We are proud to present this year’s Winter Wheat session lineup! Please use these listings to select your workshops as you register! REGISTER NOW
A Session: Friday, November 11, 4:00-5:15 pm
A1. A Cyber’s World?: Storytelling in Video Games Workshop, with Syd Anderson
This workshop will center around storytelling as it appears in video games and how it’s different from other more traditional storytelling genres (e.g. novels). We’ll explore different storytelling strategies employed by a few exemplary games and workshop ideas for how we might emulate them in our own future projects.
A2. Madwoman in the Attic – The Importance Reclaiming Women’s Stolen Stories, with Gen Greer (ONLINE)
This workshop will focus on what it means to reclaim the narratives of women whose stories were stolen by patriarchal narrators. Some famous examples of these women include Medusa (Greek Mythology), Dolores Haze (Lolita), and Bertha Mason (Jane Eyre). Together we will consider who these women were, why their true stories are important, and what we can do to reclaim their narratives.
A3. Crafting Prosaic Parables, with Christopher McCormick and Lucas Clark
Many prose poems read almost like parables, such as “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass and “The Dog’s Music” by Russel Edson. In this workshop we will construct our prose poems with the help of existing wisdom from around the world. We will be guided by the virtue of “quickness” from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
A4. Writing Into and Out of Landscapes, with Anastasios Mihalopoulos and Joee Goheen
In this panel, we will discuss the way we write through and around our tethers to place. This presentation addresses the amorphous concept of home, how a landscape upholds its own identity as well as one for its inhabitants and the way we craft narrative about place.
A5. Getting Published in LitMags: From A to Z, with Jamie Lyn Smith (ONLINE)
In this workshop, participants will learn the ins and outs of placing work for publication in literary magazines: from finding the right litmag fit, to preparing your work for publication, to setting up an author profile and working with an editor upon acceptance.
FRIDAY SPECIAL EVENT, TIME TBA:
Dungeons & Dragons: Tales of Initiative One Shots, with Billy Visnaw and Ruel C. Fox
B Session: Saturday, November 12, 9:30-10:45 am
B1. The Importance of Personal Narrative: A Look Into Melissa Febos’ “Body Work” and Writing Your Story, with Michelle Bellman
In this workshop we will discuss the importance of personal narrative as writers and academics. We will also discuss who our audiences are, what misconceptions we have about personal writing, and how we can get started.
B2. Brainstorming the Novel, with Lawrence Coates
Novelist Lawrence Coates will lead a workshop on conceiving and developing your novel idea. The workshop 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 work-in-progress.
B3. Native vs Newcomer: Perspectives of Place in Your Writing, with Caitlyn Mlodzik
You’ve thought about point of view, but have you thought about the point of view of place in your writing? This workshop will explore how we write about the places our characters inhabit. We’ll also take a look at the responsibility of writing about a place, including multimodal research strategies.
B4. Mask Up: Exploring Persona and What We (Don’t) Know in Lyric Poetry, with Jennifer Moore
This poetry workshop will focus on the possibilities available to authors when writing in a persona, or mask. We will explore definitions of “persona” consider the advantages and techniques of this mode, read examples of persona poems, and spend time drafting poems through various writing prompts.
B5. A Full Poem From a Single Word: A Generative Workshop, with Raegen Pietrucha (ONLINE)
This online generative workshop will share strategies to help participants develop entire poem drafts from the spark of a single word, guiding writers in real time through word selection, idea and draft development, and considerations for revision in the future.
C Session: Saturday, November 12, 11:00-12:15 pm
C1. Before You Came Into My Life I Missed You So Bad: Love Poems and their Reach, with Samuel Burt
Where pop culture so frequently reaches for parroted clichés, poetry troubles our easiest sentiments. In this workshop, we will discuss how the love poem demands more of us than tenderness, using the subject of love to pose questions of consciousness, violence, and the timelessness of the devotional posture.
C2. The Shapes of Our Stories, with Joseph Celizic (ONLINE)
From Freytag’s Triangle to Harmon’s Story Circle, the Snowflake Method, and even Kishotenketsu, we’ll explore various approaches to story structure. We’ll discuss how a story’s form can complement its other narrative devices and contribute to its meaning, with a chance to outline a story using one of the discussed structures.
C3. Inventing in Place: The Real and the Imagined, with Tyler Jacobs and Michael Morris
The poet relies on place and location to inform the shape of the poem, its language, and its reachability. Through discussions of craft and technique, this workshop aims to explore place, some real and some imagined, which we inhabit to discover, shake up, and from which we invent.
C4. Breaking the Frame: Fairy Tale Revision as a Radical Act, with Sara Moore Wagner
Fairy Tales are meant to be revised. First whispered by women into cradles, they were transformed into moralistic lessons and warnings by Grimm, Perrault and others. Participants will explore radical re-visionings in Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas, Harryette Mullen, and my work, then select familiar tales to break apart and rebuild.
C5. DIY Zine-Making Workshop, with Jessica Dawn Zinz
A presentation about Zine Culture and self-publish Zines. Why share your work WITHOUT permission and outside approval? Discussion of Zines then and now, word and image combinations, and creating community by sharing via zine-making. Participants will learn about Zines and create a mini-zine inspired by the panel discussion.
D Session: Saturday, November 12, 2:30-3:45 pm
D1. No Beautiful Corpses: Rewriting Patriarchal Hierarchies through Decay and the Grotesque, with L Favicchia (ONLINE)
Figures like Snow White are victims of impermanent deaths in which they are not allowed an exit from patriarchal hierarchies. Instead their corpses are kept beautiful, silent, then reanimated back into oppression when needed. This workshop explores how writing can dismantle patriarchal hierarchies by embracing true death through decay.
D2. Keep Writing Weird: Capturing Oddness in Fiction, with Dan Marcantuono and Chloe McConnell
Weird fiction is any fiction that deviates from the literary/realistic norm. It utilizes odd imagery and narratives that often apply to our own reality. We will be discussing how weird fiction is generated and the social impact it can have. Grab your ghosts, ghouls, and grandmas; let’s get weird!
D3. Exploring the Neighborhood: A Nature Writing Workshop, with Mary Simmons
In this workshop, we will look at nature writing in the context of creative nonfiction, using Annie Dillard as our guide to “explore the neighborhood.” Dress warmly, because we will go outside for a period of observation before returning to write our own nature writing pieces.
D4. What We Have to Cut Away: Using Landscape to Convey Generational Trauma, with Sara Moore Wagner
In this workshop we’ll explore the ways in which landscape poetry can capture and convey generational trauma and the self. Participants will write from various artistic and photographic landscape images, finding the one which most powerfully sparks a personal or familial image as a way to access often traumatic inheritances.
D5. Book Making/Chapbook, Journal, & Zine Binding Workshop, with Jessica Dawn Zinz (please note this is a two-session workshop, and will last until 5:45)
Prior to attending, participants are encouraged to participate in the DIY Zine-Making Workshop, though not required. This workshop will guide participants in a few book-binding techniques, encouraging you to hand-bind a chapbook, journal, zine, etc. If you wish to bind a book with content, bring the content with you.
E Session: Saturday, November 12, 4:00-5:15 pm
E1. Modern Illuminated Texts: The Poetic Broadside, with Erika Gifford
Writing poetry doesn’t have to end with putting the last word on the paper. We’ll look at examples of poets that add complexity and dimension to their poems by creating visually in the margins, then employ some techniques to make our own modern illuminated texts. Bring a poem to workshop!
E2. Palestinian Literature and Memory in the Face of Erasure, with Mays Kuhail
This session explores using Palestinian literature to counter threats of erasure to Palestinian culture, heritage, and history. How does Palestinian literature tell stories mainstream media cannot? How do we narrate our stories beyond numbers and figures? How is creativity influenced by the threat of erasure?
E3. Bird Begat Bird: Poetry Writing, with Paula J. Lambert
Long a symbol of union between earth and sky, the physical and the spiritual, poets have been writing about birds for centuries. And in a world where climate change has turned to climate crisis, where pandemic survivors are left to process loss and grief, where the world sometimes seems unrecognizable, birds are more than harbingers of myth and metaphor. Here, they serve as prompt for powerful new poetry offering hope and healing.
E4. Your Work Reimagined: Work Adapted for New Media, with Jonathan Maldonado
Participants discuss stories that were adapted for the screen and what has been lost or gained from the adaptation of fiction and poetry. Participants will reimagine their own work for new media. Participants are encouraged to share their work and ideas throughout the presentation.
E5. Visuals as Inspiration: A Prompt-Based Generative Panel, with Taylor Necko and Mallory Tinnirello
This panel will focus on all genres and how spending time with an image can generate ideas. Participants will learn about published works inspired by visuals and will be given a variety of prompts based on images to practice flash fiction, black out poetry, Vispos, etc.
E6. Fan-Fiction: Rediscovering the Childlike Joy of Writing, with Sarah E. White (ONLINE)
In this workshop, we will discuss fan-fiction. Sometimes, it is regarded as juvenile or not worthy of conversation; however, once a person realizes 50 Shades of Grey was Twilight fan-fic, things become more interesting. Fan-fic is probably how many people composed their first stories. Let’s rediscover the joy of writing!