2001 Seminar
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Workshops' Schedule |
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| Workshop/Event |
Day |
Dates |
Time |
Orientation Dinner |
Sunday | Jan. 7th | 7:00 PM |
| Writing the Healing Narrative with Paulette Bates Alden |
TBA | TBA | TBA |
| Finding the Story and Nurturing It with Alan Cheuse |
TBA | TBA | TBA |
| Creative Nonfiction: Style and Substance with Lee Gutkind |
TBA | TBA | TBA |
| Science Non-Fiction with Richard Panek |
TBA | TBA | TBA |
| The Writer, the Editor, the Agent and the Teacher with Tim Seldes and Susan Shreve |
TBA | TBA | TBA |
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Workshops |
| New Workshop "WRITING the HEALING NARRATIVE" with Paulette Bates Alden Email: (info@paulettealden.com) Web Site: www.paulettealden.com
“What is any story but a form of hope?” Richard Jackson For people who want to take the raw material of their life experiences and shape it into narratives that have the power to move and heal. The desire to tell one’s story is an ancient and honorable one. Instinctively people feel the need to express and communicate what has happened to them, how it felt, what it means. Unlike the flux of life itself, stories have form - a beginning, middle, and an end. By writing our stories fully and complexly - whether in memoir, short stories or novels - we have the opportunity to gain control over painful material and come to a symbolic resolution which can help us heal and move on. Paradoxically, writing is a way to both hold on - in the sense of honoring and even memorializing our losses - and also to let go. Once we have found the right images, details, language and structure, and have created a story, a concrete object, a work of art, we feel emotionally relieved.Participants in this workshop will be invited to write their stories and will be introduced to elements of a healing narrative drawn from recent research and other writers’ experiences as well as the instructor’s. The instructor will offer helpful exercises on how to get started and keeping going, how to shape stories, the use of metaphor and imagery, and how to trust one’s own sense of what to do. Participants will read examples of literature dealing with loss, mourning and healing, share their work-in-progress with a respectful group of fellow writers, have an individual conference with the instructor, and take time for themselves. “As it happens, this morning before I started working on my description of ‘Writing Healing Narratives,’ I worked on a healing narrative of my own - an autobiographical short story called ‘Lost Lake’ about the time my husband and I took my mother to a cabin for what turned out to be her last vacation away from the nursing home. We came home after one night. Life did not offer any particular moments of grace on that occasion, which may be why I'm now writing the story. In ‘Lost Lake,’ Miriam (me) cannot make the decision to leave after only one night, even though she knows she has to. She flees down to the lake and lies down on an old dock. ‘She was so tired. It felt as if she had been fighting a losing battle for years - well, the three years she had been taking care of her mother. She had been bailing and bailing, but still her mother was sinking, going down. If only she could rest a moment…. The worn wood of the dock felt so warm. She shut her eyes. Summer days, lost lakes, memories, her mother, everything flowed together in the soothing murmur of water all around her. Maybe dying wasn't so bad after all. After the long struggle, the holding on. But then the letting go, the floating. The sense of being held up, received… Miriam opened her eyes. How blue and beautiful the sky was, a whole lake itself! The blue of memory, the blue of forgetting, a whole blue lake of eternity where nothing ever ended, nothing was ever lost….’ Now of course in “real” life I didn't go lie down on that dock; but I did in the story. And it made me feel better. It made me feel I understood my own experience, the real, true experience underneath what had actually “happened.” I don't call that remembering, I don't call it imagining, I call it writing.”Biography: Paulette Bates Alden is the author of Feeding the Eagles, a collection of autobiographical short stories, and Crossing the Moon, a memoir that recounts her own initial ambivalence about motherhood, embarking on a course of infertility treatment, and coming to terms with not having a child. The book also touches a wide array of other issues: aging parents; being raised Southern and female in the fifties; tradeoffs between a life of work and one devoted to nurture; coping with grief and loss. She is currently working on a "memoir in stories" about, among other things, taking care of her mother who has dementia. Her work as appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, The Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She was born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she received her Masters in Creative Writing and taught for three years as a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing. The recipient of numerous awards, including a Loft-Mcknight Award, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, she has taught extensively, including graduate level courses in memoir reading and writing at the University of Minnesota, where she received a distinguished teaching award, at Carleton College, at St. Olaf College, and at the Split Rock Arts Program in Duluth. Paulette led a workshop last year for the 18th Annual Key West Literary Seminar, THE MEMOIR. We're delighted to have her back for a second year. She lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches privately and does individual manuscript critiquing via the Internet at www.paulettealden.com. What students say about Paulette Bates Alden: "Paulette is an excellent instructor - well-organized, welcoming, extremely competent, humorous, gentle, manages her classroom exquisitely. She generously opened her personal library to us. She's very encouraging - both by praising our efforts and taking us seriously enough to challenge us to perform more complete work. Not only was it important to her that we receive the assistance we needed for this class, but that we see ourselves as writers in that we put our immediate work into a larger context." "Best writing workshop/course I ever attended and believe me, I've seen a few!" "Excellent knowledge of subject area; excellent control of group; great empathy for difficult disclosures; honest feedback - astute; excellent helpful hand-outs; I feel like I'm getting help from a master writer." "Paulette is a wonderful teacher - patient, informative, clear, articulate and helpful. She does a nice job of balancing didactic information, stimulating discussion and giving constructive feedback. She creates an atmosphere where others feel their thoughts and opinions are heard and respected." "Paulette has been a wonderful resource and offered valuable insight and criticism which has served to deepen and significantly improve my writing. She has a gift for helping a writer identify what it is they truly want to say in a work, and helping them recognize when they are (or are not) giving voice to that message." |
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| New Workshop "FINDING the STORY—and NURTURING IT" with Alan Cheuse Web Site: http://web.gmu.edu/departments/writing/cheuse.html
Cheuse lives in Washington, D.C. His experience includes work as a journalist, speech-writer, and social worker. Since 1970 he has taught literature and writing workshops at a number of colleges and universities, including Bennington, the University of the South, the University of Virginia, and the University of Michigan. He currently teaches in the writing program at George Mason University, and serves as book commentator for National Public Radio's evening news-magazine All Things Considered. |
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| New Workshop "CREATIVE NONFICTION: STYLE AND SUBSTANCE" with Lee Gutkind Web Site: http://www.creativenonfiction.org
Biography: Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of the popular journal, Creative Nonfiction, has performed as a clown for Ringling Brothers, scrubbed with heart and liver transplant surgeons, wandered the country on a motorcycle and experienced psychotherapy with a distressed family—all as research for eight books and numerous profiles and essays. His award-winning Many Sleepless Nights, an inside chronicle of the world of organ transplantation, has been reprinted in Italian, Korean and Japanese editions, while his most recent nonfiction book, An Unspoken Art, recently published in the Republic of China, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. The University of Southern Illinois Press recently re-issued Gut kind's book about major league umpires, The Best Seat in Baseball, but You Have To Stand! which USA Today called "unprecedented, revealing, startling and poignant." Former director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and currently Professor of English, Lee Gutkind has pioneered the teaching of creative nonfiction, conducting workshops and presenting readings throughout the United States, Europe and Australia. Also a novelist and film maker, Gutkind is editor of The Creative Nonfiction Reader (a series of anthologies, from Tarcher/Putnam), Emerging Writers in Creative Nonfiction book series from Duquesne University Press and Director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College in Baltimore. Most recently, he has been mentoring editors and reporters at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. |
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| New Workshop "SCIENCE NON-FICTION" with Richard Panek
Biography: Richard Panek is the author of Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens, a cultural history of one scientific instrument and how it changed our understanding of our place in the universe over the past four centuries. In addition to contributing a monthly astronomy column to Natural History magazine, he has also written about science for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Outside, Lingua Franca and World Book Encyclopedia. Before discovering (much to his surprise) the pleasures of science writing, he was the author of Waterloo Diamonds, the true story of an Iowa minor league baseball franchise's struggle for survival, as well as a PEN Award-winning writer of short fiction whose stories appeared in Ploughshares, several newspapers and anthologies, and on National Public Radio. He's currently completing another book on a scientific topic for a general audience, The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and Our Search for Hidden Universes. |
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| New Workshop "THE WRITER, THE EDITOR, THE AGENT AND THE TEACHER" with Tim Seldes and Susan Shreve
We will focus on workshop submissions and discuss with writers the various ways of looking at manuscripts from the point of view of a teacher, an agent, and an editor. In the process we will also explore the ways in which writers, editors and agents interact and provide practical suggestions for manuscript improvement and placement. We do not anticipate doing in class exercises. This workshop is intended for advanced writers only, though previous publication is not a prerequisite. Applicants MUST submit 10 pages of a work in progress. Biography: Timothy Seldes has spent most of his professional life in book publishing; beginning with 17 years at Doubleday where he was the Managing Editor of the Trade Department. He also worked at Harcourt Brace, the New American Library and Macmillan. Outside of book publishing, he was Assistant Publisher of The New York Post and the Public Information Officer of The Welfare Island Development Corp. He was Chairman of the Board of Poets & Writers for many years. Since 1972, he has been the President of Russell & Volkening, Inc., a literary agent which represents such authors as Annie Dillard, Marian Wright Edelman, Nadine Gordimer, Jim Lehrer, George Plimpton, Howell Raines, Dan Schorr, Ntozake Shange, Anne Tyler and Eudora Welty. He is married to the author Susan R. Shreve (who was with the Seminar in 1999 for the American Novel, as a moderator and workshop leader) and divides his time between Washington, D.C. and New York City. Biography: Susan Shreve was the founder of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at George Mason University and served as its director for three years. She has been a Professor of English Literature at George Mason for twenty-two years.She has been a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton, Columbia, Bennington and George Washington University, as well as a Bread Loaf Writing Fellow and Staff. In addition to her works of fiction, Susan has written twenty-three books for children published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and William Morrow, among others. From 1985-1995 she wrote and delivered short documentary essays for the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour. Her novel "Daughters of the New World" was seen as a four part mini-series produced by Warner Brothers in the Fall of 1998. "A Country of Strangers" has been optioned for film and "The Visiting Physician" is in development as a new series for NBC. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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