Marc Acito

January 7-8, 4:30-5:30: Media Training

The life of the published author is distinctly bi-polar: you are either completely alone writing or you are exposed to strangers dealing with publicity, interviews, and speaking engagements. Self-described "publicity hound" Marc Acito will coach future authors on the skills needed for successfully handling the public aspect of their careers.

Marc Acito’s comic debut novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater, won the Ken Kesey Award and made the American Library Association’s Top Ten Teen Book List. It was also selected as an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times, has been optioned for film by Columbia Pictures and is translated into five languages the author cannot read. The eagerly anticipated sequel, Attack of the Theater People, came out this past spring. Author Jennifer Weiner says it is “Jazz hands down, the funniest thing I've read this year.”

A former opera singer, Marc is now a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and blogs at marcacito.com about his Quixotic quest to do something new every day. His first play, Holidazed, a twisted yet heartwarming holiday comedy, received its world premiere at Artists Rep in Portland in November.

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Bonny Becker

Bonny Becker is the author of ten children’s books including picture books and novels. Her books have been featured in the New York Times Book Review, read on National Public Radio and selected for the Junior Literary Guild and Children’s Book of the Month Club. She’s an instructor for the Institute of Children’s Literature and a freelance editor and writing consultant with an expertise in story structure.

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Carmen T. Bernier-Grand

January 12 2:00-3:00: Write What You Know? That’s Boring!

Write what you are passionate about. If you are passionate about it, you will research it and learn what you don’t know. But even when you write what you think you know well, you need to research. Can you describe with details what is on your back wall without looking at it? Probably not, because you haven’t looked at it with writer’s eyes. You haven’t had the need to research it. Researching is an adventure. It unveils facts that you probably have forgotten or have ignored. Research equips you to make your book—no matter what genre—come alive. But how do you find those hidden facts? How do you gather them? How do you document them? Carmen T. Bernier-Grand will talk about that and more.

Carmen T. Bernier-Grand is a faculty member at the Whidbey Island MFA program. She’s the author of seven books for children and young adults. Her César: Sí, se puede! Yes, You Can and Frida: Viva la vida! Long Live Life! won Pura Belpré Awards. She’s also the recipient of the 2008 Lampman Award for her contributions to the children of Oregon in the field of children’s literature.

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Stephanie Bodeen

January 7, 2:00-3:00: Getting Off the Farm

From a childhood on a Midwestern dairy farm to Africa and back: how the journey inspired one writer to create an award-winning picture book series.

January 8, 2:00-3:00: Surviving Your First Novel

From that sunshiny brilliance of the perfect idea to the hopeless, slogging trench of revision, this is the story of how to survive writing a novel--and perhaps even manage to snag a two book deal in the process.

January 9, 2:00-3:00: Mining Your Memories for Gold

Through a few simple exercises, you'll get back in touch with your five-year-old self and create a story based on an emotional experience you may not even remember.

Stephanie Stuve-Bodeen is the author of several award-winning picture books, including the ALA Notable Elizabeti's Doll. Her first young adult novel, The Compound, was released in May '08, and is nominated for both the Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers and the Best Books for Young Adults. A native of Wisconsin, she was a Peace Corps volunteer in East Africa, and has an MFA in writing. She currently lives in eastern Oregon with her husband and two teenage daughters.

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Larry Cheek

January 9, 3:15-4:15: Bending reality until it breaks: The ethics of truth in nonfiction

Every year or two we're treated to a spectacle of humiliation and an imploding career as another author or journalist is exposed for fabricating characters or blending fiction into fact. Where, exactly, lies the line we must not cross? Can we rearrange a sequence of events for the sake of good storytelling? Are we allowed to reconstruct a conversation only dimly remembered or one we didn't witness? Can we edit a direct quote? Are the standards different in creative nonfiction and journalism? There are no absolute answers to such questions, but in a 40-year career I've had to wrestle with all of these and more, and I have both provocative ideas and practical solutions.

Lawrence W. Cheek (Larry) has published 15 nonfiction books on travel, nature, North American prehistory, architecture, and a memoir about building a sailboat. He is currently architecture critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and has written on architecture and environment for many other newspapers and magazines, including Preservation, Interior Design, Sunset, and Arizona Highways. He teaches in the University of Arizona Writers Program and the Whidbey Island Writers Association MFA Creative Writing program.

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Madeline DeFrees

January 4, 2:00-3:00: Cool Drafts from the Whidbey Island Writing Well

In this session, a poem (or poems) will be read aloud (and distributed), then used to demonstrate the sources consulted to assure maximum understanding of the four elements mentioned by I.A. Richards in his book, Practical Criticism: 1) Sense; 2) Feeling; 3) Tone; 4) Intent. We'll note several helpful sources, both known and newly discovered.

January 5, 2:00-3:00: Four Kinds of Metaphor

Readers are sometimes unable to determine which two entities are being compared. With the help of a new classification for metaphors devised by Lawrence Perrine, the author of Sound and Sense, we’ll explore this important tool of understanding.

January 6, 2:00-3:00: Revision: How to Make Your Poems As Good as Possible By Using Matthew Arnold’s Touchstone Theory

You should compete not against the experts, but against your own best phrases or passages.

The first 20 to 30 minutes of each hour will be devoted to the instructor's presentation. The last part will be interactive, covering material the students wish to discuss.

Madeline DeFrees lives and writes in Seattle. Born in eastern Oregon in 1919, she entered the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in 1936 where she was known for many years as Sister Mary Gilbert. In 1973 she was dispensed from her religious vows. She taught at Holy Names College for 17 years; at the University of Montana (Missoula) for 12; and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) for six. Her publications include two memoirs of convent life, about seventeen short stories, and eight full-length collections of poetry. The most recent, Spectral Waves, appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2006. Her Blue Disk: New and Selected Poems, won the Lenore Marshall Prize. She has also received two Governor's Awards; a Guggenheim Fellowship; Seattle Pacific University's Flannery O’Connor Award; and the Maxine Cushing Gray Award from the University of Washington.

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Tess Gallagher

January 11 4:30-5:30: Not Understanding

I read a lovely short essay by Linda Greg once by this title. In the essay her premise was that she had been drawn to poetry by what she could not understand more than what was explicit and available. I realized that this was exactly the case for me also. I always craved the most difficult sort of poetry and enjoyed figuring out what made such poems tick. I even enjoyed, a certain amount, that I felt rather left outside the meaning. What I've come to feel over a lifetime of writing, reading and teaching poetry is that we perhaps are nourished by the very difficult poets in ways that teach us much about language and nuance and experience itself.

I would like to take three or four poets of some difficulty and present poems which are not easily available.We must admit we don't understand. But then we find "the way" that poet is working and come to companion the poem and to enter it on its terms. Such effort makes available work which is experimental and hermetic and whose strategies may be frustrating at first, but which do yield insights once we are patient with them. I think "not understanding" can be an invitation instead of what turns us aside. It should bring us to understand how individual each voice and imagination is and thereby we can respect those differences and learn from them.

January 12 4:30-5:30: "Don't Lift Your Pen from the Paper".

This talk will deal with those things which cause a writer to stop before the drafting is finished. One of these things is feeling that one doesn't know enough or doesn't have the correct details about something--that one has to do some research, perhaps. But one should just make a dash here to indicate the ellipsis and go forward with the narrative line. Keeping the momentum of the story is the primary thing in drafting the narrative. I am speaking about short story writing primarily but I believe the same works for novels and essays. There is an energy that can be lost and by keeping with the process even when you don't know where it is leading and when you feel fragile about how well you are writing is very important. Not yielding to the temptation to break the motion of the writing is a kind of concentration that can be learned. What kinds of things can be deferred? What can you leave to redrafting? How can you lean into the writing and let it pull you along? We can look at some passages of prose where one can feel the writer being carried and rushed along by the narrative itself. Speaking about this should help free up any tendency to worry the prose along and allow for one's most vigorous narrative impulses to lead the way.

Tess Gallagher is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Dear Ghosts, Moon Crossing Bridge, and My Black Horse. In 2008

Blackstaff Press in Belfast and Eastern Washington Press in America published Barnacle Soup—Stories from the West of Ireland, a collaboration with the Irish storyteller Josie Gray. Distant Rain, a conversation with the highly respected Buddhist nun, Jacucho Setouchi, of Kyoto, is both an art book and a cross cultural moment. Gallagher is also the author of Amplitude, Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray, A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry, and two collections of short fiction: At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and Other Stories. She will publish Selected Stories in fall of 2009. She has also spearheaded the publication of Raymond Carver’s Beginners in Library of America’s complete collection of his stories coming in Fall 2009. She spends time in a cottage on Lough Arrow in Co. Sligo in the West of Ireland and also lives and writes in Port Angeles, Washington.

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Greg Glazner

Three Talks on Genre

Introduction: About the time my second book of poetry, Singularity, was published, I'd come to a crossroads. Experience seemed so explosive to me that I wanted to try to get more of that intensity into my work. I started to try cross-genre experiments as a way of stretching out past the lyric mode of my first two books, to read genre-crossing writers (John D'Agata, C. D. Wright, and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, for example), and to read critics who'd written about genre. Also, incidentally, not long after I started this literary pursuit, my life blew up. The multi-genre novel I'm writing, Zeno's Cure, is the result of all of the above. My three talks will address some of the genre issues that have had my attention in recent years.

January 4, 3:15-4:15: "Pure" Impulses and Genre — Lyric, Narrative, and Essay

This session will focus on modern and contemporary work that stays firmly put within its genre—relatively "pure" examples of lyric, narrative, and essay writing—so that we can gain a provisional foothold in thinking about how genre functions. The point isn't so much to categorize the work, but to explore different writerly impulses that end up manifesting themselves as genre. Homework (or in-class writing, if we have the time) will involve some short exercises in differing genres.

January 5, 3:15-4:15: "Impure" Impulses — The Rich Strain of Mixed Motives Within Genre

It can be useful to say that some writing is more or less "pure," but it's probably at least as common for writing to have mixed impulses. Obviously, writing with complex impulses doesn't need to cross genres in order to be successful. In this session, we will look at contemporary writing that contains rich tensions in its basic impulses--verse that wants to tell a story, a narrative that wants to sing, an essay that moves by associations rather than by reasoning. The homework or in-class writing will involve some of these productive tensions.

January 6, 3:15-4:15: Crossing Over — Cross-Genre Writing

Why cross genres at all? Why is there increasing numbers of books that cross genres? When they are successful, how do they pull it off? This session will look at specific examples from genre crossing books. It will also chronicle a bit of the instructor's cross-genre writing in process, and if there is time and interest, an in-class exercise as well as Q & A.

Greg Glazner's books of poetry are From the Iron Chair, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Singularity, both published by W.W. Norton. His awards and honors include a 2005 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and the Fairfax Award for Excellence in Teaching. Currently, he is finishing a multi-genre novel, Zeno's Cure, and working on a music/poetry project with his band, Zeno's Run.

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Jill Johnson

THE WRITER'S JOURNEY: STORY IT!

Nancy Mellon, in her book Storytelling and the Art of the Imagination says, "Although setbacks of all kinds may discourage us, the grand old process of storytelling puts us in touch with strengths we may have forgotten, with wisdom that has faded or disappeared, and with hopes that have fallen into darkness."

If we were to "story" our writer's journey, what would the landscape look like? The elements? The seasons and moods? What humans or animals would be there with us? What ephemeral and mysterious beings? A trickster? A wizard? An enchantress? What would give us power and protection: our touchstones and talismans?

This three part workshop will whisk us from childhood to the present – and back again. We will face challenges we never knew existed and meet helpers we didn’t know were there.

January 4, 4:30-5:30: Session 1: What’s the Story?

Explore story types; clarify structures, formats, devices, etc. Discover which traditional stories are yours – and why.

January 5, 4:30-5:30: Session 2: Create it!

Create your own journey story – or make a traditional story your own (through a process of identification – not changing the story).

January 6, 4:30-5:30: Session 3: Tell it!

Tell your own story – and be a delighted listener to the stories of others. Discuss what these stories have taught you: about the journey – and about yourself.

Actress, storyteller, teacher, and trainer, Jill Johnson has performed and given workshops in the US, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. Her one woman show, "Little, But OH My!" received a national Honor award and has been performed on both the East and West Coast. She has given workshops on storytelling and writing at the Write in the Woods and Whidbey Island Writer's conferences here in Washington and at the American International Schools of Africa conference in Yaounde, Cameroon. Her essays on storytelling appear in "Tell the World: Storytelling Across Language Barriers" published in 2007 by Libraries Unlimited.

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Kathleen Dean Moore

January 10, 3:15-4:15: "The Nature Essay: Practicing the Osprey's Art"

Here is how an osprey hunts: soaring over water, patiently watching. All she sees are surfaces, reflections on the riffles, the glistening pines. Then the angle of light changes, or the direction of the wind, and the osprey catches a glimpse of a shadow under the surface of the water. She tucks her wings and dives. So it is with the nature essay. A nature essay begins with patient, loving, informed observation of a particular location. Then it pursues a truth briefly revealed in that place. In this talk, we will examine the essayist's art of moving between experience and the exploration of its meaning.

January 11, 3:15-4:15: The Writer in a World of Wounds

In a world of war and ecosystem collapse, many writers are reluctantly putting aside their novels or essays to write instead in the unfamiliar form of the political manifesto -- Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, David James Duncan. I've found myself in the same uncomfortable place, wanting to write about birdsong, but writing instead about birds with their wings on fire. How can a writer negotiate the competing demands of art and activism, hope and despair? What are the obligations of a writer in what Aldo Leopold called a "world of wounds"? What sources of strength and gladness will empower our work?

January 12, 3:15-4:15 :Colored Rags: The Literary Uses of Memory

"Memory is a crazy woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food," wrote Austin O'Malley. Maybe so, but those colored rags are an important part of literature and of the writer's craft. In this session, we will explore the uses of memory in a variety of genres, including the memoir and the personal essay, and in a variety of books, from Walden to Angela's Ashes. What accounts for the power of a personal story? What makes it interesting? How can a writer use memories to bring a text alive?

Kathleen Dean Moore is an essayist best known for her books about the cultural and spiritual values of wet, wild places -- Riverwalking, Holdfast, and most recently, The Pine Island Paradox. Her books have received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Oregon Book Award. She has written for Audubon, Discover, the New York Times Magazine, The Journal of Forestry, and Orion, among other journals. This year saw the publication of three co-edited volumes -- In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens, Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge, and How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V.F. Cordova. Moore is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she serves as University Writer Laureate and directs the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word.

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David Wagoner

January 9 4:30-5:30: The Best American Poetry of 2009

I was given the job by Scribners and general editor David Lehman of finding the 75 poems I thought were best in American journals published between December 1, 2007, and Nov. 30, 2008. I've done my best, with the help of several faithful scouts, to read all those and have spent the past year knee-deep in big and little magazines. I'd like you to hear some of the results of that search as a sneak preview of the publication of this anthology later in 2009.

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.

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Susan Zwinger

January 11 2:00-3:00: CROSS DRESSING: MULTIPLE GENRES AND WHAT MAKES US DO IT

Many writers work in two or more genres, and quite a few of them also paint or sing or act as well. Each genre feeds the others in surprising ways. Poetry deepens prose, fiction informs nonfiction, nonfiction adds to poetry, poetry flavors theatre, and drama infiltrates it all. Working with color and brush stroke enhances description. Working with tone, rhythm, and harmony teaches sound to prose writers. Can you become a better poet if you play the calliope? Might you write better short stories if you play piano in a brothel?

What are the inner desires which drive one to each form, and how differently do we use our brains in each? Very differently! Try writing a short story when you feel the intense need for a poem.

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.

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Sharon Mentyka, Ann Gonzalez, and Peter Davio

January 10 4:30-5:30: Selling Yourself Online

It's no longer sufficient for writers to write and publish their work. Today writers are also responsible for creating an Internet presence that is fun, funny, professional, engaging, attention grabbing and smart. This panel will demystify the technology of creating a web presence and discuss the many venues and strategies for selling oneself and one's writing online.

Peter Davio has spent many years building websites for Microsoft as a Technical Program Manager in Digital Marketing. He will share the basic techniques for creating and optimizing websites to appear in Internet search results, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live search engines. While in college Peter studied Philosophy and English Literature, and while Editor-in-chief for the collegiate arts magazine met his wife, Kelly Davio.

After posting information about her upcoming novel on her website, Ann Gonzalez was contacted by a woman who had the same first and last name as the main character in Running for My Life, and who grew up under similar circumstances. It’s true, the web is an important venue for reaching readers and promoting one’s work. Ann will share what she’s learned about opportunities for connecting with readers using the Internet.

Sharon Mentyka is a graphic designer, writer, and educator who has worked in the design field for the past 22 years, first in New York City, and since 1991 in Seattle with her husband in their design studio Partners in Design. She has designed identity programs, books, marketing collateral, exhibit design and signage systems for a diverse client list including cultural and educational institutions, parks and museums, and corporations in the public and private sectors.

She approachs and evaluates web site planning and design the same as she would any graphic project, with ease of use and clear communication being the primary objectives. Recent web site designs have been completed for the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, the San Juan County Land Bank, Pioneer Square Community Association, the Brainerd Foundation, and Commuter Challenge: Seattle's Commute Option Program.

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Stefanie Freele, Caleb Barber, Ann Gonzalez

January 7 3:15-4:15: Send Send Send

Three program graduates explore the process of submission, including targeting magazines, submission tracking systems, and their own submission systems for magazines, agents and editors.

Caleb Barber is a poet based out of Bellingham, Washington. He is a graduate of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts' Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program, with a focus in poetry. His poems have been published in many literary journals, including Rattle, Portland Review, LA Review, Poet Lore, Forge, Makeout Creek, Jeopardy, and more. There’s a good chance he’ll even have a book out in the near future.

Stefanie Freele: After recieving the 2008 Kathy Fish Fellowship Writer-In-Residence for SmokeLong Quarterly, Stefanie has joined the SmokeLong Quarterly editorial staff. She holds an MFA from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts: Whidbey Writers Workshop. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, American Literary Review, Talking River, Literary Mama, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Frigg, Wigleaf, Café Irreal, Permafrost, Hobart, and Contrary. Her collection, Feeding Strays, will be published by Lost Horse Press in September 2009.

Ann Gonzalez learned from her freelancing father that the key to succeeding as a writer is to submit. She values every rejection letter she receives because each one is undeniable proof that she is, in fact, a writer. Recently Ann has become a novelist and will share the particular challenges of only being able to submit one work every year or two.

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Carolyne Wright, Kathleen Alcala, Bruce Holland Rogers

January 10 2:00-3:00: Voyages and Homecomings - Working with Influences from the Literature of Other Languages

How can we as poets and writers open ourselves to influences from the literatures of other languages - both from reading translations of this literature into our native language, and from reading this literature in its original language? And how can such influences be sources of inspiration for our own work? In this panel, we will focus, among works from other languages, on the influences of Spanish and Latin American poetry and prose - the work of Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Paz, Isabel Allende and others, as well as of the ubiquitous Garcías: García Lorca and García Márquez! How does this literature affect us in differing ways if we absorb it through reading translations, as contrasted with (for those writers who are bilingual or bi-cultural) experiencing it in the original language? And what about influences derived from translating, which is just about the closest form of reading there is? Panel members will discuss their own experiences with such influences - no anxiety of influence required!

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