WRITING ON THE DOOR: YOUR WRITING LIFE

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 Fishbach, Marianne Fons, Roland Jackson, Catherine Jagoe, Karol Lagodzki, Kyle Tran Myhre, Tiffany Rodriquez-Lee, Kathleen Rooney, Martin Seay, Angie Trudell Vasquez, and Liza Wiemer.

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 Fishbach

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 Fishbach, and Kathleen Rooney

3:00 – 4:30 pm

Track A: Beginners: 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

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 Fishbach

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 Fishbach, 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 with Tiffany Rodriquez-Lee

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