Writers Studio March Newsletter
A Community for Writers
Presents
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Writers Studio 5th Spring Literary Festival: "Come to the AWP at ACC" on Sunday, April 11, 8:30a.m.-3:30p.m.NONFICTION WORKSHOP: THE MIND AT WORK by Sonya Huber
Sonya Huber is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Opa Nobody (2008) and Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (2010), and a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration (2010). Her work has been published in literary journals and magazines including Fourth Genre, Passages North, Hotel Amerika, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Washington Post Magazine. She teaches in the Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at Ashland University. THE WELL-WROUGHT BOOK: SHAPING YOUR POETRY MANUSCRIPT INTO A COLLECTION by Stephen Haven
Stephen Haven is the author of two books of poems, Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008) and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (West End Press, 2004), and of the memoir The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). Haven was the long-time editor, and is currently the director, of the Ashland Poetry Press, where he founded two book competitions for poetry, the Richard Snyder Prize and the Robert McGovern Prize. He is Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Ashland University.  Fiction Workshop: POINT OF VIEW by Janis HallowellWho is telling your story? Why that character and not another? First or third person? And what the heck is omniscient, really? What are we evoking with the POV we’ve chosen? We’ll explore through our writing the intricacies and subtleties of choosing and changing points of view with the intention of gaining awareness and skill in using this powerful pigment in the writer’s palette. Janis Hallowell is the author of two novels, The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn (Wm. Morrow 2004) and She Was (Wm. Morrow 2008). She is a MacDowell fellow and has published in Ploughshares magazine and 5280 magazine. She’s on the faculty at Denver’s Lighthouse for Writers. Nonfiction Workshop: WHERE YOU ARE: CRAFTING PLACE IN NONFICTION by Robert Root
 Special All Day Poetry Workshop: THE WRITER AS SHAMAN: USING WORDS TO RETRIEVE OUR SOULS by Ruth L. SchwartzWe’re all familiar with the experience of writing from our small personal selves -- mining our own histories, wounds, confusions and joys for material. Yet our writing can also be a portal to realms of wisdom and understanding beyond that personal self – a way for us to access, in poet Audre Lorde’s words, “what we didn’t know we knew.” Most writers accidentally tap into this deeper, wider vision from time to time; this workshop will show you ways to contact this larger perspective more deliberately, in ways that will both enrich your writing, and help you heal whatever keeps you from it. Among other tools, we’ll use the shamanic journey, an ancient practice which offers a simple, structured way of going within to contact inner wisdom. We’ll also do writing exercises throughout the day, and have plenty of time for discussion. Ruth L. Schwartz is the author of four award-winning books of poetry, including Edgewater, a National Poetry Series winner, and a memoir. She has won over a dozen major grants and prizes, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Astraea Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. Ruth has taught creative writing at five universities, and is currently a core faculty member of the low-residency M.F.A. program at Ashland University. She has also had a private healing and shamanic practice since 2003 (see www.HeartMindIntegration.com), and teaches The Writer As Shaman, along with other workshops related to both writing and healing, nationwide. |
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In the fictional work of such authors as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, stream-of-consciousness writing recreates the whirling dervish of the mind through the experience of a created character. In nonfiction, working with the "stream" of our own consciousness might feel like either digging a well in the desert or sandbagging against the rising tide. In this workshop, we will dip into the "stream" of our own consciousness and talk about methods for presenting, recreating, and using this raw and unruly source of material in our writing.
This workshop will focus on the process of shaping a group of poems into a resonant volume. We will discuss Robert Frost's idea that in a collection of 30 poems the book itself is the 31st poem. How is it possible that a book as a whole might be so well crafted that it seems to be something more than the sum of its individual poems? We will discuss one basic concept of form in music--the sonata form--that might help poets as they shape the movement of their manuscripts. We will talk about central thematic or stylistic effects and variations from them, the decision to divide of not to divide a book into sections, the order of poems within sections and within the entire book, and the role of the more powerful and the less powerful poems in working together to create the sense of an aesthetic whole. We will draw examples from Robert Frost's North of Boston, Natasha Tretheway's Native Guard, and from Marc Sheehan's Vengeful Hymns, a recent winner of the Richard Snyder Prize--Ashland Poetry Press's annual book competition. 