2023 Schedule
-workshop descriptions below-
2023 Workshop Details
Workshop Sessions – One – 8:20-9:10 a.m.
Heidi Horner
Working from Life: the Creative Approach of Virginia Lee Burton • (in the Alumni Reading Room)
In this workshop, newly minted professional archivist Heidi will share inspiration toward creative work, community, and geographic rootedness, gleaned from the papers of local treasure, celebrated author and illustrator Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios (1909-1968). See visual examples of design practices developed by Burton, who had a second, simultaneous career as the teacher and leader of the Folly Cove Designers, a cooperative of printmakers who worked on Cape Ann from 1940-1969. Discuss how we use our own experience, time and place, and how we might also use historical collections as sources for unique information and lively details in our work.
Denise Frame Harlan
Scene, Summary, and Reflection: the Three Voices of Creative Nonfiction, and How to Say What a Thing Means • (Jenks 220)
Your life changed in a moment: you went into an experience picturing the world a certain way, and afterward, your perspective changed so radically that you might not have recognized yourself as the same person. This interior transformation is the heart of spiritual memoir, but how do you bring readers along with you? You might feel like the scene—what you were wearing, and how the air felt—communicates what happened, but your reader wasn’t there. How do you write what that experience means? We’ll generate some written scenes, analyze some models, and discuss the so-called “balance” of scene, summary, and reflection.
Nick Maione
Cross-Training & The Creative Countenance • (Jenks 212)
In this workshop, using multimedia, discussion, and personal reflection exercises, we will be exploring the idea of cross-training/cross-pollinating artistic disciplines and across genres, the lifelong “countenance” of one’s work, and the relationship between the spiritual life and the creative life.
Workshop Sessions – Two – 9:20-10:10 a.m.
Matthew E. Henry
Reclaiming Exile • (the Alumni Reading Room)
The stark shift in the literary traditions from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament limited the “acceptable” responses to the pain of exile—the expulsion from a grounding place, people, principle, and/or pathos. What one was “allowed” to say in the Hebrew Bible about suffering was largely silenced in the New Testament, and this has largely carried on throughout much of the Christian tradition. This talk will examine how this happened and attempt to reclaim the authentic voices of the oppressed in past and the present, the voices and perspectives on suffering that are often repressed within the modern Christian sensibility.
Melanie Brooks
Writing Hard Stories • (in Jenks 212)
Ernest Hemingway famously said, “Write hard and clear about what hurts.” His words support the notion that writing about the painful material that life gives us—illness, death, trauma, abuse, family dysfunction, displacement, and more— can help us understand it in a more profound way. The process of re-entering those memories, taking them apart, and then putting them back together on our own terms can transform them into something meaningful, perhaps even healing and beautiful, for both writer and reader. In this workshop, we’ll look at ways to gently peel back the layers of memory to uncover the stories at their core. We’ll talk about examining our motives for digging into these stories and how to take care of ourselves in the process. We’ll discuss how giving narrative shape to our hard stories—whether in fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—can invite others to lean into our experiences and offer them permission to reveal some of their own.
Rob Bradford
Writing the Great American Pastimes • (in Jenks 220)
Rob will read and discuss his new book, A Damn Near Perfect Game.
For a whole bunch of reasons, I find our present moment overwhelming. The answer is not to look away. Rather our work as writers is to attend to and contain as much of the moment as we can stand (“I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman), then translate our experience into language, written and/or performed, that hopefully sustains us through our few days under the sun and perhaps others, too.
Plenary Session on Story – 12:45-1:35 p.m.
Steve Almond
Failure IS an Option • (Jenks 237 auditorium)
Writers take a binary view of their work. Either it’s a success, meaning it gets published and frantically promoted, or a failure, meaning it gets shoved in a drawer. The published work of any writer represents the tip of an iceberg. We never see the failed projects and drafts. But those failures are essential to artistic growth. In this session, I’ll offer a humorous survey of my five unpublished novels. The point is to recognize failure as an essential step on the way to success. Our “failed” work offers us a profound chance to learn, if we have the courage to examine it without judgment or shame.
Collaborations – 1:45-2:35 p.m.
J.D. Scrimgeour & Richard Hoffman
The Ekphrastic Essay • (the Alumni Reading Room)
Paintings are invitations, asking us to muse about both the image and the artist. Writing about a painting can make the painting richer, helping us appreciate and question it. And such writing can also be a jumping off point, an inspiration for essayists to make their own discoveries, to step through the artwork and go beyond it. Richard Hoffman and J.D. Scrimgeour will discuss their experience writing the ekphrastic essay and share excerpts of their work about William Blake and Nathaniel Dance-Holland, as well as a collaborative work about Salvador Dalí’s Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War).
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Matthew E. Henry and Nick Maione
Presenters Reading • (Jenks 212)
-a reading of original work by workshop leaders-
Workshop Sessions – Three – 2:55-3:45 p.m.
Lisa Usani Phillips
A Reading: Guest People • (in the Alumni Reading Room)
I will be reading poems from my debut hybrid collection, Guest People. The title comes from the English translation of Hakka, Han people who migrated within China over centuries and formed a distinct subculture. My mom comes from a Hakka family that emigrated from Guangdong to Thailand in the 1940s. She left Bangkok in the 1960s to go to college in the US, which is where she met my dad, an American of Dutch, English, German, and Irish descent. The collection, which Carolyn Oliver describes as “both an ache and a balm,” reflects a persistent, intergenerational sense of otherness, border crossings, and a longing for home.
Enzo Silon Surin
Reading & Remarks with Enzo Surin • (the Alumni Reading Room)
Enzo will read from his award-winning poetry collection When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, 2020, winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards for Poetry) and his forthcoming collection American Scapegoat (BlackLawrence Press, May 2023), and discuss the role of poetry as an agent of social change.
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Colleen Michaels
Step Right Up – A Trifecta Reading/Conversation/Workshop with the author of Prize Wheel • (Jenks 212)
Colleen Michaels, Writing Studio director of Montserrat College of Art and host of the Improbable Places Poetry Tour, will read from her debut poetry collection, Prize Wheel (Small Bites Press, 2023). The poems in this collection examine the joy, consolation, luck, and con in matters of work, family, illness and intimacy. She will pull back the curtain to reveal all the gambling and carnival barking that goes into publication and planning a community book launch. But that’s not all folks. Step right up, and leave with some writing prompts to test your strength and sharpen your aim.
Sergio Inestrosa
Composing and Translating Poetry in Portuguese, Spanish, and English • (Jenks 212)
A session on the challenges poets face bringing work across languages. In this case, Sergio will discuss his own poems written in Portuguese and Spanish and their English translations.
Workshop Sessions – Four – 3:55-4:45 p.m.
Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger, Corey Sparks & Elise Lonich Ryan
TRANSLATIO AMICORUM – Writing Friendship • (the Alumni Reading Room)
The title of this ongoing multimodal project means “translation of friends.’ Translatio literally means ‘to carry over,’ and in the Middle Ages it was the term used to describe the movement of a relic from one location to another. Such a process troubles distinctions between absence and presence. Amicorum inscribes belonging, trust, and mutual affection. This is the promise of blurred boundaries between originator and recipient, between maker and audience—between friends. In this session, we will present some of the literary and relational underpinnings of this project, share some of the work we’ve done together, and invite attendees to consider how the concept of ‘translatio amicorum’ might inspire further creative-critical work in classrooms or workshops.
Brad Davis
Digging Out – keynote writing workshop • (Jenks 212)
This workshop will build on the keynote theme of creating from our attention to multiple horizons; being immersed in, perhaps overwhelmed by our life-circumstances. Think creative writing as an eyes-wide-open survival strategy for both writer and reader, individual and community that is grounded in hope.
Gordon Pubs Editors Panel – 11:45 a.m.-12:35 p.m. • (Jenks 212)
Molly Forget, Mary Stuart Murray, Drake Sprowles, Ginny Vienneau
-Five Ponds, Four Editors, Three Publications-
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