Regina Brooks

Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency LLC, a full service agency in Brooklyn, NY. The agency has established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. A member of the AAR, Brooks was hailed by Writer's Digest Magazine as one of the top 25 literary agencies in 2004. She has edited numerous published books and is the author of the children's book Never Finished! Never Done! Brooks is interested in a variety of nonfiction subjects including psychology and self-help, pop culture, health, women's issues, parenting, politics, current events, design crafts, alternative spirituality, business, science/technology, and she is always interested in new and emerging writers. www.serendipitylit.com.

1. What You Need to Know about Literary Agents:
In this session we will cover how to determine if you need an agent, a description of the different types of agents, how to find the perfect one for you and your writing, and how to make writing appeal to an agent.

2. An introduction to the World of Children's and Young Adult:
In this session we will discuss the current trends in the children's/ya market, what publishers are looking for and a brief breakdown of the various areas of the market.

3. Grab My Attention! How to write an enticing query letter:
In this session we will discuss what information should be included in your query letter as well as the format. Students should come prepared with a query letter to discuss with the group.

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John Calderazzo

John Calderazzo is the author of Writing From Scratch: Freelancing; 101 Questions About Volcanoes; and Rising Fire: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives (Lyons Press, 2004). He writes about a wide variety of topics, including the nature of the personal essay, natural history, Asia, Buddhism, and the interrelationships of science and culture. His work has been cited in Best American Stories and Best American Essays and has appeared in Coastal Living, Georgia Review, Audubon, Orion, Witness, and many other magazines. His nonfiction students in recent years have gone on to editing or staff writer positions at NY Times Magazine, Times Science Section, Popular Science, Discover, Archeology, Utne Reader, as well as publishing in a wide range of literary magazines. One former student, Jim Sheeler, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for newspaper feature writing.

Witching For Wonder: Finding the Extraordinary Inside the Ordinary
The great essayist and children's writer E.B. White once wrote that he felt charged "with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost." Exactly. I believe deeply that wonderful stories float around us all the time, everywhere, and that it is our job as writers - -our responsibility and privilege - -to discover the ones that most compellingly speak to each of us and to tell them in the best ways possible. Don't believe me? Well, I'll prove it to you.

Using the Secrets of Fiction To Write Nonfiction
I was driving in the country with a neighbor-friend and her seven-year-old son, Jake, when he spotted some aluminum cans by the side of the road that he wanted to recycle. So I pulled over, and his mom walked back a ways to retrieve them. The second she got out of the car, Jake leaned forward from the back seat and said, "Tell me a story." The desire to hear a good tale well told is universal, and this goes every bit as much for nonfiction as for fiction. I wrote short stories and got an MFA in fiction writing before I started freelancing fulltime for magazines and industries, and then later writing books, and I'd like to share some story-telling techniques to use in essays and literary journalism, including some ethical ways to make things up.

Freelancing Doesn't Mean You Do It For Free
Everything you want to know about the practical, money-making side of nonfiction writing, or at least what we can talk about in an hour or so. Finding the right place for your work. Selling a story more than once, or more than twice. To query or not query? What to do if you are asked to revise something before you have a contract. And why does it matter, sometimes a lot, where the main character of your story went to college? I'll pass on to you what a lot of freelancers and editors have passed on to me. Bring lots of specific questions.

Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon - "the finest spiritual magazine in the United States," says Annie Dillard.
Portland Magazine has won five national gold medals as the finest small-circulation university magazine in America (from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education), and won the 2005 Robert Sibley Award as the finest American university magazine of any size (from the editors of Newsweek).
Doyle is the author of seven books, most recently The Grail: a year ambling & shambling through an Oregon vineyard in pursuit of the best pinot noir wine in the whole wild world (May 2006, by Oregon State University Press, and October 2006, by One Day Hill Publishers in Australia). Among his other books are The Wet Engine (Paraclete Press), about "the muddle & mangle & miracle & music" of hearts; Spirited Men, essays about writers and musicians, and Leaping, essays about everything else. Both latter collections were finalists for the Oregon Book Award. His first collection of poems, Epiphanies & Elegies, will be published in 2007 by Sheed & Ward.
Doyle's essays have appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1998, 1999, 2003, and 2005, and in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion, The American Scholar, and magazines and newspapers in Australia, Ireland, France, England, and New Zealand. His work has also appeared in Best Spiritual Writing, Best Essays Northwest, and many anthologies. He is a columnist for The Age newspaper and Eureka Street magazine, both in Melbourne, Australia.

1. A magazine editor talks about markets:
Magazines, newspapers, and other markets for your work that actually pay cold hard cash for your stories which is a refreshin' idea altogether, and what editors love and hate about submissions, and how to target your work for magazines, and suchlike

2. Why essays are the coolest widest deepest most glorious genre of all:
And why they totally kick butt on poetry and novels and journalism, with sidelong jaunts into personal essays, travel essays, litry essays, science essays, and, the hardest and most wonderful essay form of all, humor

3. Storytelling as prayer and power:
And politics and crucial glue for human beings to keep shuffling along the suffering road for without stories of substance and zest and verve and pop and pierce we would be nothing but lonely liars

Deborah Grandinetti

Deborah Grandinetti is a former journalist turned magazine senior editor turned book publishing senior editor who still thinks of herself primarily as a writer. During her five-year tenure acquiring books for Running Press Book Publishers, she learned a lot about how publishing houses make decisions on manuscripts - things every aspiring author should know. She has been involved in the writing, rewriting, editing, or conceptualization of over 90 books. Her first book, which she co-authored for Rodale Press, sold over 200,000 copies. She was also a staff writer for five other Rodale books, including The Doctor's Book of Home Remedies, which sold over 17 million copies worldwide. She is the author of Sex on the Beach, Instant Meditations and the upcoming alphabet primer, A is for Angels.

1. How to Think Like an Acquisitions Editor
You—or your agent—have gotten your book proposal off to the publishing house. Now its fate rests with the acquisitions editor, who has the power to decide what gets presented to the team and what gets rejected outright. Capture this editor's heart, and he or she may even go to bat for you a second or third time, overcoming the objections of skeptical colleagues until the publisher says "Okay, I'm convinced. Let's add that to the list." What can you do in your proposal to help the editor win that fight? What really goes on in acquisitions meetings? That's what we'll talk about in this session. Prepare to think like an acquisitions editor because we'll analyze some short proposal samples in this session.

2. Keep the Soul Fires Burning
All too often, there's the writing your heart longs to do, and the writing—or other work you do—to pay the bills. Often it's hard to balance the two, and harder still to maintain enough freshness of mind to bring your best to the writing you really love. In this session, we'll look at strategies that can help. We'll also engage in experiential exercises designed to help generate more energy, time, and inspiration for the writing that fulfills you most.

3. Gift Books and the Seasonal Sale
The gift book market may offer special opportunities for nonfiction writers who have a great concept, but not much of a platform. Publishers who sell these books are a little like Hallmark in that every year, they've got to develop product appropriate for holidays like Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day (and sometimes, more generally, the graduation and/or bridal season.) How can you capitalize on this need? What do you need to know about format to create a viable proposal? Who are the players in this market? What can you expect in terms of royalties? That's what we'll cover in this session.

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Chris Howell

Christopher Howell's eight collections of poetry include The Crime of Luck; Though Silence: The Ling Wei Poems; and Light's Ladder, latest in the University of Washington Press' Northwest Poets series. His poetry has won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Washington State Governor's Award, and the Vachel Lindsay and Helen Bullis prizes, along with three Pushcart Prizes.

Saving the World from New York, or Why the University Press is Your New Best Friend
Commercial publishing is, well, commercial. Its object, increasingly as old privately owned firms have sold out to conglomerates, is to generate torrential currency exchange on behalf of its stockholders. It isn't that there is not attention to the quality of books published, only that, with any publication project undertaken in the commercial publishing world, the bottom line is now also the top line. For years it looked as though the small independent presses would collect the highly literary castoffs and bring them viably into print. This has occurred, to a degree. But, since the mechanisms of distribution and sale are now also increasingly corporate owned operations, the independents simply cannot, in most cases, bring literary works into the cultural mainstream, a situation bad for writers and bad for the vital conversation literature enacts. Enter the university presses on a small army of small white horses.

Hello, I'm Your Editor: Give me Fifty, Now!
Day Two:
What do editors at university presses (and elsewhere, for that matter) actually do? What happens to manuscripts after they find their way into a press office? How far can (and do) editors go in cutting, restructuring, and actually rewriting manuscripts? Who do you yell at when you need to yell? What can you and can't you ask (or expect) an editor to do? What makes a good editor/what to look for. These and other questions and topics will receive copious treatment.

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Kirby Larson

Kirby Larson is the author of five books for children. Second Grade Pig Pals was named a Seattle Times' Best Book for 1st and 2nd Graders; Cody and Quinn Sitting in a Tree was nominated for a Missouri Young Reader's Choice Award; The Magic Kerchief has won numerous awards, including the Oppenheim Platinum Award, Banks Street Best Books and International Story Tellers Award. She is also the winner of an International Reading Association Excellence in Literacy Award.

Finding Story in History: Creating Believable Historical Characters, Settings and Events
The past is a rich source of material for story and historical fiction is a genre that still sells steadily. This session will introduce you to three techniques to tapping into the past and provide you with the opportunity to experiment with them. Come prepared to write.

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Lisa Dale Norton

Lisa Dale Norton is author of Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills and the upcoming nonfiction writing guide Bad Girls: An Audacious Guide To Claiming Your Voice and Writing Your Life. She is working on a book of creative nonfiction entitled Ogallala: The Life and Death of the Great Plains Aquifer. Norton serves on the faculty of the UCLA Writers¹ Extension Program and recently completed an appointment as Visiting Writer at Pacific Lutheran University. She teaches at conferences and arts centers nationwide. In the 1990s she founded and directed Neahkahnie Institute on the Oregon coast. She lives in Santa Fe.

Truth vs. Fact: Narrative Nonfiction in the Post-James Frey World
What is the role of the nonfiction writer when telling a personal story? Given the fluidity of memory and the arbitrary nature of truth, where does the writer of narrative nonfiction draw the line between truth and fabrication? In this talk, Norton considers the writing landscape post-James Frey (author of the controversial memoir "A Million Little Pieces"). She discusses the responsibilities of the memoirist and the nature of truth in the personal narrative. Question-and-answer session follows presentation.

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Bruce Holland Rogers

Bruce Holland Rogers' short fiction collections include Flaming Arrows, Wind Over Heaven, and Thirteen Ways to Water. He is also the author of Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer. His stories have appeared in North American Review and Quarterly West and have won Nebula, Hugo, and Pushcart awards. Bruce won the 2006 World Fantasy Award for his collection The Keyhole Opera.

Collaborating With the Oracle
Using Tarot cards, magazine clippings, or other sources of rich images for solving difficulties in your text and your writing process.

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Rita Rosenkranz

Rita Rosenkranz founded the Rita Rosenkranz Literary Agency inn New York City in 1990. The agency focuses on adult nonfiction and represents various authors, including Pat Solley and Jason Blume. She specializes in adult non-fiction, including biography, history, business, self-help, popular reference, parenting, cookbooks, health, spirituality, music and general interest titles. She works with major publishing houses, as well as regional publishers that handle niche markets. She previously was an editor at various major trade publishing houses. She looks for projects that present familiar subjects freshly or less-known subjects presented commercially.

STEP 1: HOW TO WRITE AN IRRESISTIBLE NON-FICTION PROPOSAL
We'll break down the process of writing a saleable non-fiction proposal, which will help shorten the distance between writing a proposal, finding an agent, and publishing successfully.

STEP 2: HOW TO MANAGE THE AUTHOR/AGENT RELATIONSHIP
What are the tried-and-true ways to find an agent and sustain a productive relationship? Rita will discuss the many aspects that make the author/agent partnership work.

STEP 3: HOW TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN YOUR WRITING CAREER
You've got talent, and now you've got a book deal. What does a writer need to do to endure in the industry? We'll cover the options that apply regardless of the writer's chosen genre.

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David Wagoner

David Wagoner is the author of seventeen books of poems, most recently Good Morning and Good Night (U. of Illinois Press, 2005) which has been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. He's also written ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. Wagoner won the Lilly Prize in 1991 and has won six prizes from Poetry, which has published 171 of his poems, more than any other individual. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for 23 years and edited Poetry Northwest until its closure in 2002.

Your Source Material as a Writer
The benefits of keeping a combination of journal and commonplace book and unrevised madhouse with daily entries from the earliest possible age or before it's too late.

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Elizabeth Wales

Elizabeth Wales heads the Seattle-based Wales Literary Agency, which represents an eclectic list of narrative nonfiction, and mainstream and literary fiction. The Agency's first interest is in compelling and well-crafted stories, whether in fiction or nonfiction - with a special interest in writers from the West, Northwest, and Alaska. Elizabeth Wales has been with the Agency since it was established in 1990. She is a native of the New York metropolitan area, worked in publishing in New York City and moved to Seattle in 1983. She is a member of the Association of Authors Representatives (AAR). The Agency works with both major commercial and independent presses. Agency titles have appeared on the NY Times, Publishers Weekly and other national bestseller lists. www.waleslit.com

1. When is my writing ready for publishers?
Whether fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.How is a writer to know? How to judge and who might help in that judgment?

2. New York publishing deconstructed.
Who are they? Who owns them? What are they looking for?And, does my work fit in? If not to New York Publishers, then where else might I take my work?

3. A word about story and how important it is to the success of a writer.
An agent's point of view of how important it is to master the art of telling a good story. For writers of fiction, nonfiction, AND poetry.

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Carolyne L. Wright

Carolyne Wright has published eight books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali, and a collection of essays. Her new collection is A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), finalist for the Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her previous book, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Eastern Washington UP / Lynx House Books), which won the Blue Lynx Prize and an American Book Award, appeared in a second edition in 2005. Wright's investigative memoir in progress of her experiences in Chile on a Fulbright Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende, The Road to Isla Negra, received the PEN/Jerard Fund and the Crossing Boundaries Awards. She spent four years on fellowships in Kolkata, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers. Wright is Translation Editor for Artful Dodge, and on the Board of Directors of the AWP for 2004-2008.

Passion of Place - Writing the Land in Verse:
"The land was ours before we were the land's." Robert Frost's poem recited at JFK's inauguration speaks to us in the West, and particularly the Northwest, where sea and landscapes have a powerful hold on our imaginations and in the poetic voices and traditions that flourish here. We will look at poems from a number of poets of the West and Northwest - from Hugo's Triggering Towns, to Snyder's Zen reflections in the Sierras, to DeFrees's Light Station on Tillamook Rock - and reflect on writing our own poems about scenes and landscapes that move and matter to us, using as many senses as we can to describe the scene, and if there's a story associated with it, tell the story.

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Susan Zwinger

Susan Zwinger's books of non-fiction include 2004's The Hanford Reach; The Last Wild Edge; Stalking the Ice Dragon; and Still Wild, Always Wild. Her essays and non-fiction regularly appear in magazines and journals around the country. She co-authored Women In Wilderness with her mother, Ann Haymond Zwinger.

Ways of Knowing the World: How to include science, fine arts, and craft processes in your fiction, nonfiction and poetry
Great literature includes more than plot, narration, characters, action, and setting. Authors entice their readers with "ways of knowing the world". Knowledge of science, other art forms, and the craftsmanship of survival move the plot along, add a sense of reality, and give characters fuller depth through what they know and can do. How does a writer find such knowledge and integrate it naturally into the story? Your life contains such knowledge all around you, often unrecognized because it seems so "normal." Tuning an engine, studying the stars, pregnancy, the health of children, your grandmother's famous German chocolate cake, your sister's pottery studio, your friend's violin skill, the chopping of winter wood, the slaughter and skinning of wild animals... all contain science and all contain realistic connections for characters to their environments. Learn how to include such knowledge in your narratives and poems.

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