SPC’s Annual Writers’ Conference

Saturday, April 25 8:30 am – 4pm $40 for the day Casual lunch included

register by emailing [email protected]

Conference Schedule – see details on the following pages

8:30 – 9:00 Registration Gathering, Greeting & Coffee 9:00 – 10:25 Sarah Green Balancing Voice and Image

9:00 – 10:25 Kate Asche Lectio Divina – Reading into Writing(all genres) 10:30 – 11:55 Peter Campion Lyric Energy

10:30 – 11:55 Susan Gubernat You (Understood)

12:00 – 12:55 Lunch 1:00 – 2:30 Alan Soldofsky Setting Loose the Iambs: The Music of Free Verse 1:00 – 2:30 Julie Bruck Balancing Voice and Image

2:45 – 4:00 All Reception and Reading SPC’s Annual Writers’ Conference - April 25, 2015 - register: [email protected]

Workshop: BALANCING VOICE AND IMAGE Frank O’Hara vs. William Carlos Williams; Gwendolyn Brooks vs. Kay Ryan; we often think of voice and image as all-or-nothing traits in poetry. A poem is driven either by personality or meditation. What happens, though, if we challenge our poems to achieve the inclusion of both an engaging, idiosyncratic speaker and striking, visual language? We’ll consider examples and try our hand at drafts in which voice and vision overlap and thrive.

Sarah Green, a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation writing award nominee, most recently appeared in Best New Poets 2012 and the Incredible Sestina Anthology.

A Pushcart Prize winner, she has been a semi-finalist for the Discovery prize, Crab Orchard’s first book prize, Barrow Street’s first book prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in FIELD, Little Star, Gettysburg Review, Mid-American Review, Redivider, Forklift Ohio, Leveler, H_NGM_N, Ruminate, and elsewhere.

In addition to teaching undergraduates at Emerson, Oberlin and Wheaton, she has held poetry teaching residencies in Montmelard, France and San Gimignano, Italy, and spent many years facilitating youth writing workshops in Roxbury and South Boston. Sarah is one half of the Massachusetts-based Americana band Heartacre. She lives in Ohio, where she is a doctoral candidate in poetry.

Workshop: LECTIO DIVINA: READING INTO WRITING (All genres) Join Kate Asche to “read into writing” a brand new draft. This workshop will benefit writers in all genres. Practice lectio divina–reading as a sacred act of attention–as you immerse yourself in poems by world-class writers. Watch this deep attention to the work of others unfold into a fresh draft of your own that engages and surprises.

As time and workshop size allow, we’ll have the option of sharing our new drafts to receive specific, motivating feedback in an atmosphere of enthusiastic respect. (And, after the workshop, Kate will email participants a PDF of a selected reading on the topic of lectio divina, to keep you inspired as you continue in your writing practice!)

Kate Asche’s poetry has appeared in The Missouri Review (audio online) and in Bellingham Review, RHINO and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Our Day in the Labyrinth, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. A graduate of the UC Davis creative writing program, she teaches workshops in Sacramento and is a contributing editor at Under the Gum Tree. www.kateasche.com. SPC’s Annual Writers’ Conference - April 25, 2015 - register: [email protected]

Workshop: LYRIC ENERGY This workshop will offer a few ways to locate energetic sources for our poems. By exploring some key formal elements we will find new ways to generate and hone poems.

Peter Campion is an American poet and art critic. He's the author of three collections of poems: Other People (2005), The Lions (2009), and El Dorado (2013), all from the University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Poets Series.

He has published catalog essays and art monographs on such painters as Eric Aho, Suhas Bhujbal, Kim Frohsin, Karl Knaths, Joseph McNamara, and Terry St. John. His work appears in Art News, The Boston Globe, Modern Painters, Poetry, The New Republic, The New York Times, Slate, and elsewhere.

His awards include the Pushcart Prize, the Larry Levis Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Campion directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota, and lives in Saint Paul.

Workshop: YOU (UNDERSTOOD) The urgency of writing to another has been at the center of many poems we can admire (so many of them sonnets, for example). We'll take a look at how the impulse of "I have something I must tell you" can result in strong, memorable work, both personal and political.

Susan Gubernat’s first book of poems, Flesh (Helicon Nine Editions), won the Marianne Moore Prize; her chapbook Analog House, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, Michigan Quarterly, The Pinch, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Stand (U.K.), The Yalobusha Review, among others. An opera librettist, her major work, Korczak’s Orphans (composer: Adam Silverman), has been performed in a number of venues, and by a number of companies, including in the VOX New Composers Series of the New York City Opera and by the Opera Company of Brooklyn. Gubernat is a professor in the English Department at California State University, East Bay, where she inaugurated and now advises the Arroyo Literary Review. Her awards and honors include residencies at the MacDowell, Millay, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo colonies, as well as artist’s fellowships from the states of New York and New Jersey. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. SPC’s Annual Writers’ Conference - April 25, 2015 - register: [email protected]

Workshop: SETTING LOOSE THE IAMBS: THE MUSIC OF FREE VERSE How do "free-verse" poets work with a loose iambic line to find the best line endings for their poems. I'll discuss poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Tracy K. Smith, Wallace Stevens, Mark Strand, and C. K. Williams to see how they've loosened the rhythms of their basically iambic lines. I'll also look at revisions on one or two of my poems, where I was at first unsatisfied with the line endings.

Alan Soldofsky has published a new collection of poems, In the Buddha Factory, from Truman State University Press. Also three chapbooks of poems: Kenora Station, Staying Home, and most recently a chapbook that includes a selection of poems by his son, the poet Adam Soldofsky, Holding Adam / My Father's Books. He has published poems widely in magazines and academic journals including: The Antioch Review, The Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, Grand Street, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, The North American Review, and Poetry East.

His poems have three times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has also contributed essays on modern and contemporary poets to a variety of journals. His articles, essays, interviews, and book reviews have appeared widely in periodicals including Chelsea, Narrative, Poetry Flash, Quarry West, and The Writer's Chronicle. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at San Jose State University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Workshop: GETTING OUT OF THE POEM'S WAY Sadly, Pegasus is not always waiting in his stall. When lightning strikes are scarce, how do we stop preconceived ideas from taking over the writing process? How might we reconnect with the thrill of a poem discovering itself during writing and/or revision, and let the reader participate in that experience?

Let's look at poems that embody that kind of surprise, and explore a few rather unlikely strategies for getting out of the poem's--and our own--ways. Using unfamiliar approaches can make it easier to slow down and hear what the poem has to say, and to let the poem lead. Expect some in-class writing, so bring your electronic device, paper and pencil, or clay tablet.

Julie Bruck's most recent book of poems is Monkey Ranch (Brick Books, 2012). Her previous books include The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, MS, Ploughshares, Hazlitt, and The Walrus, among other publications, and new poems are forthcoming in Plume and The Rusty Toque.

Her awards include the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry, two Gold National Magazine Awards, and the A.M. Klein Award, as well as as a Catherine Boettcher Fellowship from The MacDowell Colony. A long-time Montrealer, Julie lives in San Francisco with her husband, the writer Lewis Buzbee, their daughter, and a fish. She teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco. More info at: www.juliebruck.com