The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

Writing often describes work other than the work of writing to build narratives, images, and/or metaphors. For example, what do the chapters dedicated to whaling in Moby-Dick do? The making of chutney in Midnight's Children?  The preparation of lengua in Laurie Ann Guerrero's Preparing the Tongue‚ the cutting of greens in Lucille Clifton "cutting greens," the building of a Ford engine in Middlesex? Writing can document the process of other forms for creative purposes, certainly, but how far can this go and to what end?

Poet and playwright Sharon Bridgforth says of her work, "like most things that I do, it started inside of my own bone marrow and blood memories." In what ways do we write our memories as People of Color and Queer people? How do we survive in literary traditions and forms beyond those, like the literary canon, embedded in heteronormativity and white supremacy? This session will explore how we disrupt and transform narratives of "normal" in our writing to include narratives and experiences of disability, race, gender, and/or class.

Too often sex in fiction devolves into ghastly metaphor and unpleasant perviness, when passion can (and should!) be used to develop character, heighten conflict, and advance plot. Join New York Times bestselling romance author Sarah MacLean for a discussion of how to write love scenes that strengthen your book and satisfy readers, without being silly, stilted or shaming. 

Writing is not only deeply personal but cultural. What better place to discover the nuances of cultural experience than within your own family? Our parents, grandparents, aunts, and cousins are great sources of knowledge. In this generative seminar, we'll explore the complications of and uses for conducting family interviews to enrich your writing as well as contemplate when we should expand on a familial experience to craft more compelling stories. We'll brainstorm potential interviewees and questions we may put to them.  

Unarcheology is a queer, anticolonial orientation that asks us to examine how texts, objects, artifacts, bodies, and histories have been dug up and narrated in service of particular, oppressive ideologies—what we might understand as a form of archeology. Informed by queer, anticolonial aesthetic practices like collage and autoethnography, unarcheology asks that we intentionally engage our poetics in service of putting back‚ or reburying, restoring complexity and dignity to those texts and subverting those oppressive ideologies.

More information about this session is coming soon.

What would it mean to carry out justice in our fiction, given the realities of our unjust world? How do fictional villains differ from real-life ones? Should the hero's journey be a blueprint for stories when saving the climate requires movements and communities? Can we use the tools of speculative world building to prefigure a truly just and sustainable future? Touching on imaginative greats like Ursula K.

The sonnet is a poetic form that writers have turned to for centuries, and it endures thanks to its incredible malleability. In this session, we will talk about the sonnet not as experts, but as writers who are attempting to contribute to the "sonnet conversation" that poets have atttempted to weigh in on for so long, focusing specifically on the vehicle of the American Sonnet in our work. 

In this generative session, we will pinpoint the places where magic resides in autobiographical poetry. Through personal exploration and group discussion, we will find places where truth and magic touch, will discover how magic renders truth truer, begets an attentiveness in the reader, and locates moments more deeply in the experiential. All this opens narrative poetics to new possibilities of phantasmagoria and wonder. We will briefly examine contemporary poems containing some of these elements.

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.

Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) is an intense embodiment of some of the most challenging values in contemporary American poetry: she uses archival photographs of the wars in Korea and Vietnam (many taken by her father, a photojournalist and a central figure in the book), her own childhood drawings, Korean words in ideograms, Korean words in transliterated English spellings (to mean what they mean in Korean and/or what their transliterations mean in English), nursery rhymes, librettos with stage directions, advertisements, newsreel voiceovers, and more.

More information about this session is coming soon.

The challenge for writers who incorporate fantastical elements in their fiction is to sustain readers believability and emotional engagement amidst the unreal, the magical, supernatural, mythical, or surreal. Embedding fantasy in richly historical world-building is one of the most canonical solutions, whether the author pulls the historical details from one historical period/place or weaves from multiple traditions. Using passages from J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin and George R.R.