONTEST

Submit your flash fiction, micro-memoir, or poetry to our new writing contest! Winners will be featured at Friday’s open mic reading and receive free registration to the 2027 Writing On The Door conference. Submit your works of short prose of no more than 1,000 words or up to three poems (each poem no longer than one page) by March 31. You may submit in more than one category and submit more than once within one category. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission.

To submit your flash fiction, please click here.

To submit your micro-memoir/personal essay, please click here.

To submit your poetry, please click here.

Deadline is 11:59 pm Tuesday, March 31. Winners will be notified by Thursday, April 16.

DETAILED SCHEDULE

Friday, April 24

9:00 – 10:15 am

Panel Discussion: The Writing Life with Eric Diekhans, Roland Jackson, Tiffany Rodriquez-Lee, and Angie Trudell Vasquez

Hear from four writers how the balance their creative lives with full-time jobs, raising family, and other obligations.

10:30 am – noon

Track A: Beginner: Getting Naked: How to Use Personal History in Your Fiction with Eric Diekhans

We all have fond and painful memories. Most of us focus on suppressing the latter. If we want our writing to resonate deeply with readers, we need to dig deeply into our pasts and be willing to stand naked before our audience.

Track B: Prose: Tension & Compression: Story Lessons from Tree Work with Roland Jackson

“Maples pop,” as we say in tree work, “they don’t hinge.” In tree work and in fiction, I feel like we take for granted the otherwise simple ideas — we read them as something magical and thereby elusive — and I prefer for us practioners to have takeaways. In this generative craft intensive, we’ll examine tension, compression, and suspense — basic aspects of the trade, whether for tree work or for writing. We’ll watch “don’t-try-this-at-home” tree videos, read excerpts from writerly masters, and write our own stories.

Track C: Poetry: Poetry of Witness: Past, Present & Future with Angie Trudell Vasquez

During our session, we will celebrate female poets who shaped my own work. Writers who taught me the possibilities of poetry, how to be a poet of witness, resistance, and joy. We will enjoy selections from Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lucille Clifton, Sandra Cisneros, Layli Long Soldier, Mary Oliver, and Nikki Giovanni. This will be a generative workshop with sharing optional.

Track D: Career: Beyond the Book with Chris Fischbach

Many writers think that The Book Is The Thing. In this breakout session, we’ll discuss the many different ways writers can use their skills between books, before they ever have a book, or even if they never have a book. Being a writer can mean many things, and in this session we will challenge each other to think more broadly about what and how a writer can be in the world.

1:30 – 2:45 pm

Panel Discussion: Our Books’ Journeys with Steven Espada, Marianne Fons, Catherine Jagoe, and Martin Seay

Hear from writers of poetry and prose about their journeys to publication, including two books that are forthcoming.

3:00- 4:30 pm

Track A: Beginner: Ideas, Ideas, Ideas! What Should I Write? with Liza Wiemer

Many writers have lists of ideas, but struggle to determine what to write. This workshop will help you determine what ideas to pursue and how to move from a blank page to completing your first draft. What are the challenges and how can you move past them? How do you develop the plot, create interesting settings, develop and interact with your characters, overcome self-doubt, and avoid writer’s block? We’ll discuss strategies for keeping you on task, setting appropriate goals, and motivation. This workshop is perfect for beginners as well as those who have some writing experience.

Track B: Prose: Make Gravity Do the Work: Achieving Suspense in Fiction with Karol Lagodzki

Suspense is a feature of engaging fiction regardless of genre. This workshop will introduce relevant craft resources, terminology, and examples from published stories and novels. To become more comfortable with selected techniques for building suspense, participants will be given handouts with resources, including a reading list, for use in their future work.

Track C: Poetry: Strangeness as Survival with Steven Espada Dawson

The Kurdish poet Abdulla Pashew writes, “If a word / can’t become … winged bread / to fly from trench to trench, / then it might as well / become a brush to polish the invader’s boot.” In this workshop, we will make winged bread of our words–bread that (with time) feeds the speaker, the poet, the reader, the language. We will lean into strangeness as a necessary part of the drafting process and discuss how it might better serve our survival and the survival of others. By giving ourselves permission to be strange, we give our speakers permission to persist.

Track D: Career: Behind the Scenes at Graywolf Press with Katie Dublinski

How does Graywolf decide what to publish? What are the stages of the publication process? What does it mean that we’re a nonprofit organization? This session will cover the history of Graywolf Press and will offer participants an inside look at the workings of an independent literary publisher.

4:45 – 7:00 pm

Welcome reception and reading. Join us for light reception and cash bar featuring a reading by winners of our poetry, flash fiction, and micro-memoir contests followed by an open mic.

Saturday, April 25

8:00 – 9:00 am

Registration check-in and continental breakfast

9:00 – 10:15 am

Keynote Talk: Curiousity & Community: What I Write and Why with Kathleen Rooney

10:30 am – noon

Track A: Beginner: Writing with Consistency and Courage with Tamara Dean

Consistency and courage count for more than talent or technique in writing success, whether success means starting your story that longs to be written, adding pages joyfully, or publishing your masterpiece. These qualities aren’t flashy. But they work, if practiced daily and even–or especially–during difficult times. The good news is that everyone can develop consistency and courage. This workshop will help you do that and is designed for writers at any level who are looking to begin a new project, resume an old one, overcome obstacles in a work-in-progress or surprise themselves with a forward leap.

Track B: Whose Story Is It Anyway? Experimentation with Point of View with Tina Jenkins Bell

If you have ever submitted a piece to a prospective publisher or beta reader only for them to question whether or not the point of view (POV) for which you’ve dedicated your first born was the right choice, this is the session for you. POV focuses on the type of narrator used to tell a story. It’s like a camera lens controlling what your reader knows and from what range. The question is: what does your story need the narrator to do? We don’t always know that when we sit down to spin fiction. This session will give you a chance to take an existing story or create something new and spin it from different POVs as an experiment to determine what type of narrator serves your story best.

Track C: Poetry: Poetry, Protest, and Possibilities: What Writers Can Offer in Times of Crisis with Kyle Tran Myhre

Whether or not we believe that our writing can change the world, there are deep, powerful connections between artists and movement-builders, historically. This interactive workshop will highlight what powers these connections, as well as what specific tactics artists (especially poets and writers) might use to most effectively advocate for our values. What kind of work can writing do, and what can’t it do? What are some favorite examples of writing that “meets the moment?” What makes those examples powerful? We’ll explore those questions and more.

Track D: Career: The Winding Path to Publication: A Persistent Novelist’s Story with Marianne Fons

Iowa writer Marianne Fons offers proof that planets do sometimes align, agent acquisition does actually happen, and a mansucript that took years to write finds its way to an editor at a Big Five imprint who adores it. Tips for potential success and agent/author/editor etiquette included.

1:30 – 2:45 pm

Panel Discussion: Inside Publishing with Katie Dublinski, Chris Fischbach, and Kathleen Rooney

Katie Dublinski, Associate Publisher at Graywolf Press; Chris Fishbach, literary agent and former editor/publisher at Coffee House Press; and Kathleen Rooney, co-founder and editor of Rose Metal Press, offer an insider’s look into the publishing world.

3:00 – 4:30 pm

Track A: Beginner: Session Writing from the Root with Tiffany Rodriquez-Lee

Many beginners feel they have to sound like a “poet,” using formal or abstract language that feels far removed from their daily lives. In this session, we throw out academic rules and focus on your personal heritage and everyday language as your primary toolkit. Drawing on her Puerto Rican roots and her work as the former Poet Laureate of Wausau, Tiffany will guide participants through the process of mapping family histories onto the landscapes they inhabit today. By using sensory memories and local landmarks as anchors,  you will learn how to translate your unique sense of belonging into powerful, accessible poetry. Whether your “home” is a memory of an island or a specific street corner in Wisconsin, this session provides the permission and the tools to claim your story in your own voice.

Track B: Prose: What to Leave Out: Using Research Effectively with Martin Seay

Research for creative work differs from scholarly research in ways that are significant and not always obvious. To get the most benefit from our research efforts, it helps to start with a clear sense of how we’ll use what we learn. In this session, we’ll talk about how our information-gathering actually shows up on the page, and we’ll look at examples of writing that employs researched material gracefully.

Track C: Poetry: From Image to Poem: Strategies for Writing About a Photograph or Artwork with Catherine Jagoe

In this session, we will explore ways to generate poems in response to an image–either a photograph or a piece of art that you find particularly compelling. We will look at some published poems that do this and identify the approaches they use, paying attention to the range of possibilities for point of view. Then we will do some structured free writing about an image you have selected ahead of time and brought to the session. Please locate a photograph or artwork that holds a genuine and compelling interest for you. It could be a photo that someone took of you or a person or group of people you know; an art photo by artists such as Ansel Adams or Diane Arbus; a painting; or a journalistic photograph that documents a historical event.

Track D: Career: Self-Promotion: Social Media and Beyond Social Media with Kyle Tran Myhre

So many writers do not have the luxury of just being writers. If we want people to actually read our work, we must also be publicists, outreach coordinators, event planners, graphic designers, digital strategists, and more … and this can be exhausting. This interactive workshop is simply a space to skill-share: especially for people who aren’t planning to go “all-in” on social media, what other paths might we take? How can we promote our work in effective and sustainable ways, both online and offline? Spoiler alert: there is no magic key or authorative answer to these questions, but there are practical tips, tools, and tactics we can share with each other.

4:45 – 5:00 pm

Closing Remarks

PRESENTERS

Tina Jenkins Bell is a published fiction writer, playwright, academic, freelance journalist, and literary activist. She has had numerous short works published in journals and anthologies, including Redline: Chicago Horror Stories, Hypertext Review, and Re-Liviing Mythology. Her plays, Cut the Baby in Half and the collaborative piece A Conversation with Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks were produced as staged readings at the Green Line Performing Arts Center and the Chicago Humanities Festival, respectively. As a co-founder of FLOW (For Love of Writing), Bell has collaborated with numerous writing and arts organizations, authors, and bookstores to offer literary programming in Chicago’s underserved communities.

Steven Espada Dawson is the author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025). From East Los Angeles, and the son of a Mexican immigrant, he has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have been anthologized in Sarabande’s Another Last Call, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart Prize. He serves as Poet Laureate of Madison, Wisconsin.

Tamara Dean is an author of fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which reviewers call ‘luminous’ and ‘fascinating,’ invites readers to consider how we tend the earth in times of uncertainity, what we owe our neighbors, and ways we thrive in community. Her essays and stories have appeared in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, One Story, and elsewhere. Her essay, “Safer than Childbirth,” received a 2024 Pushcart Prize Special Mention and “Slow Blues” was named a 2021 National Magazine Award finalist. She teaches workshops with writers.com, The Loft Literary Center, Hugo House, Madison Writers’ Studio, and other writing centers.

Eric Diekhans’ speculative fiction has appeare in Jelly Bucket, Etched Onyx, Decapitate, and Thin Skin magazines, as well as the banned book anthology Uncensored Ink and the prize-winning collection Unforgettable: Harrowing Futures, Horrors, & (Dark) Humor. As a television producer and screenwriter, Diekhans is the recipient of a Chicago/Midwest Emmy for Children’s Television and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in screenwriting. He holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Indiana University and an MA in Film from Northwestern.

Katie Dublinski serves as associate publisher and chief operating office for Graywolf Press, an independent, nonprofit literary publisher based in Minneapolis. She oversees the book production process, sells subsidiary rights, and is a member of the editorial team. She has worked with authors and translators such as John D’Agata, Shulem Deen, Alyson Hagy, Bojan Louis, Ander Monson, Adèle Rosenfeld, and Jeffrey Zuckerman. She is the board secretary for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Chris Fischbach is the former publisher of Coffee House Press, where he also served as an editor for twenty-five years. He is currently a literary agent, editor, and consultant for writers and nonprofit arts organizations. He serves on the board of the Minnesota Prison Writing Worksop, and has also served on the boards of the Friends of Hennepin County Library, the Grand Marais Arts Colony, and the Minneapolis Arts Commission.

Marianne Fons is well known to quilters as the former co-host of “Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting,” which aired nationwide on public television. She has co-authored or authored many how-to books, including Quilter’s Complete Guide, published in 1993 and still in print, with sales of over a half a million copies. After retiring from the quilting industry, Fons returned to her love of fiction, studying craft books, enrolling in writing classes, joining writing groups, and finally landing a New York City agent. Her debut, The Dressmaker of Winterset, is set for publication by Union Square & Company, an imprint of Hachette, in 2027. She lives in the small town of Winterset, Iowa, and part-time on Washington Island, Wisconsin.

Roland Jackson is a writer, teacher, and arborist. He is the 2023-2024 FSG Writer’s Fellowship Winner. His work has been supported by MacDowell and Baldwin Center for the Arts.

Karol Lagodzki is an exophonic, English-language author of fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Invisible City, Storm Cellar, Asimov’s, and elsewhere, and he has won Panel Magazine‘s Ruritania Prize. Her first full-length book, Controlled Conversations, was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. He holds an MFA in creative witing, buys more books than he can read or afford, and gives back to the literary community by serving as a reader for literary journals. In some of his work, Karol draws on his memoiry of growing up in autocratic Soviet-controlled Poland. He now lives halfway down a Southern Indiana raved with his wonderful family, a scurry of squirrels, a passel of possums, a gaze of raccoons, a descent of woodpeckers, and a large dog.

Kyle Tran Myhre (aka Guante) is a poet and activist based in Minneapolis. A member of two National Poetry Slame championship teams, he has also been featured on a Grammy-winning album, performed at the United Nations, and visited countless colleges, conferences, and festivals, using spoken word and storytelling as doorways into critical dialogue. His sci-fi poetry book, Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough, is available via Button Poetry. Find his poems, music, zines, and more at www.guante.info.

Tiffany Rodriguez-Lee is a poet and nonproft leader dedicated to the intersection of creative expression and community resilience. She currently serves as the Director of Arts + Fellows at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Formerly the Poet Laureate of Wausau and Executive Director of the Center for Visual Arts, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing and centers her literary work on accessibility, frequently leading free workshops and gatherings to ensure poetry remains a vital, open resource for all. Blending her creative craft with cultural identity, she draws on her Puerto Rican heritage to champion diverse voices and build cultural bridges across the state. A mother of three and a passionate advocate for the arts, she is committed to the power of words to foster belonging and enrich the fabric of Wisconsin life.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her lastest poetry collection, Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press and her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, came out in September 2023. In the fall of 2025, the University of Minnesota Press, released her debut picture book, Leaf Town Forever, co-written with her sister, Beth Rooney. Her fifth novel, Man Overboard!, is forthcoming with Gallery, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in July of 2026. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches at DePaul.

Martin Seay’s debut novel The Mirror Thief was published by Melville House in 2016. He has been awarded a fiction fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and his short stories and essays have appeared in Joyland, MAKE, Gargoyle, the Believer, and the Gettysburg Review. Originally from Texas, he lives in Chicago with his spouse, the writer Kathleen Rooney.

Angela (Angie) Trudell Vasquez served as the Poet Laureate of Madison, Wisconsin, from 2020 to 2024, the first Latina to hold the position. Angie received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. She is the author of four collections of poetry and has published widely both in print and online as well as on stage. During her poet laureate term, she established the first Youth Poet Laureate program in the state of Wisconsin. She is a Macondo Fellow and served as Chair for the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission from June 2021 to September 2024. She lives with her husband and their cat and is in the eighth year of rewilding portions of their lawn back to native prairie.

Liza Wiemer is an award-winning educator with more than twenty years of teaching experience. Her second novel, The Assignment, was published by Delacorte Press and has received thirteen honors, including being name a Sydney Taylor Notable Book and a 2025-2026 Facing History All-Community School Read. The novel has been translated into Russian, Polish, Italian, and Korean, and has been optioned for film. Her debut picture book, Out and About: A Tale of Giving, was published by Kalaniot Books in August 2023. A graduate of UW-Madison, Liza has two married sons and lives in Milwaukee with her husband, Jim.