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Archive for the ‘writers conference’ Category

Jennifer Acker is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Common and has published several short stories, translations, and essays. Her forthcoming works in 2019 include a long personal essay from Amazon Original Stories and her debut novel, THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD. She will appear on the panel Writing the Short Story. She was interviewed by Linda Rowland-Buckley.

Why did you become a writer? When did you get the urge to begin writing?

I’ve loved both reading and writing since I learned to follow words on a page. My great-grandmother was an amateur poet, and although I don’t remember her, my grandmother used to read me her verses. I won a statewide poetry competition when I was young and was flattered to read my piece in front of the governor! Sad to say, my poetry abilities left me a long time ago, and I’m now squarely a prose writer.

Would you tell us about your writing process?

I usually start with a character in a situation I find interesting. Some kind of “fish out of water” story or a vexed ethical dilemma. I love building characters and setting scenes; it’s creating a tight narrative that is the bane of writing for me. Getting through a first draft is therefore pretty painful. I relax when I enter the revising and editing process.

What are your writing goals?

To write something that other people want to read! And that explores some thought or issue that’s been bubbling up inside me.

What inspired you to found The Common?

Being a word person who had worked in a variety of trade and freelance publishing jobs, I wanted to start a literary venture closer to home, one that would build literary community. I was also beginning to notice the many ways in which the constant mobility of modern society is somewhat in tension with many people’s desire to be from somewhere and to identify with a particular place.

The Common has published several reputable authors and poets including Lauren Groff, who is shortlisted for the National Book Award for FLORIDA, her new book of stories, Rafael Campo as well as Sarah Smarsh, who is also shortlisted for the NBA in Nonfiction for her memoir HEARTLAND. Can you offer a piece of writing advice you have garnered over the years as Editor, or just the best suggestion you have received as a writer?

Publishing is a dance between one’s own ideas and language, on the one hand, and the concerns and expectations of readers on the other. In America, we have a wonderful editorial system that connects editors and writers so that they can work together to honor both forces/constituencies. It’s essential, in this process, to be both honest and humble. I’m very grateful for what I’ve learned from the writers I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and I believe they have learned something from me as well.

Would you like to give us a hint about the writing project you’re working on now?

Right now I’m revising a long personal essay that will be published with Amazon Original Stories next year. It’s about the impacts of illness on my marriage. I’ve never written so revealingly about myself, so facing up to these revisions is a bit intimidating!

Your debut novel THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD will be released in 2019. Can you describe it for us?

Thanks for asking! The novel is about three generations of an East African Indian family, the Chandarias. The book explores cross-cultural and intergenerational conflicts, and the ways in which we think about making moral decisions.

You’ll be a part of the Short Story panel this year. Can you say a bit about what you are planning?

I’m looking forward to talking about what goes into selecting, editing, and publishing short fiction in The Common.

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Registration begins today, with payment options that include check or PayPal.

Hope to see you on Nov. 17!

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We are so happy to announce that this year’s November 17 WriteAngles conference program is now complete, as is information about our panelists and literary agents (well, almost).

Registration is expected to begin about six weeks prior to the conference. If you have not already done so, please subscribe to this blog/website and you will receive an email announcing the start of registration.

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We are thrilled to announce that Edie Meidav and Andrea Hairston have accepted our invitations to speak at this year’s WriteAngles conference.

We hope to publish our full program soon, and to include information about literary agents who will be available for individual meetings.

If you have not yet subscribed to our site, please do so and you will receive further announcements (via email) as they are made.

Registration is expected to begin about six weeks before the November 17 conference.

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Thanks to all who made this year’s conference a success!

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Deborah will be a panelist on the historical fiction panel. The interview was conducted by Wendy Vowell.

Why did you become a writer? When did the writing bug first bite you?

When I was a kid, definitely. It just felt like a natural extension of reading.

What’s your writing process like?

Fairly structured. I get up, head to a coffee shop, and do my best to write for five hours (five pages when I’m drafting, whatever comes first). Research is a favorite part of the process for me and can over-absorb me, so I’m finding I have to schedule it. Sometimes I set my alarm.

What are you trying to accomplish as a writer?

A big question! I can only answer it one book at a time, and each has a different trajectory, a different destination.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

I think it was Jane Yolen who prescribed somewhere, “butt in chair.” A variation on “you can’t ‘find’ time to write; you have to make it and then guard it.”

What are you working on now?

A book of linked short stories about P.T. Barnum (or some of the people whose lives he touched) for a YA/crossover audience.

You’ll be a part of the Historical Fiction panel this year. Can you tell us a little about what you’re planning?

I think one focus will be the way I try to reach back with all five senses . . . and some strategies for doing that.

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We can accept pre-registrations for Saturday’s conference up to and including Friday, Nov. 17. However, you will need to pay with Paypal if you register in the last couple of days before the conference since there will not be time to receive checks.

We will also welcome walk-ins on the day of the conference, though we can only accept payment by check or cash at that time. There will be a $10 surcharge for walk-in registrations.

We are expecting a wonderful day that will recharge everyone’s writing energies! See you there!

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John Robison will be participating in the Memoir panel. He was interviewed by Kate Hartford, who has edited the interview for length. For more about his book SWITCHED ON: A MEMOIR OF BRAIN CHANGE AND EMOTIONAL AWAKENING, see excerpts from NPR’s Fresh Air interview of John and Alvaro Pascual-Leone by Terry Gross on the research in transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) that formed the basis for the book.

 

Why did you become a writer? When did the writing bug first bite you?

I don’t think that I would say that the writing bug bit me. I have always communicated my ideas through written words. As an autistic person, I have often been disabled in my ability to engage people face to face because of my limitations [in] reading body language [or] expressions and my unexpected responses to other people’s language. But in the area of written communications, having practiced it for a long time, my ability is the opposite of disabled. It’s far better than the average person’s. For me, communicating in written form is simply maximizing what you’re good at, and minimizing your disabilities, not a bug at all.

When I was in my thirties, I began to feel like I should try and give something back for younger people who were coming along, like me, who had had bad childhoods. At first, I started talking to young people about growing up in bad circumstances. Then when I learned that I was autistic, which was when I was forty years old, for the first time in my life I had a nonjudgmental explanation for why I was this way. I realized there were millions of other young people just like me. And I began talking about that. So that generated such a tremendous response, that I thought well there must be people that would be benefiting from this message all over, not just in Western Massachusetts. My brother [Augusten Burroughs] had written a story about our lives, RUNNING WITH SCISSORS, that had turned out to be a fairly big hit, and I would go to events when my brother was around here, and a great many of the questions were people asking what about the autistic brother – who was, of course, me. I decided that I should write my story in book form, rather than just telling the people in local elementary schools and such. LOOK ME IN THE EYE was the first effort I ever made to write a book. That’s what it sprang from, it was just a realization that there were a great many people who would be likely to benefit from the story about an autistic person who grew up and did okay because so many of the books about autism are frankly really bleak and clinical and depressing. And I thought that an autistic person should be able to tell a better story than that.

LOOK ME IN THE EYE was really meant as an entertaining life story that illustrated the life of an autistic person, but people very quickly took it to be a book about autism, to be like a guide about autism, not a memoir – and it really was never that. And that’s what prompted me to write BE DIFFERENT, which is a guide for autism. I never tried to write books before doing those, so that was something I came to late in life, but I had been practicing writing in the context of my cars and such for quite a long time before that.

What’s your writing process like?

I just write things when they need to be written. There’s a constant demand on me to write things. Today I’m writing accounts of the automotive projects that are in our shop. I have an idea that I should write an article about how they might change ADA therapy for autism, because I saw that that was a very contentious topic at the federal autism meeting last week, and people have been commenting on it still on Twitter and such to me. So, I see things that need writing, whether for work or for autism advocacy or whatever, and I write them.

That’s not all I’m engaged in. I’m engaged in photographic art and discussions of photography, and in history and genealogy and other things, and [on] those things, I do communicate with all those people through writing. I also communicate with photographic imagery, but most of the communication is in written words.

What are you trying to accomplish as a writer?

Well, I started out trying to be successful creating things that would be useful to people, whether those were musical instruments, or restored or repaired cars, or pictures put on billboards or walls, or books that people would read and take some benefit from. I wrote things that were viewed as doing those things successfully.

I view [my books or my writing] as having a purpose; they’re not really just to be entertaining. I thought LOOK ME IN THE EYE would be an entertaining story of my life, but specifically to people who were affected by autism. I felt that those people were likely in need of an entertaining story because the stories they had before were very bleak and depressing, and I thought somebody should paint a different picture of life for autism. And that was a very definite purpose; it wasn’t just for fun.

I’m not really an artist with these written words; I’m much more of a tradesman. I think that you have people at these writing conferences, those people [who] are aware of subtleties and language and turns of phrase, and so forth. I don’t really have a sense of that, I just think that you have to be able to explain things in a language that people understand. That means that you have to be adept at using common words. Because sometimes I am in government meetings (you know I’m on the autism committee in Washington) and I listen to scientists and government bureaucrats using these complex terms, and I think to myself: I’m an educated person, and I don’t understand what they’re saying. And I’m supposed to be a specialist in this. What is the average person on the street going to make of it? I think they’re going to make of it that it’s gobbledygook.

You have to be able to explain any issue that you want to communicate about in a language that will be understandable for 6th graders – if you haven’t done that, I think that you’ve failed in your job as a communicator. A lot of college faculty, a lot of educated people lose sight of that basic truth, that when you use words that people don’t understand, or you use them in ways that people don’t expect, they are not impressed with your language skills; they think you’re a fool, or they just turn away from you. I’ve always had that in mind in communicating, and I think for that reason my stories are simple and direct and easy to understand. Because I’m autistic, there’s not perhaps a lot of subterfuge or fine art in them. I think that some people appreciate that. Other people probably think it’s simplistic and stupid, and that’s okay. But I think that’s the essence of communicating stuff successfully, more than the art of it. It’s got to be told in a straightforward way that anyone understands.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

I’m not really sure what to say to that. My mother [also a writer] and my brother would both say to me: show things with illustrations in writing, not just tell them. So I learned to describe things in scenes, as opposed to just stating the facts. I think that that contributes to storytelling as opposed to logical recital of facts. And it makes it more interesting.

You might be asking if there’s some kind of one-line bit of wisdom that people could take away. And I just don’t know that there is.

I don’t really think of myself as a writer. I think being a writer is an ability I have that I have to have to practice my trades: I’m a restorer of cars, and an artist with photography, and I’m an advocate for autistic people and people with developmental differences, and I’m successful at doing those things to a significant degree because I can communicate the written words about what I believe in.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a story about autism in the southwest Pacific, and whether the original navigators who colonized Tahiti, Hawaii, and the other islands were enabled by being autistic, and therefore autism was a key human ability in the colonization of the southwest Pacific. So Hawaiians and Tahitians today owe their ancestry on those islands to the ancestors of the autistic kids that we now see.

And I’m working on a story about autism and life in the 17th century in the establishment of British North America.

I’m working with a screenwriter at Focus Films on a film adaptation of the SWITCHED ON book.

I always have things that I’m writing; I write some thousands of words of stuff of all kinds every week. I don’t at this moment have another book in mind, but my agent and publisher think I’m certainly capable of writing more books. I guess that’s probably true.

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Michele Barker, who publishes under the name M. P. Barker, will participate in the historical fiction panel. She was interviewed by Wendy Vowell.

Why did you become a writer? When did the writing bug first bite you?

When I was a kid, I wrote stories to entertain myself and my siblings. I loved to read, and it seemed very romantic to write novels and get them published. Then I put aside fiction writing for many, many years, thinking how unlikely it was that I’d ever get published. (Besides, I was very good at beginning stories, but not at ending them!) But all of my jobs since college have required some sort of non-fiction writing, so I kept on writing—not always exciting stuff, but it was still writing.

I didn’t return to writing fiction until I was in my thirties, when I was working as a costumed historical interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village. That job allowed lots of time for musing in between talking to visitors and working on projects, so I began to get story ideas and write them down. This time, I wasn’t thinking so much about getting published as just writing as a hobby. I took some classes and joined a writing group just for the fun of it. Then a combination of the social history I’d learned at Sturbridge Village and an 18th-century document I discovered while working in the Springfield History Museum archives inspired my historical novel A DIFFICULT BOY. With lots of encouragement from friends and family, I turned my unwieldy (and very scary!) 700-page manuscript into a manageable—and eventually publishable—novel.

What’s your writing process like?

It’s pretty random. I’ve been in various free-writing groups that used Pat Schneider’s Amherst Writers & Artists technique. I often use the free-writing exercises to play with characters and situations—that’s how my first novel evolved. I tend to be a seat-of-the-pants kind of writer. I don’t really know where a story is going (or even if there’s a story at all!) until I have several dozen pages stacked up. I don’t write in a linear way, but tend to hop around a lot from one part of a story to another as I go. My characters tend to lead me, rather than the other way around, so I have to follow them for quite a bit before I know what they’re going to do!

What are you trying to accomplish as a writer?

Good question! I think mostly I’m just trying to figure out who my characters are and how their stories end. I don’t sit down at the beginning of a story with a plan to explore a theme or teach a lesson—I just kind of throw things against the wall and see what sticks.

As a writer of historical fiction, I enjoy exploring the lives of ordinary people in daily life situations, rather than major historical figures and events. I like learning about both the differences and similarities between past and present and sharing what I find, so that the past doesn’t feel like such a foreign and distant place to readers. I hope readers will come away from my books feeling they’ve lived in and can better understand the era they’ve visited in the story.

I hope readers will be able to identify with my characters while seeing that those characters aren’t just modern people wearing funny clothes and living without indoor plumbing. While my character’s thoughts and beliefs might be very different from ours, they grapple with many of the same problems and cherish many of the same things that we do today.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

Persistence pays off—sometimes even more than talent!–whether it comes to research, writing, revising, or getting published.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a historical novel that involves a sea captain’s wife and daughter during the 1840s and 1850s, after the captain is lost at sea. In the wife and daughter’s journey to self-sufficiency, they blossom as artists and question their roles as women in Victorian society.

You’ll be a part of the historical fiction panel this year. Can you tell us a little about what you’re planning?

I’m intrigued by the idea of “alternative truth”—not in the sense that there are conflicting “truths,” but in the sense that there are a lot of levels or facets to the truth that we rarely get to see. For me, exploring alternative truths is a good way to describe the sort of stories I write. When studying history, we may forget or ignore the stories of ordinary people, whose experience can be quite different from that of the famous people who star in our history books. Those ordinary, daily-life stories—those “truths”—deserve to be told and can show us how “big-picture” historical events affected folks who were much like us, and can make it easier for us to picture what our own life might have been like in the past.

Also, the idea of “alternative truth” kind of captures the way we sometimes think history is fixed and unchanging, but in reality what we know (or think we know) about the past constantly changes as new research unearths new information. Think, for example, about the way King Richard III has been reassessed, thanks to the efforts of persistent researchers and also of historical novels like Josephine Tey’s THE DAUGHTER OF TIME and Sharon Kay Penman’s THE SUNNE IN SPLENDOUR. So many of the things we once thought were “truths” about the past have been supplanted—and will continue to be–by newer, (hopefully!) more accurate truths

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If you register now there is still time to arrange a meeting with a literary agent or with the representative from Levellers Press. But don’t delay!

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