€¦ · web viewpick up your conference packet, grab a cup of coffee or tea, reunite with other...

“Lighthouse” by John Loo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Program

Lighthouse Writers’ Conference & Retreatfor Goddard College MFAW Alumni

February 16th-19th, 2018

Lighthouse Writers’ Conference & Retreat 2018

Friday, February 16th

9:30 am-11:00 amArrival and Check-In (Goddard Helpdesk, Bldg. 204)Pick up your conference packet, grab a cup of coffee or tea, reunite with other alums

11:00 am-12:30 pmThe Journey to Now: Who We Are, and How Our Work Has Brought Us Here (Opening Panel)

This is our Goddard community. We are among a unique and vibrant community of writers. Who are we? How has our work brought us here? We’ll meet each other and review our writing journeys. Taking a look ahead to the next few days, what are our intentions for this weekend, and what are our intentions for our writing? (1.5 hrs, led by returning attendees)

12:30-1:30 pm – lunch break

1:30-3:00 pmPuzzle Logic and the Gestalt of Storytelling Are you a putter-inner or a taker-outer? An artist, or a logician, or both? We’ll read excerpts from Ray Bradbury, Georgi Gospodinov, and Aimee Bender and discuss how puzzle logic and Gestalt principles lend themselves to the art of telling engaging, vivid stories. Excerpts are fiction, but the class applies to all genres. (1.5 hrs, led by Liz Kellebrew)

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Individual Writing Retreat – available during any LWC&R session! Feel free to use the public or community spaces around Ft. Worden (The Commons coffee shop or fireplace seating area, Goddard Community Room, etc.), or in Port Townsend (coffee shops, waterfront and parks), or the Goddard College Library (located in the Schoolhouse Building), to work on a new/ongoing project, read or free write on work of your own choice. Reach out to collaborators, if desired! You can engage in an Individual Writing Retreat at any time during the conference.

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3:15-4:45 pmWhat the craft of acting offers writers: Loving difficult characters. Two Schools. Beats. (1.5 hrs, led by Jeff Eisenbrey)

6:00-7:00 pm Faculty/Alumni Dinner (in the Ft. Worden Commons) Join us for a gathering with MFAW Faculty to talk casually about writing and other shared interests. (1 hour)

7:00-8:00 pmMFAW Student and Faculty Reception We are co-hosting the welcoming reception for MFAW students and faculty; come and mingle and help enrich our writing community! (1 hour)

Saturday, February 17th

9:15 am-10:45 amShattering the Gods: The "Thing" Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke in Response to the Creative Works of Sculptor Auguste Rodin and Painter Paul Cezanne This workshop will provide a brief historical glimpse into one of the most influential and pivotal time periods in the life of Rainer Maria Rilke, a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, and one of the most significant poets in the German language during the twentieth century. We will be reflecting on Rilke's artistic influences during a period in his life of disillusionment and creative output, and discuss how other art forms contribute to the writer's imagination as we engage in our own creative response to sculptures and paintings. (1.5 hrs, led by Laura Schaeffer)

11:00 am-12:30 pmLaunching Your Writing: a Series of Free-Writing Prompts to Lead Off the Weekend

Kick-start your creativity to start off the conference right with a series of free-writing prompts. Bring a journal or notebook, something to write with, and your imagination. (1.5 hours, led by Mary Curtis)

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1:30-2:30 pmMFAW Keynote Session, “Lost and Found” (Reading Room, Bldg. 204)With faculty members Bea Gates, Victoria Nelson, and MIcheline Ahronian Marcom.

3:15-4:45 pmTaking Action - Social Justice Through Allegory: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” “It is not enough to be compassionate. You must act.” - His Holiness, The Dalai Lama

Allegory has a long history of illuminating social injustice by telling a story that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning or message, usually a moral or political one. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” was written as a protest against the censorship and oppression toward socialist ideals in the late 1940s and 1950s. Her story created a huge outcry and reaction from the reading public, and it is still studied today as a cautionary tale of the insidious power of “mob rule.”

In this generative writing session, we will study Jackson’s story for structure and techniques, and then we will experiment with writing our own work that speaks to an issue of social injustice. Bring writing materials, your imagination, and your passion for justice! (1 hour, led by Theresa Barker)

5:00 pm – Informal Happy Hour (Taps Pub – former Guard House)

7:00-8:00 pm Readings: MFAW Graduating Students – Optional (Reading Room)

Sunday, February 18

9:15 am-10:45 am Research, Storyboarding, and Writing Through Scrivener

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Scrivener, a writing program for Mac or PC, is fast becoming a standard, especially for those working in long form. Like an empty spreadsheet, Scrivener can seem formidable—a tabula rasa—to the new user, uncertain how to begin or get the most out its many features.

This workshop will be helpful to people at all levels of experience, whether you're just thinking about starting, already dabbling with Scrivener, or have been using it for years and are ready to learn new tricks (as well willing to share your own tricks.)

Our focus will be using the program to help manage a multi-year long-form project (fiction or non fiction.) You’ll learn how to structure your project for maximum efficiency, utilize Scrivener for managing research, story-boarding/outlining, writing, revising, and outputting to print or directly to e-book.

Peter has utilized Scrivener over the course of writing three novels and will share tips derived from his own experience. We’ll also explore alternative approaches that might be suitable to different writing styles, all with the intention of helping you get the most out of this amazing tool. (1 hour, led by Peter Geerlofs)

ALSO9:30-10:30 amReadings: MFAW Graduating Students – Optional (Reading Room)

10:45 am-12:15 pm Commencement – Optional (JFK Hall)


1:30-3:00 pm Fragmented

Whether writing a fictional trauma narrative, your own story, someone else’s, or a cultural trauma story the fragment is a powerful way to begin. Trauma causes the mind, body, and spirit to fracture, sometimes slightly, sometimes more completely. Using the shards of trauma in our writing can build a powerful kinesthetic experience for the reader. In this workshop we will playfully explore how to use sentence fragments, and trauma fragments to invite your reader into a fully somatic experience of your work. We will briefly explore how this has already been done in the works: Schizophrene, by Bhanu Kapil (hybrid

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poetry); and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, by Nick Flynn (memoir). (1.5 hrs, led by M. Storm Blue)

3:15-4:45 pm Historical Now: Tracing the Seams Between Past and Present

“Historical fiction was not - and is not - meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote 'War and Peace' to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe." - Alexander Chee

When we look to the past we can only do so through the lens of who we are now. Whether we are writing historical fiction or exploring the heritage of character, we can research and study a time period but, ultimately, all that has come after, all of what is now, informs what we see and write. This workshop will use a series of objects and prompts that you can apply to a current work to help delve the connections between now and then and find the resonance between past, present, and future. (1.5 hrs, led by Cathy Kirkwood)

5:00-6:00 pm Clockhouse Journal Reading

Lighthouse Writers Conference and Retreat (LWC&R) Alumni will be reading from from the latest edition of CLOCKHOUSE, Goddard’s very own national literary journal, published in partnership with Goddard College by the Alumni Association of Goddard’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Clockhouse has won a Pushcart Prize special mention, and each issue features fiction, interviews, essays, plays, and poems from a community of new and exciting literary voices. Four to six Lighthouse attendees will choose a reading from the current edition and present their reading at this event.

From the website: “CLOCKHOUSE is an eclectic conversation about the work-in-progress of life – a soul arousal, a testing ground, a new community, a call for change. We are interested in diverse voices and nontraditional narratives, and in writing that attempts to understand our place in the world and responsibility to each other.” (1 hour)

7:00-8:00 pm Faculty Readings – Optional (Reading Room)

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Monday, February 19th

9:15 am-10:45 amLanguage as Sound; Narrative as Score

In this exploratory workshop, we will listen to the “spoken word” of Warsan Shire and perform close readings of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Kate Zambreno’s Heroines and June Jordan’s lyrical memoir, Soldier. We will consider the use of sound, creative syntax, white space, echo and refrain, noting their influence on the reader’s experience of narrative. Participants will move in and out of immersion, writing and analysis of text. (1.5 hrs, led by Sarah Townsend)

11:00 am Closing Session, Celebration, and Goodbye

A recap of this year’s conference, a celebration of our launch as a community, and final expressions of farewell.

4:45-5:45 pm Faculty Readings – Optional (Reading Room)

ADDITIONAL VISITING WRITER EVENTS later in the week (optional, see update handout)

Visiting Writer Lesley Hazleton Reading - Tues. Feb. 13th (evening) Workshop - Wed. Feb. 14th (morning)

Visiting Goddard Alumna Simone John Reading – Wed. Feb. 14th (evening) Workshop - Thurs. Feb. 15th (morning)

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BIOS - Visiting Writer and Visiting Goddard Alumna - from Elena Georgiou, Goddard MFAW Director:

We are thrilled to announce that our Visiting Writer will be Lesley Hazleton. Lesley Hazleton’s work focuses on "the vast and volatile arena in which politics and religion intersect." Her Books include Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto (New York Times Editors' Choice); The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (New York Times Editors' Choice); After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split (Finalist: 2010 PEN-USA book award); Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen (Finalist: 2008 Washington Book Award); Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography (Winner: 2005 Washington Book Award); Jerusalem, Jerusalem: A Memoir of War and Peace, Passion and Politics (Winner: 1987 American Jewish Committee/Present Tense Book Award); Where Mountains Roar: a Personal Report from the Sinai; Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths; England, Bloody England: An Expatriate's Return; Confessions of a Fast Woman; and Driving to Detroit: An Automotive Odyssey. In September 2011, Lesley received The Stranger's Genius Award in Literature, and in fall 2012, she was the Inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Town Hall Seattle. Lesley has written for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Nation, and The New Republic. In April 2010, she launched The Accidental Theologist, a blog casting "an agnostic eye on religion, politics, and existence." And finally, she has also presented three TED talks: TEDGlobal 2013: The Doubt Essential to Faith; TEDxRainier 2010; TEDSummit 2016: "What we talk about when we talk about soul.”

We are also very excited to bring Simone John to the residency as our Visiting Alumna. Simone is the author of Testify, a book of poems that experiment with documentary poetics to uplift stories of black people impacted by state-sanctioned violence. A poet, educator, and facilitator based in Boston, she received her Goddard MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on documentary poetics. Her poetry has appeared or been reviewed in Wildness, The Boston Globe, Public Pool, PBS Newshour, Bustle , and more. She is a contributing editor at Gramma Poetry and chief creative officer at Hive Soul Yoga.

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