Winter Wheat 2016: Fiction Panel Features

Do you like fiction? Check out these 5 panels at this year’s Winter Wheat!

 

“On Writing Horror: Avoiding Ghastly Clichés,” with Olivia Zolciak and Tanja Vierrether

Creepy dolls, dark basements, experiments gone wrong, and groups splitting up and encountering their inevitable doom. It’s all been done before, but there’s something about the horror genre that keeps readers craving that visceral fear of the unknown and unexplainable. Therefore, it is important to engage readers in a genre that is constantly reproducing similar motifs. In this workshop, we will discuss common horror fiction clichés and how to work in a space defined by them.

Olivia Zolciak is an MA student in English at BGSU and an assistant editor with Mid-American Review.

Tanja Vierrether is an MA student in German at BGSU and an assistant editor with Mid-American Review.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A8 when you register!)

 

“Death in the Afternoon—at Winter Wheat: Writing Believable Death Scenes,” with Nick Heeb

In this workshop, participants will learn innovative ways to write death scenes in their fiction. Participants will have an opportunity to write their scene depicting the death of a character—remember, the death doesn’t need to be violent, it just needs to be authentic. Please come prepared with a character you’re ready to kill off!

Nick Heeb was born in western South Dakota. He is currently working towards an MFA in fiction at BGSU.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 4:30-5:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select B4 when you register!)

 

“Stories as Jokes/Jokes as Stories,” with Samuel J. Adams

In this workshop, we will examine jokes and stories that follow a punch line/non-sequitur structure. After reading Saki’s exemplary The Open Window, we will review academic theories of jokes and then briefly discuss fictional works that follow this structure, along with some time-honored jokes and acts from comedians who have mastered the art of storytelling. After that, we will generate stories that adhere to this structure, either by fleshing out a joke we already know, or turning a humorous instance from our lives into comedic writing. A few participants will perform their work at the end of class.

Samuel J. Adams was born in Japan and grew up in Northern California. Before entering BGSU’s MFA program in fiction, he taught school in Estonia, wrote for lifestyle magazines, made wine, and managed a vocational program for adults with disabilities. And no, he is not named after the beer.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 9:30-10:45am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select C2 when you register!)

 

“The Protruding Moment in Fiction,” with Brad Felver

This session will investigate the “protruding moment” in fiction—big, often bizarre, memorable events that tend to stick in the reader’s brain long after finishing reading. We will consider what makes a moment truly protrude: the anatomy of them, their benefits and potential pitfalls, and how to structure stories to best make use of them. Ultimately, we will start sketching out some ideas for protruding moments in our own work.

Brad Felver’s stories have recently appeared in One Story, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, and Zone 3, among other places. He teaches at BGSU.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 11:00-12:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D3 when you register!)

 

“Have Some Backbone: Using Unexpected Structures to Challenge Your Prose,” with Jameelah Lang

As a writer, it’s sometimes easy to fall into expected patterns in your work, depending upon a few reliable tricks for plot, structure, and language; this can lead to a writing rut or prevent your work from making leaps and strides. We will amass new tools for dealing with structure in prose, taking a critical lens to the ways that emerging and experimental writers disrupt structural patterns. We will discuss examples of interesting patterns in text, song, and film, establish some ground rules for how they are used, and practice applying them to our own work in freewrites and writing exercises.

Jameelah Lang is an Assistant Professor of English at Franklin College and holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. Her fiction recently appears in The Kenyon Review and Pleiades. She has received awards from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, VCCA, and Hub City Writers Project.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select F6 when you register!)

Winter Wheat 2016: Poetry Panel Features Part III

We wrap up our Winter Wheat poetry panel features with these last 5 amazing workshops. Be sure to check them out!

 

“That’s Absurd! How to Write Absurdist Poetry,” with Jen Pelto

Whether you’re still Waiting for Godot or undergoing a Metamorphosis, this workshop will discuss the thematic and philosophical elements of absurdism, provide post-postmodern examples from working writers, and give you the space to play with language to write your own absurd poems!

Jen Pelto is a poet and taxidermist who hails from West Michigan, pursuing an MFA in poetry at BGSU. Her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, Heavy Feather Review, Rock & Sling, and elsewhere.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A5 when you register!)

 

“Forcing Found Poetry and Reluctant Collaborative Discovery,” with Jessica Zinz-Cheresnick

Do you get annoyed by found poetry and think it lacks the creative pulp of other work? Or is it the only way you can get writing? Do you detest collaborative poetry or poems with multiple writers? Or do you embrace the struggle two people might have in trying to create one piece?

I used to devalue found poetry. I also hated the concept of poetic collaboration and recognizing that two writers wrote one poem. However, after not getting much of my own writing done in the last several years of teaching, found poetry allowed me to get writing again. After being forced to collaborate on a poem in a festival workshop a few years ago, I was rejuvenated by the resulting poem. I want to bring this life to your work too.

In this workshop, we will discuss found poetry, both its concerns and merits. We will also discuss the ethics of collaborative poems, the judgments of them, and the value in them. Then, participants will be guided in writing a collaboratively found poem.

Jessica Zinz-Cheresnick is a faculty member in the General Studies Writing Program at BGSU and holds an MFA in poetry. Her work has appeared in The Rubbertop Review and Fjords Review, and she also reviews for Mid-American Review.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A7 when you register!)

 

“The ‘Art’ of Poetry: Storytelling through Narrative Collage,” with Kristin LaFollette

Narrative collage has its beginnings in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements of the 1910s and 1920s and is a hybrid genre that combines elements of image and text. This workshop will examine works like Heather Cousin’sSomething in the Potato Room and Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and will give writers the opportunity to experiment with incorporating visuals into their own original poetry.

*Note: Participants should bring a laptop computer to the workshop.

Kristin LaFollette is a PhD student at BGSU. Her poems have been featured in West Trade Review, Poetry Quarterly, and Cordite Poetry Review, among others. She also has artwork featured in Harbinger Asylum, Plath Profiles, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Spry Literary Journal. Her graduate thesis was a work of narrative collage.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 4:30-5:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select B5 when you register!)

 

“Architectural Follies: Playing with Experimental Structures in Poetry,” with Erika Schnepp

This workshop will examine the often thin line between shaped poems and visual art, playing with the way poems can straddle that line, as well as the sometimes quiet way shape and punctuation can impact how a poem is read and experienced. We explore the challenge of curating Emily Dickinson’s letter poems to prose poetry and more explosively hyper-structured poems, as well as how to use forms and structure without the structure overpowering the poem.

E.B. Schnepp is a poet from rural Mid-Michigan who’s found herself in the flatlands of Ohio with an MFA from BGSU and a bad procrasti-baking habit. She is currently the Director of the Learning Center and Retention Coordinator at OSU Lima. Her work can also be found in Crabs Fat, pacificREVIEW, and Paper Nautilus, among others.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 11:00-12:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D5 when you register!)

 

“‘Raid the Other World’: Writing Prose Poems,” with Callista Buchen

Marianne Moore suggests that the problems of definition, of “trying to differentiate poetry from prose,” are the “wart[s] on so much happiness.” In this workshop, we’ll happily blur boundaries and focus on writing prose poems. We’ll look at and try out different kinds of prose poetry, exploring how the prose poem can “borrow” the strategies of non-poems, what Michael Delville calls the prose poem’s “propensity to transcend traditional distinctions.” As we’ll see, all genres are full of contradictions, and recognizing and exploiting these contradictions will help us create exciting new work.

We’ll write lots of our own pieces, using the prose poem form to challenge boundaries. We’ll think about both the boundaries of form and the perceived boundaries of content, since as Delville argues, “what is at stake here is the extent to which poetry, like any other discourse or cultural practice, can have claims to larger concerns in the world outside the text” (x).

Callista Buchen is the author of The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM‘s essay contest. She is an assistant professor at Franklin College in Indiana.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select F1 when you register!)

 

Winter Wheat 2016: Poetry Panel Features Part II

 

Our poetry panel features continues with these 5 great workshops that you can attend at Winter Wheat!

“From Lyric to Lebowski: Writing the Pop Culture Poem,” with Donora Hillard

What does it mean to write a “good” pop culture poem? How can poets use pop culture to access elements of love, anxiety, misery, hope? Led by Donora Hillard, whose most recent full-length poetry collection, Jeff Bridges, was released by Cobalt Press in 2016, this workshop will work through those questions and more. Participants will each leave with a poem draft that gets to the root of what we love—and why we love—in the public consciousness.

Donora Hillard is the author of Jeff Bridges (Cobalt Press, 2016), The Aphasia Poems (S▲L, 2014), and other books of poetry. Her work appears in Hobart, Women in Clothes (Penguin), and elsewhere. She teaches at The University of Akron and lives in a tiny house with the writer Andrew Rihn.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A3 when you register!)

 

“First, Put Pen to Paper: Instructions as Poetry,” with Daniel Gualtieri

Modern and contemporary poetry contains a great tradition of poems written as sets of instructions, advice, or even recipes. This poetic form can provide interesting structural advantages, a confident and assertive voice, and fresh content for the poet of today. In this workshop, we will delve into the nature, use, and assembly of these instructional poems, take a look at some examples from great poets of the past and present, and spend time writing our own instructional poems and discussing them in a small-group setting.

Dan Gualtieri is an MFA poetry student at BGSU, and a native of Columbus, OH. He writes fiction and creative nonfiction in addition to poetry, and thrives on continental philosophy, theology, caffeine, and sushi.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 4:30-5:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select B3 when you register!)

 

“Poetry as Meditation,” with Karen Craigo

For the presenter, each day begins with a poem—one that aims to change her own mindset and to encourage peaceful contemplation in others. Join this workshop to consider the idea of poem as meditation—a tool for connecting with a universal mind. Most poetic education is based on the very useful idea of a piece of writing as a flawed product that requires tinkering. This session explores the notion that a piece of writing might just be an artifact of the spirit, rather than a workshop fix-it project—while understanding that neither mindset suffices on its own.

Karen Craigo is the author of the poetry collection No More Milk (Sundress, 2016) and the forthcoming collection Passing Through Humansville (ELJ, 2017). She maintains Better View of the Moon, a daily blog on writing, editing, and creativity, and she teaches writing in Springfield, Missouri. She is the nonfiction editor and former editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review, the reviews editor of SmokeLong Quarterly, an editor of Gingko Tree Review, and the managing editor of ELJ Publications.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 9:30-10:45am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select C3 when you register!)

 

“Existence as Conditional on Others’ Perceptions and the Deconstruction of the Self,” with Remi Recchia

The goal of this workshop is to produce new poems centered on the idea of the existence or nonexistence of the self. The focus of this workshop will be to deconstruct your own ideas of who you are and see if there is a core “you” and how it affects your creative work. After a brief presentation, we will examine who we think we are as writers and, more importantly, humans, and challenge these perceptions during a discussion/workshop and in-session writing time. This session is appropriate for all levels of writers or anyone who is interested in existence.

Remi Recchia is an MFA candidate in poetry at BGSU. He has been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry,Cutbank Literary Journal’s online “All Accounts & Mixture” series, and The Birds We Piled Loosely, among others, and has a piece forthcoming in Ground Fresh Thursday Press.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 1:30-2:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select E8 when you register!)

 

“Writing a Love Poem that Doesn’t Suck,” with Luke Marinac and Lyric Dunagan

How can an emotion as powerful as love so often give rise to overly sentimental, cliché-riddled poetry? Is it impossible to wrangle this emotion in writing without feeling as though we’ve forgotten our pantaloons and lyre?

Although the love poem is well-trodden territory, it’s constantly presenting us with new and strange paths to assuage our confessional impulses. From ancient Mesopotamia to Kobe Bryant, we’ll examine how the love poem has evolved throughout the years and its function in contemporary society, then experiment with approaches to crafting a love poem that doesn’t suck.

Luke Marinac, a transplant from Appalachian Tennessee, is in the MFA Program at BGSU. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the North American Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Anamesa, and Stirring, among others.

Lyric Dunagan graduated with her MFA in poetry from the University of Tennessee in 2016. Her poetry has previously appeared in Cactus Heart, New Madrid and The Volta among others.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select F7 when you register!)

 

Winter Wheat 2016: Poetry Panel Features

The Winter Wheat Festival of Writing is just around the corner! We have dozens of great and intriguing panels for you to attend, from poetry, fiction, nonfiction, publishing, techniques, and new ideas for your own writing.

Are you a poet or just love poetry? Take a look at these 5 panels that are poetry-focused:

 

“The Poetic Image as Communication,” with Jacob Hall

We will have a discussion on the utility of the poetic image as a means of communicating theme, narrative, sense, and emotion within a poem. This will involve exploring hypothetical uses of image as a means of communication, as well as examining works from a range of poets who utilize the communicative image within their poems. Finally, we will have a workshop in which attendees will work to craft their own poetic images intended to communicate with a reader.

Jacob Hall is a second-year MFA candidate in creative writing at BGSU. He serves as the assistant poetry editor for Mid-American Review.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A2 when you register!)

 

“Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm.” with Abigail Cloud

An old Sesame Street music scene begins with those words and continues on to study objects that make distinct rhythms. Why is rhythm so often hard for us to grasp as adults? In this workshop we’ll experiment with ways to charge our poetic language rhythmically, whether or not we’re following a meter.

 Abigail Cloud teaches creative writing, editing, and publishing at BGSU and serves as editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review. Her book, Sylph (Pleiades, 2015), won the 2014 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 4:30-5:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select B2 when you register!)

 

“The Contemporary Ode,” with Katrina Vandenberg

Poet C.D. Wright said that the ode is “one of the few literary tendencies left on the lot that admits wonder and presumes a future.” In this hands-on workshop, we’ll examine what it means in 2016 to celebrate and wonder, noting strategies of contemporary ode writers like Ross Gay, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Lucille Clifton, and others, then put those strategies to work on the page as we create new work.

Katrina Vandenberg is the author of two books of poems, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World (2012) and Atlas(2004), both from Milkweed. She teaches in The Creative Writing Program at Hamline University, and serves as poetry editor for Water~Stone Review. She is co-attending the FUSE conference as founding editor of the undergraduate magazine Runestone. www.katrinavandenberg.com

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 9:30-10:45am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select C8 when you register!)

 

“Write Yourself as You Are, with Purpose: Feminism & Poetry,” with Roseanna Boswell

Adrienne Rich wrote, “the moment a feeling enters a body, is political,” suggesting that the intersection of feelings and bodies is political, which means that poetry is political. Helene Cixous demanded: “write yourself. Your body must be heard,” because we must meet ourselves in our own words, our own bodies, and not settle for someone else’s perspective. Writing poetry is not just political for the listener or reader then, but also for the writer who is claiming their voice as a valuable one. In this workshop we will discuss using poetry as a means of accessing identity, and attendees will be given the chance to draft poems with this goal in mind.

Roseanna Boswell is a poetry MFA candidate at BGSU in Ohio. Her writing focuses primarily on the voices of girls and women, and seeks to explore and interrogate traditional notions of femininity as related to gender, sexuality, and body image.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 11:00-12:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D2 when you register!)

 

“(Re)combining Poetic Sensibilities,” with Brandon North

Centos, erasures, Google sculpting, and other recombinant methods of composing poems are helpful with the metacognition of one’s poetic sensibilities. For both the student and experienced writer, composing with gathered materials is useful in reorienting, honing, or expanding one’s sense of what is possible in a piece of writing. In this workshop, we will try out several methods of composing found poetry with an eye toward critically investigating why we might use, choose, and/or combine words/phrases/sentences in crafting poems. After writing through each method, we will discuss the aesthetics we find ourselves leaning toward, both personally and collectively.

Brandon North is a second-year poet in the NEOMFA program and holds an MA in literature from Wright State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in decomP and UnLost. He redirects energy at centeringspirals.blogspot.com.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 1:30-2:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select E6 when you register!)

 

Check out these and other great panels on our website:

WINTER WHEAT

Chapbook Review: Whip and Spur by Iver Arnegard

Whip and Spur by Iver Arnegard. The University of Southern California: Gold Line Press, 2014. 64 pages. Paperback.

In this stunning collection of six pieces of fiction, author Iver Arnegard takes readers on a journey through the Northern Plains—stopping in locations in Montana, North Dakota, and Colorado to name a few. With each new location, Arnegard makes us feel at home as we explore the human and nature struggles that his characters are battling. We begin our adventure with “Ice Fishing”, where a man reflects on a woman that appeared just as quickly as she disappeared from his life, and follow other characters such as the woman in “Recluse” who tries to connect herself with the man with the pale eyes, as well as Eric in “Made of Land or Water”, who returns home to North Dakota to deal with his hatred for his deceased father.

While keeping with traditional story forms, Arnegard also takes new approaches in “Seventeen Fences” and “What Rises”, breaking sections off by numbers that hold importance to the telling of the story. But perhaps what is more interesting is Arnegard’s use of close setting and detailed location in each story presented: “If you have an old map, you might still find Farland, North Dakota: the sod post office writhing with moles and the Wagon Wheel Inn, glass shot out of each pane, front doorway open and choked by a knot of tumbleweeds. And if you care to stop and untangle the years, you’ll find the last great boom when the price of wheat was up, cattle prices up, even water in the rain gauge up.” Arnegard’s talent for placing readers into his settings is magnificent, and something that stands out exponentially in Whip and Spur.

-Olivia Buzzacco, MAR