Conference Schedule 2018

The tools of the trade remain relatively the same, but the size of the package—when it comes to writing “flash”—forces us to distill our stories into palatable, 750-word bites. Think of them as appetizers for your longer works, parts/chapters of a longer whole, or simply an exercise in brevity and lyrical concision. In this session, we’ll discuss the features of the form as well as a few recent flashes from Brevity magazine.

In this discussion-based session, learn about one author’s views and perspectives on graphic nonfiction, including recommendations for writers pursuing the genre, how releasing the first graphic novel has impacted the author’s life, and how the worlds of art director and author meld/don’t meld together as a career.

From the absences of Sappho to the specters of Henry James, the idea of haunting presents itself in many forms throughout literature. In this session we'll explore haunting as narrative driver and resonance builder. Whether you're interested in building a traditional ghost story, a tale of unrequited love or lingering grief, or lacing your work with outside influences, this session will help anyone looking for ways of building theme and image-based collateral in a variety of genres.

More information coming soon.

Learn an overview of an agent’s job and role in working with authors throughout the process—from signing to the publishing deal and beyond. This session opens for Q&A from the audience and is intended to be conversational, so bring your questions.

This session will explore broad approaches and philosophies to incorporating research into fiction writing. What are the goals of research? How can research be employed in fiction writing beyond ambiguous ideas of "authenticity"? How does one mine facts and histories for rich narrative discovery? A mixture of lecture and exercises, this session will ask participants to think differently on how we research fiction, and how to better employ acquired knowledge and expertise.

Here's the "what you need to know" about publication. We will discuss the publication process—every step that goes into getting your manuscript published by a major publishing house and all of the people who would be working with you throughout the process.

What makes a character memorable? How do you design a character that drives story? Great characters are not perfect. Some great characters are not even likable. At times, it’s character’s meanness, cynicism, and wretchedness that draws a reader to them and makes the plot matter. Great characters are complex, flawed, unique human beings—just like their writers and readers.

In this session, we will examine four fundamental elements of narrative and how they fit together to craft a story that readers won't want to put down.

We will focus upon the complex matters of temporal experience writers reckon with as they compose and as they revise. Participants should come prepared for an active discussion ranging over broad concepts and specific approaches.

Writing about the American West has moved well beyond literature of American Old West/Frontier narratives that were typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. A new understanding of contemporary western writing is emerging. Sometimes referred to as Postfrontier literature, the more recent literary output of the region tends to engage in a reinterpretation of the region, calling into question the ways in which it has been defined in the past.

Some of the most iconic narrators in the history of literature have been nothing short of abject liars. Huckleberry Finn? Totally unreliable. Nick Carraway? Delusional. Briony Tallis? Humbert Humbert? Both Nick AND Amy Dunne? Con artists, one and all. In this session, we'll examine the art of deception, how writers can make their narrators—in any point of view—unreliable without alienating their readers in the process.

Publication is an exciting and daunting aspect of being a writer. You’ve put in an enormous amount of work in a manuscript and you’re ready for publishers to take a look. Now what? What do you need to know in the process to be prepared for a first book publication? Join Kristen Radtke, Andrea Avery, Dereck Palacio, and Kaveh Akbar in this mixed-genre session designed to help you navigate the journey of what to expect during the first book publication process.

This session will examine whether there is a difference between writing for young people and writing about young people and the unique challenges of writing stories for both adolescent readers and adults. Many stories star young protagonists who live in and encounter the same mature world that adults do. Whether realistic or fantastical, it's a world filled with darkness and light. But just because a young character is front and center doesn't necessarily mean that the book is geared towards kids. What makes a book a book specifically for young people?

What makes a sentence so powerful and enduring that it will stick in your mind forever? In this session, we’ll take a look at some beautiful sentences and try to figure out exactly what makes them work, what distinguishes a writer’s style at the syntax level, and where the music of prose resides. We’ll talk about the sentence as the unit of composition in fiction, and take a look at some examples of revised sentences from published writers to see how they made their words sing. You’ll be asked to respond to these examples critically and creatively.

You reach a crucial moment in your short story, novel, or essay; do you employ dialogue or narrative prose? When do we want the reader to eavesdrop on a scene in real time . . . and when do we want to simply "fill in the blanks" on what happened? We'll explore the nature of dialogue, its use and misuse, and its relationship to story and character.

A talk about American regionalism, the Western, and reading and writing the American West today.

Transcendent American poet Max Ritvo wrote that if the world outside a poet’s head is more interesting than the world inside their head, they might as well become a journalist. His point: it’s what’s inside the poet’s mind, what (or who) is hooting or singing or moaning or gagging inside the poet’s own totally unique psychic ecosystem that allows the poet access to a singular voice.

Arts-Based Research has been gaining traction in the social sciences, specifically regarding the use of personal poetry as a means of recording the stories of the marginalized, as well as the use of ethnographic poetry as a means of inscribing the cultural record. This session will explore the ways in which poetry can simultaneously act as cultural document and vehicle for social transformation.

Of all the revising that happens when crafting a novel, perhaps the most effort goes into writing (and rewriting, and rewriting…) the beginning. Finding the right opening can be difficult, and it’s easy to become blind to your own work. In this interactive session, we’ll discuss how to find where your story really starts, and help willing participants identify the real beginnings of their stories. Bring the first page of your novel if you want to participate in this impromptu session.

Ever wished your sentences could warp a reader's sense of time like a high-speed camera slowing motion? We will be looking at sentences in poems and prose that impact our perception of time. This session will include a rich discussion of a few examples and a writing exercise.

In today’s publishing industry, author promotion lies in the hands of the individual author as much as the publisher. With the increasing number of small and varied presses, a writer’s understanding of their role during and after the publication process is crucial. How do you build networks, find reviews, obtain interviews, and help get the word out about your work? Join authors Daniel José Older, Kaveh Akbar and Nina McConigley as they discuss what it means to involve yourself in publishing and the ways contemporary writers work with their publishers to shape and market their books.

What are genres? Why do we have them? How do genres reflect real-life events? And most importantly, when you decide to write about zombies or spaceships, what are you committing yourself to? What do these things usually mean, and what do they mean to you personally? In this session, we will discuss how to use genres mindfully, and create stories that make good use of them.

We will explore how animals can infuse the literary imagination with dramatic and comic irony. Poets as diverse as D.H. Lawrence, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, and Mark Doty (just to name some noted examples) express both the ambitions and limits of human "knowing" by acknowledging the ways that animals (both domestic and wild) often lead us away from custom.

More information coming soon

A good collection must become more than the sum of its disparate parts, which requires some thought as to architectures and resonances. Yet structures in literary collections are rarely discussed or theorized or talked about. So we'll discuss fruitful ways to use architectures in collections—of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.

“Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.” –Nabokov.

Revision is an ongoing part of any writer’s processes. While each draft is a huge accomplishment, how do you move your draft into the revision process? How do you elevate your writing to the next level? Authors Kevin McIlvoy, Claire Vaye Watkins and Alix Ohlin share hands-on approaches to the techniques of revision, personal strategies that work for them, how to see revision as a creative act., the habits of revision, and more.  

After this panel, the conference will conclude with a few words from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

How do you approach creative writing in a multilingual landscape? Join critically acclaimed author, translator, and educator, Achy Obejas, to explore how authors use codeswitching, bilingualism and multiple languages in the same text to highlight culture, the necessity of home languages, and to demonstrate new creative paths for their writing. When and how do we codeswitch? To what to end do we use codeswitching in our art? What does it mean for our single language readers when these techniques are employed?

We too often rely on a “good/bad” binary to shape our characters and considerations in our stories. How do our complexities as human beings find their way to the page? In this generative workshop, join poet, essayist, and cultural critic, Hanif Abdurraqib, on an exploration on empathy and the dynamics of character in popular culture. The group will use an empathy tree in which participants figure out which characters in popular culture they find empathetic or non-empathetic.

Many of us come to writing through a love of reading: the strike of literary lightning, a certain line or phrase that stays with us for years. As we continue to grow as writers and participate in the community, our creative process evolves, being shaped and informed by the relationships we have with the works of others.

Every single poet has complex roots – whether his/her/their family has lived in the States for generations or arrived here recently. This session provides poets the space and freedom to generate material that examines their cultural and linguistic identities in a safe environment. This workshop gives us permission to write about our roots, to learn more about how to use code-switching, and to become mindful of the musical friction and affinities between our English accents and Standard American English.

Throughout the world people are trying to figure out how to connect, how to talk about things that matter without having those conversations devolve into chaos. Many are turning to the written word. But, how do we write about provocative topics without sounding like we're standing on a soapbox or shouting through a bullhorn? This session will provide a framework for how to write about controversial issues in ways that open the hearts and minds of your readers and that may even lead to true healing and change. 

Have a great idea for a novel but don't know how to start it? Stuck in the middle of novel-drafting and stalling out? Much of writing a novel through to its end is about what is set up by its premise. A novel, a great writer once said, is a structural machine. That structure begins at the beginning. Agents and editors want to see the first 50 pages of the novel for a reason--a lot has to happen in those 50 pages to sustain a book-length work of fiction. What exactly makes an inciting incident, though? Exploring that question will help the writer set the groundwork for a novel.

The current atmosphere of sensational opinion and clickbait headlines obsessed with a chaos-driven president has created a national eruption of misinformed dissent. In Arizona, artists and activists have seen a microcosm of present dangerous policies, electoral/resistance strategies. After the passing of SB1070, we gathered our truths to culturally and historically inform the present rhetoric of problem-solving. In this session, we will discuss how storytelling can and should function in the political sphere.

Do you need to re-energize your writing? Looking for a fun and generative way to get your artistic momentum flowing? In this session, we’ll discuss how short, timed writing prompts can stimulate creativity, and demonstrate how individuals may express themselves through creative writing in ways they never believed possible. Many people are drawn to using this technique and find that they are able to move pen to paper with ease, even after gaps and breaks within their writing. We will put this technique into action to rediscover, wonder, and harness our creativity together.

What does it mean to explore the actual lives of others? What do we know of disability and how do we write about it? How do we preform disability? Join writer, director, and performer, Terry Galloway in exploring disability in creative writing and performance. In this session participants will spend fifteen minutes writing as frankly as they can about the subject, using as prompts either their experiences with disability or their impressions of disability.

The diverse world of literary publishing is changing more rapidly than ever. We will examine several top markets, identifying trends in design, editorial preferences, leadership, and technology. We will also discuss methods for managing submissions in a fast-paced publishing environment. 

This session explores the role of history in contemporary novels—of colonialism, war, and diaspora—as events and periods become catalysts for narrative and character movement through time. It will provide an overview of the “family saga” as a narrative structure: its merits and challenges from both a reading and writing perspective. What gaps are irreconcilable or inevitable in a novel’s spanning across time and through generations of characters?

Join career journalist, Mike Conklin, on his approach to writing creative nonfiction with a focus on the basics: establish the narrative, match it with an intended audience and medium, collect facts, and, depending on length, construct your storytelling with an organized, clear pathway. The structure of sentences, paragraphs and relative details carry the reader. Sounds simple and journalistic, but nonfiction writing is about facts---their use and non-use. Let them tell the story, and the writer provides segues.

In fairy tales, there are royalty and dragons, wolves and goblins, knights and millers—but think of the world they occupy. Who are the characters on the margins of society and where are they during the events of the narrative? In this collaborative writing session, we’ll pry open a single fairy tale to discover those hidden characters. After sharing our work, we’ll pry open our own free-writes to spot our characters’ tangly relationships and use these discoveries to further our narratives.

Martin Amis said that all writing is a war on cliche -- not only cliches of expression, but cliches of setting, character, even narrative style. Tim O'Brien wrote that what he finds lacking in so much of today's writing is simple imagination. We'll talk about rejecting the first streams of what comes to mind, about digging deeper: seeing, visualizing, recreating. 

What are the realities of publishing in today’s creative writing market? Do you have a work or a manuscript ready for the world to see? What is your plan for submitting your work to publishers and publications? Is your query letter ready to go? Have you inquired about an agent? Are you looking to learn the details of starting the publication process? How does a writer prepare for the next step in the journey of professional writing?

This session will examine how seemingly dry facts and figures can be transformed into the stuff of fiction. How can raw data - historical, scientific, or technical information - create drama, inspire metaphor, drive character? And how, from a practical craft perspective, can and should we use such information in the service of story?

In the U.S., upwards of 40% of the population is currently classified as overweight and there is a growing cultural awareness of the body positive and fat positive movements. It is becoming increasingly important for fiction writers to fill their worlds with people of a variety of body types. This session will discuss how and why to incorporate people of all sizes into fiction as well as how to deal with and/or eliminate fat stereotypes.

More information about small group check ins is coming soon.

In an article for Lambda Literary, writer Marcie Bianco ask the following question to authors who identified as being queer about the nature of queer writing in its relation to identity politics: “What makes writing ‘queer’?” How does queer writing move counter to heteronormative literary traditions and forms? How does this disruption reshape current trajectories? This panel will explore queer writing in this country and how it may be impacted by gender fluid politics and the intersectional influences of other identities like disability, race and/or class.

"You're not going to believe what happened at the party!" Who hasn't said that (or some version of it)? The truth is, we're all storytellers, but it's when we put our writer's hat on that telling stories gets complicated. In this interactive session, we'll use live storytelling to identify the key elements of narrative, decode the process we all engage in to tell everyday stories, and explore strategies to help us incorporate such process into our writing.  

When we think of narrative, we typically think of a series of events that chain together and ultimately lead to a conclusion: A leads to B which finally concludes at C. But how much time should we spend on points A, B, and C? How do we determine where (and when!) to invest our narrative attention? In this session, we will examine how various authors use time to give their story elements emotional and narrative weight. Through our exploration, we will begin to develop a philosophy of time that helps us make these kinds of choices in our own stories.

How does privilege affect authors’ renderings of the masks they employ? What exactly, for example, makes Anders Carlson-Wee’s “How To” poem, which recently appeared in The Nation, minstrelsy instead of persona? How does one avoid falling into stereotypical and indolent writing practices while engaging with persona?

How do we write about love in new ways? What new is there to say about the world’s oldest subject? In this session, we will talk about how to create a riveting relationship and a novel readers can’t put down—because if they do, their hearts will explode. What are some the pitfalls of writing in the romance genre—instalove, clichés, writing sex scenes, and how can we empower ourselves to push the boundaries of the romance genre?

A book is more than just an end of one journey, it’s the beginning of another. A book is an artistic expression, but also a product, and putting a book together is a production. Before it ever hits the hands of readers, a book has already lived a life all its own. In this panel, novelists Ramona Ausubel, Matt Bell, and Natashia Deón share their publication journeys, advice on what to anticipate in the publication process, author platforms, and author commitments once the book hits the shelves. How do you find a publisher?

More information about this session is coming soon.

In The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux argue that images should “produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is ‘like being alive twice.’” As we know, images are closely linked to memory. As poets, after mining our respective memories, how do we deepen a reader’s experience with the poem via the image? How does one draft a lasting image—an image readers will remember? This craft talk will explore the image, its implications, as more than mere scenery.

Is there such a thing as a genderless narrator? Why is it so instinctive to place and categorize each other by sex (female/ male) and gender roles (masculine or feminine attributes)? How do we read fiction when these socially constructed markers are missing? And why should we? To be inclusive? To allow gender-nonconforming readers to be represented in literature? To focus on the common experiences without the social constraints of gender roles?

Join four poets/ writers as they discuss the merits and shortcomings of the concept of empathy. These poets will focus on empathy as it functions in creative writing, pedagogy, performance, and currency to interrogate how these aspects affect othered bodies. How does the idea of empathy create a market for trauma? How are the performances of traumas used to placate the white gaze? Can there be new possibilities to describe and employ an empathy that is active and engaged in works, rather than the passive "feeling" of empathy that often functions only to benefit the empathizer?

Public art at its best moves us from where we’re standing to what we’re feeling, from communal showiness and placement to personal, abiding sentiment. In this session, I’ll discuss some successful public art projects of mine in the Valley, with lean toward their secret sense of underlying story, their context from the artist’s point of view. In contemporary life, art in public is out of context and, therefore, surprising: a mural making us feel something about an otherwise plain wall, a few words in stone around a lake helping us, in that moment, to see water differently.

An epistolary form offers intimacy and a sense of composure: the reader as voyeur, and the writer in charge, addressing a potential interlocutor, but one who will not, we all know, talk back—at least for now. There’s a sub-genre of the direct-address poem, one that might be both safer and stranger as a forum in which to work out a difficult idea: poems that talk to objects, poems that talk to some non-sentience. Why do we do it? To be freer of our own consciousness? To honor the ‘otherness’ we know must exist?

The current trends in contemporary literature reflect a deep sense of using personal narrative and/or cultural history as both text and sites of investigating some of the following questions: How do I heal what's been forced upon my body, my cultural and social communities? How do I use myself as an archive to resolve personal and social conflict? This workshop will ask participants to sift through cultural memories, stories and personal histories to generate poetic text as a form of self-healing.

How does the global village tell stories? How does the digital age change our thinking and our writing? Thanks to the internet, we are now used to events being broadcast instantly and simultaneously. Plural voices report on every issue, and text is always accompanied by video, sound and image. As we delve further into the digital age, we are increasingly comfortable with hyperlinks and hybrid forms and multiple narrators infiltrating our narration. But do we forsake a certain intimacy in our literature? Are we growing accustomed to the isolation of constant connectivity?

In this session, we'll explore some of the storytelling tactics used by writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeff Vandermeer, Paolo Bacigalupi, China Mieville, and N.K. Jemison to depict and confront climate change and its attendant ecological, economic, and political challenges, as well as the often uncanny nature of life in the twenty-first century. 

Why is it so hard to write about happiness? Are happy characters boring? Where is the conflict in joy? In this session we’ll explore the pitfalls of writing joyful stories and characters, and discuss why as writers we often shy away from writing the happy. With an eye toward the craft of character development and narrative structure, as well as lenses from ancient and modern philosophy, we’ll dissect diverse examples of “happy” stories and figure out what makes them work.

In this generative poetry writing workshop, we will attempt to enter the creative space by removing ourselves from the written work, thus allowing the poetic image to speak for itself. In this way, we can get outside our drives for individual gain and into areas of articulation that may help us discover something that binds us together.

Instead of only turning to Trans, Non-binary, and Queer+ (TNBQ+) writing to learn something about being TNBQ+, in this generative, experiential workshop, we’ll push further to consider and practice a variety of craft choices while immersing ourselves in the vast brilliance of TNBQ+ poetry. Come to read, write, and build community. And expect to be challenged and filled with delight.

What does an image do? How do images move or surprise us? In this writing workshop, we will examine how images shift, transform, and ultimately, move a reader. We will take our “go-to” images and explode them, looking at etymology, mythology, context and association. Finally, through writing prompts & workshop, we will read, write, and workshop poems that use recurring imagery to create tension and surprise.

The experience of fiction as truth, as a representation of Truth (with a capital T!), is its singularly most impressive goal. To achieve this, an author must convince through the senses, says Flannery O'Connor in her essay, "Writing Short Fiction." Sensory details are at the core of writer's ability to show versus tell.

What industry generates over a billion dollars a year and is run for women by women? Would you be surprised to learn that it's the romance industry? This session examines preconceived ideas about romance writing and seeks to illustrate how opinions on the romance industry have been misshaped by the patriarchy, are rooted in puritanical shame, and have been propagated throughout the centuries as dirty and shame-filled. Come with your inquiries and learn how this thriving and important genre defies preconceived notions, and how this exciting industry might be right for you! 

As Leslie Feinberg said, “Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.” As writers and readers, how do we engage with writing as the queer practice of possibility, imagining, and un/remaking the world? Listen to panelists as they discuss questions of creation, the queerness of writing, and the way queerness subverts the known and expected, changing the literary landscape itself.

This session will explore the current applications of poetry in medical settings via the body of work produced by healthcare providers and patients. Additionally, we'll explore the value of poetic therapy‚ from its American inceptions to its modern-day appropriation by medical schools, clinical facilities, and holistic healing practitioners‚ as well as the methodologies available to anyone interested in self-care and healing. 

When we write about ourselves, in memoir and autofiction, it is easy to weigh down the reader with the darkness and drama in our lives. Humor is a way to create balance in tone. In this generative session, join essayist and short story writer, Natalie Lima, on an exploration of ways to use humor in our stories, particularly when writing about tough subject matter. This group will use prompts and short readings from contemporary funny writers to see the diversity of ways to add levity to our work.

What makes for a good mystery? How can perspective and character be used to create suspenseful scenes and great reveals? What can lyric essays, poetry, and literary fiction learn from the plot structures of crime fiction and noir? In this panel, join authors from the Sisters in Crime Desert Sleuths for a practical discussion on the craft of mysteries.

Hear work from veteran writers during the lunch break

Three successful KidLit professionals share their many years of experience in children's publishing, from the start of a story, through the ups and downs of revision and submission, and ultimately to publishng and marketing.

How do we mine our darkest moments for story, and how do we sit in that place and get the story onto the page while maintaining our mental health? In this session, we will talk about how we as writers explore our own traumas in ways that allow us to be vulnerable and open, share the experience so that others can feel what we felt, and still keep ourselves separate enough to function in real life.

Throughout literary history, the notion of story has been communicated through linear narrative carried to fruition by a traditional arc. Contemporary hybrid texts reject the idea that this formula is necessary to organize story and communicate meaning. When linear narrative is stripped away, what holds the story together? In this session, we'll explore the universality of the body and its sensory perceptions as an organizational mechanism to organize story and orient and impact the reader. 

In this generative session, we will examine how the constraints and limitations of the page affect form and content to produce work that expands beyond traditional scale and presentation. The session provides poets the chance to experiment with form and scale in order to generate work that centers their own narrative and desire for the freedom of movement that we're allowed once we stretch beyond the page and physically enter and reclaim space. The session will also provide poets with examples of contemporary work currently in conversation with the session.

Ecopoetry incorporates aspects of ecology into poetic practice. In particular, through both content and form, ecopoetry often examines the relationship between built and natural environments. In this experimental session, participants will explore the idea of eco-architecture as it applies to a poem's form and shape. The discussion will especially consider how an attentive experience of place and space affects our sense of that place, and explore how that sense can be recreated in poetry.

Ghosts have been inescapable in our lives, whether they be reminders of trauma or versions of our lives that are now long gone. How do we ask questions about these ghosts in our writing? This session will look at how memoirists construct ghosts on the page and how they connect the concept of haunting to their lives and experiences. We will then discuss how participants might be haunted and how to bring their ghosts to life on the page.

Much writing guidance advises us to just sit down and write. But that sage advice doesn't always deal with the reality of what prevents us from writing. It's often not as simple as a butt not being in the chair. Rather, the anxiety that permeates us when we sit down to write is what prevents us from approaching the blank page. In this session, we will focus on writing through our fear and the negative emotions that too often thwart us. We will utilize goal-setting, journaling, and outlining, among other strategies, to write in spite of the dread that shows up at our writing desk.  

First-time memoirists and essayists often assume a direct translation between the person they are in real life and the life they make for themselves on the page. But an under-discussed truth about personal narrative is that our "I" must be invented each time, much in the same way that we recreate ourselves for different ages or situations: the classroom, the bedroom, parenthood, sleep.

Writing is an act that takes place in the dark cave of the imagination. We have to fight for what we can see. So how can we take the abstract and make it visualizable? How might we think of the drafting process as say, shaping a bowl on a pottery wheel? This talk offers up a selection of artistic principles and practical techniques from painters, photographers, potters, cooks, and sewers for the writer to borrow or steal.

Wherever we write, more often than not we’re stuck in our own head. How do we get unstuck? How can we find a good person to talk to about writing? How can we be that good person to talk to? That’s exactly is why we have developed a board game to give us some practice. Based in part on the renga—a Japanese form of collaborative poetry—this game places writers into groups in guided cross-pollinating writing activities.

E-readers and increased time demands have shifted how many readers consume stories. Shorter fiction (from flash fiction to novellas) is more manageable for writers and readers, quicker to publication and often more profitable than longer works. New York Times bestselling author Michael A. Stackpole has written in many series, and produced works of all lengths. In this session, he'll show you how to plot a series, provide some basic structures to use, and point out ways that your shorter fiction can create a new audience for your longer-form fiction.

The more specific the story, the more universal its reach‚ or so the adage goes. As queer people of color, however, the people we write for and about are rarely in the workshop or on the masthead. How do we write the stories only we can tell when educational and editorial spaces do not reflect us? In this session, participants will discuss notions of audience that nourish our work; craft decisions that de-center a white straight gaze; and strategies for navigating feedback from people we're not legible to, especially when they hold power.

Writing in dialect or vernacular can be tricky. At its best, is can give one's writing an organic sense of place and perspective. When mishandled, however, dialect can offend readers, seem reductive, and cover lazy storytelling. This workshop covers dialect—why and how one might choose to incorporate it, the choices one has to make when using it, and how to self-check against exploitation and stereotyping.

Camus once said, "the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." Over sixty years later, we would not be remiss in thinking of ourselves as tasked with the same momentous duty. So how do we defend humanity with the might of our pens?

Explore the possibilities of self publishing or starting your own small press. What does DIY look like? What resources are available to someone looking to make a zine, chapbook, or more traditional book? Let's talk software, art, and the benefits of choosing to take total control of your work!