2012 Craft Sessions

WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE: Sessions on Craft

Please review the selections below. During registration you will be asked to choose one craft talk from each session.

SESSION I : Friday, 4:45 - 5:45 p.m.

THE HADESTOWN COLLABORATION- THE JOYS AND THE OTHERWISE
-Michael Chorney

We will walk through the collaborative process that resulted in the folk-opera "Hadestown" by Anais Mitchell, Michael Chorney and Ben Matchstick and look at how a vague idea developed into a stage show & recording that featured Bon Iver, Ani DiFranco and others. The concerns, politics, compromises and joys of the collaborative process will be illuminated and discussed. We will listen to audio excerpts from early drafts to finished pieces and consider the delights and demands of working with others.

HARDER THAN DEATH
- Kathryn Blume

The old saying goes, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." And it's true! We all know Funny when we hear it, but finding the hearts and bones of what Gives Good Giggle is a tricky and elusive pursuit. Teaching someone to write humor may be like trying to teaching someone to be tall. Nevertheless, we'll give it a try. And if you've got some work which you feel could use a chuckle-infusion, bring it along and we'll see if we can breathe in some life!

IMPULSIVENESS AND THE STRAIGHT FACE
- Eric Ronis

What is it that we have inside of us that closes all the doors to the truly original and outrageous? In this workshop, we will explore the essence of improvisation, breeze through the calisthenics of performance, and prepare to bust out of our inner-penitentiaries at the Saturday night improv theatre. "Free at last. Free at last."

WRITING FOR RADIO
-- Philip Baruth

For a long while, I wrote commentaries for Vermont Public Radio -- snappy little things precisely 3 minutes and 14 seconds long, which works out to exactly one and a half pages, double spaced, maybe 5 paragraphs tops. An amazingly difficult form in which to tell a really good story, and working with that form has a lot to teach about what needs telling and what doesn't -- not to mention what things work on paper, but die on the radio. We'll write one of these commentaries, and try our hand at recording a few. And everyone will be encouraged to take their final spoken word manuscript public at the open mikes during the last days of the Conference.

ONE MINUTE MEMOIRS, LYRICAL ELEGIES AND CAPTIVATING OBITUARIES
- Paige Ackerson-Kiely

We'll explore the types of lives available to us by reading and writing our own in past tense.

FLYING TOWARDS THE LIGHT: MOTH STORY-TELLING
- J.C. Ellefson

During a summer fifteen years ago, poet and novelist George Dawes Green and some of his no-good friends gathered for evenings of story-telling on a back porch in Georgia. "Moths would flutter through a hole in the screen" while his bunch told true stories from their lives, no notes, no props, five-minute time limit. A year later, George launched The Moth radio hour on NPR, initiating an enormous nationwide following. In this workshop, we'll study Moth form and function, unravel the art, appraise the technique, throw the switch, take to the stage, go public, and watch the moths flutter towards the light.

LAKE STUDIES
- Daniel Lusk

Is “Champ” the soul of Lake Champlain? What lies deep within the lake? What do scientists and poets have in common? This is a multi-media talk about how this poet made poetry out of what scientists and historians, divers, and storytellers say about the lake’s mysteries and wild nature. Prehistoric people and animals, legendary shipwrecks, storms, ghosts, and ancient fish are among the subjects of his new book, Lake Studies: Meditations on Lake Champlain. Daniel’s presentation includes photographs and underwater video footage as well as Q&A. (Bring paper and pen/pencil.)

SESSION II : Saturday 11:10 - 12:00 p.m.

PRACTICE-PRACTICE-PRACTICE: THE YOGA OF WRITING
- Eugenie Doyle

Yoga is a Sanskrit word meaning, in part, union of body, mind, and spirit. Although reduced by some to an exercise and fitness alternative, yoga is a discipline that can be helpful in any aspect of life, including writing. Formation of words seems a mental or spiritual activity, however a physical act, the actual writing, is required to get words out of our heads and onto paper or screens.

This craft session is for anyone who ever has trouble unifying great ideas and the action of sitting down to write. We'll explore the use of a simple daily yoga practice with breath as the conduit to ease the passage of ideas into written words. We'll move and we'll write.

BALANCING YOUR WAY ACROSS THE RUINS: HOW A STRIPPED-DOWN METAPHOR CAN GET YOU THERE
- Audrey Bohanan

Metaphor? It's the weight-bearing strut of a word-trestle you come to, a shadow-play across the abyss your lines have just opened on, a cross-tied possibility that offers you passage to the bushwhack side of your poem. Come see if metaphor is as dead as they say, or if some form of it might give you the necessary footing to get your poem across and going where it never expected but always wanted to go to.

TALKING ABOUT TALKING: MAKING DIALOGUE WORK FOR YOU
- Anne Sanow

Dialogue in fiction is what makes our characters come to life, and giving voice to characters requires that they sound "natural"—which requires a lot of artifice on the part of the writer. In this craft session we'll review the basic types of dialogue (direct, indirect, and summary), and learn how to shape effective conversations on the page. Exercises will include secrets and lies, colorful speech, and other fun ways to break the so-called rule of dialogue being necessary to advance your plot. If you have a notebook with character voice sketches or lines of overheard speech you've jotted down, bring it along!

A POEM WALKS INTO A BAR…
- Kerrin McCadden

This workshop is not about how poems can be funny, or about how to build a joke. It is about how a poem can learn from a joke. We'll tell a few good jokes, figure out how they operate. I will tell you the answer: Jokes work because they turn…from one thing toward something unexpected. We'll study how poems turn. We'll read some that do it especially well. Then, we'll try our hands at it. If you want, bring a favorite joke and a poem you think is stuck.

COLLECTIVE NOUN JAM
- Tim Brookes

Collective nouns--the word used for a group or collection of animals or people---are fun, and often more than a little weird. A pod of dolphins? A murder of crows? Once you start looking at them, you realize they conceal metaphor (a parliament of owls) and even humor (a sneer of butlers). So what would a group of writers be called? Or a group of vampires? Geeks? Guitarists? We'll look at some of the more bizarre collective nouns already in existence, then you'll create some originals of your own.

INVENTING YOUR OWN STYLE OF POEM
- Geof Hewitt

Ever wonder who wrote the first haiku or who invented the limerick? Now it's your turn. In this workshop you will explore "the writer's voice" and how to develop your own, unique voice and attach it to a brand new poetic form that you have invented. Imagine whole civilizations of the future writing poems in a "form" that bears your name, same as a Shakespearean sonnet!

SONIC POETRY or HOW TO FILL THE ENGINE OF YOUR POEM WITH ROCKET FUEL
- Jenny Mackenzie

In this workshop, we'll take a look at assonance, one of the most crucial sound-based techniques in poetry. We'll look at a few contemporary poems, play a group exercise to get jump-started, and get you launched on your own poem. You can either start a new one or bring one you'd like to have take off.

SESSION III : Saturday 4:45 - 5:45 p.m.

DOODLING HOLDEN CAULFIELD
- Tom Paine

Picasso said, "the artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." You have, within you, an emotional response to the world that is as unique to you as a fingerprint. How to get at YOUR deepest, secret emotions? Answer: by doodling. Every doodle has an emotional "sound" as particular as a complex musical chord. "The voice" in great first person fiction, too, has an emotional "tone". That sound complex, but the simple version of this class is: we doodle, we listen, we write, we genius.

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE STORY'S APOCALYPSE!
- Diane Benedict

Tie on your chaps, buckle on your spurs, and get ready for a ride across the cosmos where stories are born!

In this workshop, groups of four students each will take on putting together a strong opening to a really good story. Here's how this will happen.

In each group (without, at first, sharing his or her writing with the other students in the group), one student will write a description of a main Character in a story. Another (again keeping the work to herself or himself) will describe the Place where the character is located when the story begins. Another will describe the Action the character is involved in when the story opens. And another will explain some Conflict the character is struggling with, either physically or psychologically.

The four students in each group will then share with each other what they've written. After that, they'll revise it a little to make all the parts fit. And then they'll present the story (orally) to everyone in the workshop.

The whole workshop will then pick one of the stories and finish it, using oral storytelling. Please bring a tablet to write in, your trusty pen, and your vivid imagination!

Props and play-acting are encouraged.

THE RIDICULOUSLY REVERBERATIVE STRANGENESS OF YOU
-Luke Farrell

In this craft talk we'll depart from the conventions of memoir and take as our guide Joe Brainerd's weirdly intoxicating cult classic, I Remember—in which a narrator constructs the story of his life through an extensive series of brief entries, each beginning with the phrase, "I remember." Sound tedious? It is. You are. We all are. And yet: how can the tedium of our lives become a medium for rich communication, perception, and narration? I don't know exactly, but my guess is that it has something to do with juxtaposition—between the specific and the generic, the sensory and cerebral, the poetic and prosaic: the ridiculously reverberative strangeness of you. Come as you are.

WRITING TO TELL THE TRUTH: IMAGES OF SOCIAL ISSUES
- Catharine Wright

How do we address issues of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, disability and socioeconomic class in our writing without resorting to stereotypes or sounding like we're preaching on a soapbox? One way is to use images, specific, gritty images, a drag queen's painted toenail beside the straight stripes of the American flag, a food stamp beside a Starbucks latte on the floor of a parking structure. In this workshop we will produce images of whiteness, blackness or brownness, bisexuality, heterosexuality, masculinity, femininity or genderqueerness, of wheelchairs and football fields… images of the issues that matter to you. We'll throw in a little dialogue, too, let the "voices" of these issues speak in their own language/dialects/slang. This workshop will maintain an attitude of respect for all social differences.

BLOCK THAT BLOCK!
- Geoffery Gevalt

This wild writing workshop could wear out your hand, run you dry of ink or wear down your pencil lead. You will write, write and keep writing without stopping, without angsting, without second-guessing until you reach the goal: A wondrous surprise! A new idea. Some of those ideas will be shared, but after a breather, you will dive back in and see what you can do to take this idea deeper.

I'M HEARING VOICES
- Mark Nash

Whether it's for the stage or for a story, it's often what your characters say that brings them to life. You can hear their voices in your head, but getting them down on paper can be tricky. Bring your dialogue dilemmas along and we'll use techniques from theatre improv to help you craft convincing, compelling conversations that'll make your play or prose sizzle and shine.

CREATING AN INNER SANCTUM IN A FISH BOWL
- Leon Marasco and Kate Harper

In this time of expensive social networking, when being connected is as normal as breathing, where does a writer go to find her or his authentic voice. During this craft session, you will be introduced to – and practice – some unusual tools that, over time, can help you tease out and dialog with the myriad voices within. The more of yourself that you can find and express, in the safety of your journal, the more you discover the essence of what you most need to communicate. Journaling provides the seeds for all of your creative writing.