Uncategorized

Are you a fiction writer and attending the 2017 Winter Wheat conference? Here is just a taste of the wonderful fiction panels we have planned!

 

“Beginnings. Where and How Does Your Story Start?” with Brad Felver

This session will aim to differentiate between strong story openings and weak ones. What makes one compelling and the other forgettable? How can you catch the eye of readers (and editors!) without relying on gimmicks? How much pressure is fair to place upon a story’s beginning? We will look at famous beginnings, as well as some lesser-known ones, as we discuss how exactly they are juggling all the various demands. Finally, we will spend some time writing some new beginnings of our own.

Brad Felver is a fiction writer and essayist. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in magazines such as One Story, Colorado Review, and New England Review. He teaches at BGSU.

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

 

“Speaking of Death: Dialogue & Funerals in Fiction,” with Dr. Kasie Whitener

Funerals are cliché and all editors will tell writers to avoid them. However, what if we just did a better job with them? This workshop provides samples of good and bad funeral conversations in fiction. Dr. Whitener will provide a checklist for evaluating effective funeral dialogue and some “shan’ts” and “musts” for novice and emerging writers. Learners will then practice their own. Seasoned and journeymen writers will enjoy this chance to break through clichéd treatments of death in fiction.

Dr. Kasie Whitener is a regular contributor to the South Carolina Writers’ Association Columbia II Chapter where she recently blogged “Writing About Death” and got interested in how to keep our universal death experience from dragging down the drama of our fictional funerals. Dr. Whitener is a member of the South Carolina Humanities Council Speakers’ Bureau, an entrepreneur and frequent workshop presenter to the Kauffman Foundation’s 1 Million Cups Columbia. Her fiction has appeared in The Petigru Review and Spry Literary Magazine. Her short story “Cover Up” won the Carrie McCray Award for fiction and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016.

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

 

“Using Prompts to Create Scenes and Character in Fiction,” with Susanne Jaffe

A prompt is a method to jumpstart your creative juices, and to get you thinking about the possibilities for a story, a character, a plot, or a scene. It is an effective tool whose primary purpose is to inspire a writer’s vision, not replace it. The class will consist of a great deal of writing in response to various prompts—usually short, maybe 500 words—and then reading a few of them out loud.

Susanne Jaffe is a former executive and editor in New York City trade publishing and the former executive director and creative director of Thurber House, a nonprofit literary center in Columbus, Ohio. She has taught at Thurber House and a library learning organization in Columbus. She is the author of several published works of fiction, many of them published traditionally and the most recent two self-published with 5-star ratings on Amazon. For more on Susanne, please go to either: www.susannejaffe.com or to her Amazon author page at: http://amazon.com/author/susannejaffe.

This workshop will be held on Saturday, November 4, from 11:00-12:15 am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D3 when you register!

 

“Brainstorming the Novel,” with Lawrence Coates

“Brainstorming the Novel” will be a discussion/workshop on conceiving and developing your novel idea. The presentation will feature an outline of the seven basic plots, some guided exercises that can be shared, and some questions that can be used to strengthen your idea or the manuscript you’re currently working on.

Lawrence Coates has published five books, most recently The Goodbye House, a novel set amid the housing tracts of San Jose in the aftermath of the first dot com bust. His work has been recognized with the Miami University Press Novella Prize, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction.

This workshop will be held on Saturday, November 4, from 1:30-2:45 pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select E1 when you register!

 

 

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 4^th 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 4^th 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 5^th 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 5^th 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 5^th 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

Mid-American Review would like to feature Winter Wheat Festival of Writing Coordinator and poetry editor, Coral! 

Coral Nardandrea hails from Ocala, Florida, a small horse town landlocked in a state known for its oceans, swamps, and glades. She got her undergraduate degrees in creative writing and women’s studies, which complemented each other more than you’d think. She came to Bowling Green to get her MFA in poetry and to get to know another small, landlocked town. This year, Coral is coordinating Mid-American Review’s Winter Wheat Festival of Writing and serving as an assistant editor on MAR’s staff. She’s enjoying the other side of the country (and its seasons) so far, though she wishes there were more trees.

 

Q: What drew you to the writing world?

C: Just a love of stories, really. I started making up stories when I was pretty little—all of my toys had extensive, dramatic backgrounds. Each time I sat down to play, I had to decide what the story was—who was related to who, their likes and dislikes, where they were from, what their goals were. Eventually I started writing those things down, because acting them out wasn’t enough. I was always reading, too, and that really nourished my imagination.

That shifted a bit, of course. In college, I was converted from fiction writing to poetry, and my appreciation of words and what they can do is always growing. While I still lean towards the narrative—a good character, a good story—my understanding of how words shape that narrative is much deeper.

 

Q: How has your time in the MFA been?

C: I really enjoy the writing community we have here. Our cohort is very close-knit, and it’s amazing to be surrounded by people who are creatively wired, who can discuss the pros and cons of Sylvia Plath’s rise to fame over a beer or two, and who will make time for a road trip to see Rita Dove in the middle of a school week. My writing has also really improved from being immersed in poetry and connected with people who love it.

 

Q: What makes you want to accept a submission?

C: I’m always looking for something that makes me perk up a little. If the language can make me say, “Oh, that’s different from the fifty other submissions I’ve read today,” I’m perking up. Also, the fiction writer in me always loves a good narrative. Poems have to matter. You have a short amount of time to pack a punch, to tell me something important, and I want to feel changed by the time I’ve finished your poem.

 

Q: What’s your favorite story/poem MAR has accepted?

C: This is hard! “Lesson” by Christina Duhig was a poem I fought hard for when we discussed its publication, so it has a special place in my heart. But I think my all-time favorite has to be coming up in Volume 37: Matthew MacFarland’s “Mosaic Floor Depicting the Rape of Persephone, Uncovered at a Tomb in Amphipolis, Greece, October 2014.” There’s just something so quietly haunting about it. It’s a powerful poem. I’m so excited for everyone to read it.

 

Q: What’s the best advice a writer has given you?

C: I’m lucky to have a lot of mentors in my life who give amazing advice. Probably the most helpful thing I’ve ever been told is to be kinder to myself. To stop saying “should.” There’s enough rejection in the writing business without adding my own doubts before I can submit a packet to a journal or print a poem off for workshop. I’m still working on this, but respecting my poetry for what it is has helped make me a more confident writer.

 

Q: Best experience in Bowling Green so far?

C: Honestly, each week has been its own grand adventure. Spending time with those in my cohort, whether we’re watching trashy television, staking out the Black Swamp Festival, or riding every coaster at Cedar Point, has always left me with a story to tell or an inside joke to reference. The people have made my experience here, and I’m glad to know them.