Winter Wheat

5. Ready to register online? Put away your wallet. Good news — no fee is required when you register online for Winter Wheat workshops! We encourage attendees to register for sessions online ASAP to help us with some logistics and session planning, but there’s no need to dig out your credit card. We do have a suggested donation of $50, which can be paid either online or on-site at the conference — and truly, every last donated dollar makes a huge difference to Mid-American Review — but there’s also no pressure. Donations are incredibly appreciated (and help keep this conference running), but right now we hope you’ll register purely to plan and sign up for sessions.

4. Got ten bucks? Take 20 minutes of an editor’s time. This year, for the first time ever at Winter Wheat, Mid-American Review editors will offer private 20-minute manuscript consultations for a $10 donation. This $10 for 20 opportunity provides personal and specific feedback on manuscripts and allows time for questions. Consultations will be scheduled individually with each writer to suit the writers’ and editors’ festival schedules. Spaces are limited, so sign up soon! Manuscripts of up to 10 pages (any genre) should be submitted to mar@bgsu.edu. Put “Winter Wheat Manuscript Consultation” in the subject line.

3. We’re 8 sessions short of a Crayola 64-count box of crayons. That’s right — Winter Wheat is bigger and better than ever this year with a mind-boggling 56 workshop sessions held over two days. Head on over to the sessions listing page to start combing through all that literary goodness so you can plan your time at Winter Wheat. In the meantime, here’s just a taste of some of the workshops that will be offered:

Selfie Revolt: How Millennials Can Rewrite the Coming-of-Age Story
Websites for Writers: Launch Your Website in a Weekend
Bitches Be Crazy: Portraying Madness in the Short Story
Blurred Lines: What Hybrid Texts & New Media Can Teach Us About Genre
Poetry and Nightmare
We Regret To Inform You: Dealing with Literary Rejection
The Sentence: Acoustics, Syntax, and Style

2. Did someone say Anne Valente? Marcus Wicker? Allison Joseph? Sharona Muir? They’ll all be reading at Winter Wheat. (View the full schedule of keynote readings here.) And don’t forget to check the workshop sessions page for more literary luminaries — like Matt Bell — who will be in attendance and leading workshops.

1. Off-site after-party! We’re shaking things up this year and hosting our post-conference event off-site at Grumpy’s in downtown Bowling Green. From 5:30-9:00pm, join us for some food, an open mic, a cash bar, and more. Who knows…as the night goes on, we might even pull out karaoke machine. (Important: Please be sure to to register for the off-site event if you plan to come!) We hope you’ll join us Saturday night to kick back and raise a glass to a successful Winter Wheat.

Winter Wheat: The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing, will be held Nov. 13-15 on the campus of Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Find conference details here, view sessions here, and register here. Join the Winter Wheat Facebook event page here.

–Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Photo: Malcolm Carlaw

We are now accepting workshop proposals for Winter Wheat: The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing, which will be held Nov. 13-15, 2014 on the campus of Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. Workshops are held Nov. 14-15.

Interested presenters may propose workshops in any area of creative writing, including but not limited to the craft of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry; publishing; revision; the writing process; and more. Each workshop is one hour and fifteen minutes long, and preference is given to workshops that include writing time for participants. The proposal deadline is Sept. 10.

Curious what type of workshop proposals we’ve accepted in the past? Here’s a sampling of several workshops held at Winter Wheat in 2013:

2013 Accepted Winter Wheat Workshops

“Whose Story Is It? Ethics in Creative Nonfiction” with Sarah White
Whose story is it to tell? You have a creative nonfiction piece you want to write, but it involves your mom, your spouse, your child, that crazy ex-girlfriend from high school…. Where do we draw the line? If it’s part of my experience, am I justified in sharing it? Let’s discuss the ethics of nonfiction.

“Haunted Places” with Catherine Carberry and Katrin Tschirgi
By exploring our past and collective memories, we see that haunted places provide a wealth of inspired stories and allow us to understand the intersection of past and present, living and dead.

“All Scenes Are Duels” with Brad Felver
In this session, we will examine ways to create and elongate tension in a scene. We will consider a few famous examples, discuss potential strategies, and then try our hands at infusing scenes with tension.

“Writing the Imaginary Landscape” with F. Daniel Rzicznek and Bryan Gatozzi
This exploratory workshop will offer suggestions and prompts for writers of all genres hoping to sharpen their senses of expanse and enclosure. Writers will come into closer contact with their physical and psychic surroundings while investigating the landscapes of memory and imagination.

“Poetry with Personality: Writing Persona and Character in Poetry” with Casey Nichols
This workshop will discuss the ways in which we write about people we know (or people we don’t), the challenges of writing from the perspective of a persona, and what our persona poems reveal about ourselves. Participants will spend time writing to create a strong persona or character of their own.

“Diagramming the City, the Experience, the Population of Butterflies: Using Maps and Cartography in Creative Writing” with Anne Valente
In this interactive session, we will discuss and test out using maps to enhance or even define creative work. Writers of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction alike can find innovative ways to use maps and cartography to diagram both tangible and intangible aspects of their creative writing.

Proposals can be accessed here. Please email your proposal to Abigail Cloud (clouda@bgsu.edu) and Laura Maylene Walter (lauwalt@bgsu.edu) by Sept. 10. If you prefer to submit your proposal via mail, please use the address below:

Mid-American Review
Department of English
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403

Good luck!

Join us Nov. 13-15 for Winter Wheat: The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing! Winter Wheat features dozens of panels focusing on publishing, craft, and technique for writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Keynote readers for 2014 include Sharona Muir, Anne Valente, Marcus Wicker, and Allison Joseph; Mid-American Review editors will also offer publishing insight.