This year’s Winter Wheat Festival of Writing, November 6-8, 2025, was a celebration of twenty-five years of enduring passion for the art of writing on the campus of Bowling Green State University. The events from this year encompassed workshop sessions, a bookfair, two guest reading sessions, Friday Night Game Night, Winter Yeet! (a burning of our detested drafts), and the Open Mic & Reception followed by the finale of the Flash Fiction Battle to the Death.
My first session as a first-time participant was “New Perspective: Exploring the Effect of Writing in Strange Points of View” with Emilea Justice. This topic was a cross-genre exploration of writing from different points of view. I was immediately drawn into this journey by the expertise and preparedness of the presenter. Emilea connected well with the audience as she delivered her knowledge with a calm and friendly demeanor. I appreciated her insights and suggestions for both poetry and prose ideas and questions to consider. She also encouraged the participants to explore using different points of view as we took time to write in the session. I came away from this session feeling more knowledgeable and more willing to try something new. I also have two pages of notes and a solid piece of new writing that I want to add to my portfolio.
“Ekphrasis in Poetry: The Art of Essence,” with Mo Orr and Elijah Woodruff, was an immersion into ekphrastic art and poetry. This Saturday morning session began the final day with a fantastic description of ekphrasis and how to approach incorporating it into a poem. The presentation was virtually seamless, even with a small unavoidable technical glitch that was handled by the team with grace and humor. The writing portion of this session was extremely helpful in sealing the understanding of the content. As a participant, I valued the variety of artwork employed and the connections we studied of an ekphrastic poem in relation to three films prior to writing.
I also attended a zoom session from Canada, “Myth, Fairy Tales, and Folklore: The Art of Retelling in Short Fiction and Poetry” by Anastasios Mihalopolous. This was a richly laden session of well-researched information and ideas of the integrity of these works as well as useful and artful methods of developing a personal version of retelling while paying tribute to the ethics in the retelling itself. This workshop included two shorter periods of writing instead of one longer period, allowing the start of two new pieces for the participants. The presenter worked easily with the Winter Wheat zoom moderator to ensure a smooth pacing of this session. I was highly encouraged that we were given a list of places to send our writing for these particular topics for our future submissions reference.
My own session presentation, “Who We Are: Creating an “I Am” Poem from Collage Items and Words,” was a successful venture into viewing and realizing the value of crafting the “I Am” personalized box and poem for writers. Although I have presented often for musical workshops, this was my first foray into presenting as a creative writer. It was interesting to me as a presenter to note that though many of the participants seemed to absorb the premise of both of these aspects, there was a small number of people who shared that the singularity of either the act of making the box or the act of creating the poem was more helpful to them. I was especially thrilled when an initially doubting participant approached me after the session, exclaiming over the meaningfulness of the activity to them, success!
As a new participant and presenter to the Winter Wheat Festival of Writing, I must say how grateful I am for this fantastic venue. The chance to build community through meeting new and old writing friends, to connect with the Mid-American Review readership, to learn new techniques and styles, to write and share within new experiences, and to shop an onsite bookfair all in one place is an amazing occurrence, and unbelievably at no cost. My sincere gratitude I extend to everyone who contributed to this event, and especially to Hannah Goss, Winter Wheat Coordinator, and Abigail Cloud, our fearless leader. I will be a gatherer of Winter Wheat for life.