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Poetry Workshop: Writing the Hive  (FULL)
During this week we will generate a series of new work, a group of related poems. A kind of lyric and narrative hive.  Our goal will be no fewer than five new poems and no more than ten. By writing a group of closely related or linked poems we will be given an opportunity to write PAST our first and most well used impulses and writing strategies, and into some uncharted and exciting discoveries. Bring some paper, something to write with, and a beginner's mind. Together we will bring the nascent hive to life!

Matthew Dickman won the American Poetry Review/Honnickman First Book Prize for his first collection All-American Poem (2008, Copper Canyon Press).  He is also the author of two chapbooks, Amigos and Something About a Black Scarf.  He has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  His poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker and Tin House, and All-American Poem was awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Praise for All-American Poem:

“Dickman crystallizes and celebrates human contact, reminding us—as the English poet Philip Larkin did—that our best memories, those most worth holding on to, those that might save us, will be memories of love . . .  [Matthew Dickman’s] work swings with all the crazy verve of the West.”     —The Los Angeles Times

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Michael Dickman’s first collection is The End of the West
(2009, Copper Canyon Press).  He says that he began writing poetry “after accidentally reading a Neruda ode.” His poems have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, and Narrative Magazine, where he won the 2008 Narrative Prize for his poem “Returning to Church.”  He has been awarded the Hodder Fellowship in Poetry at Princeton University for 2009-10.  He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Praise for The End of the West:

“[Michael Dickman’s] work achieves all that is most valuable and most difficult in writing: simplicity, clarity, specificity, mystery, primal sincerity, and emotion . . .  With the utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit, Dickman gives voice to the real life sorrows, horrors, and indomitable joys that bind together the vast human family.”     —Franz Wright

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Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Uncovering, Creating, Revising
I intend this workshop to be a creative, generative experience, in which we examine different contemporary forms of nonfiction—hermit crab essay, lyric essay, memoir and mosaic—in order to discover the perfect vehicle for your words and your stories. We will examine models by contemporary authors, learning how those authors styled their essay—including use of sentence structure and paragraphing--to create the voice and narrative pressure each piece demanded. We will use these discussions to springboard daily writing together.  The instructor’s goal is for every student to leave with a set of drafts he or she feels is worth continued development, and ideas for using a variety of modes to continue generating exciting nonfiction.

Susanne Antonetta is a poet and writer of creative nonfiction. Her most recent book, A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, received a Ken Book Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her first book, Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, was selected as a 2001 Notable Book by the New York Times Book Review and won a 2002 American Book Award. 

Under the name Suzanne Paola, she has published four collections of poetry, including Bardo, a Brittingham Prize winner and her most recent, The Lives of the Saints. Her poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Yale Review, Shenandoah, Ploughshares, Willow Springs, Southern Humanities Review, and in numerous anthologies. She is the co-author, with Brenda Miller, of Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction. She is a professor of English at Western Washington University and an editorial advisor for Bellingham Review. She lives in Washington with her husband and son.

Praise for Susanne Antonetta:
 
“As inventive and full of mischief and deep feeling as Diane Ackerman, as adept at translating experience into life lessons as Anne Lamott, and an excellent adjunct to Oliver Sacks, Antonetta fashions an intriguingly meandering narrative as she describes her atypical neurological experiences, portrays a "many-headed" friend—a man who harbors multiple female personalities—reports on the murder trial of a disturbed teen, wonders about the fate of atypical neurology in a future in which genetic engineering is commonplace, and offers startling theories about the phenomenal increase in autism.”—Donna Seaman, starred review, Booklist 

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Fiction Workshop: Points of Entry
We’ll consider an array of starting points for story, such as memory, character, situation, plot, landscape, conflict--treating them as both inspiration for our own work (via writing prompts and exercises) and lenses through which to examine the work of other writers (reading peer drafts and published stories). We’ll also explore the often-freewheeling process of research as it pertains to writing fiction, from conducting reporter-style interviews and logging library time to lurking in dodgy Internet chat rooms, all in the hopes of achieving verisimilitude. Time permitting, all your burning questions about writing will be addressed, if not definitively answered.

June Spence is the author of the novel Change Baby, published by Riverhead Books in 2004.  Her short story manuscript, Nice Men and Good Girls, won the 1995 Willa Cather Award, and many of those stories appeared in her collection Missing Women and Others, which was published by Riverhead in 1998 and won the North Carolina Literary & Historical Society's inaugural Mary Ruffin Poole Award for first fiction.  Her title story, "Missing Women", was included in the 1997 Best American Short Stories.  Her short stories have appeared in the Southern Review, Seventeen, and The Oxford American.  She lives with her husband, writer Scott Huler, and two sons in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is a freelance writer and editor. She has served as writer in residence at Berry College, Vanderbilt University, and UNC-Chapel Hill. 

Praise for June Spence:

“A southern writer who excels at charting the minor victories that briefly relieve dreary lives. Though stories about the poor, the hopeless, and the psychically maimed have by now become as commonplace as Cheever’s suburbia, Spence invests these particular tabloid lives with an appealing freshness, and, neither condescending nor partisan, she writes in beautifully weighted prose about the blighted lives of small-town men and women.”  —Kirkus Reviews

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retreat in the natural beauty of St. Olaf College

St. Olaf College rests on a beautiful 345-acre campus. Adjacent to the main campus are 700 acres of land, including woodlands, prairies, wetlands, and farmlands. A walk around campus could take you from Norway Valley through dense woods, across open prairie to the shore of a small wetland. It is a setting conducive to reflection, writing, and simple appreciation of the campus’ natural beauty. Northfield is less than an hour’s drive from the Twin Cities, so that students wishing to commute may do so. Dining in St. Olaf’s impressive student center is provided by Bon Appetit.

St. Olaf College website:  www.stolaf.edu

St. Olaf "maps & directions": http://www.stolaf.edu/visiting/maps/

City of Northfield, MN:  http://www.ci.northfield.mn.us/

Questions?
Contact the Graduate School of Liberal Studies at 651/523-2047 or send an e-mail.