SEMINARS AND PANELS

Monday, July 14th 2008
2pm THE AGENT GAME
Panel with Sarah Burnes, Emilie Stewart, Judy Heiblum, Amy Hughes
Finding an agent to represent your work can be a time-consuming and hair-raising endeavor. Ideally, the relationship between agent and author is both professional and personal, providing a writer with much-needed support and encouragement. In this seminar, New York agents talk about what writers should know before seeking representation and offer unique insight into their profession.

3pm THE ARTFUL EDIT
Panel with Judy Clain, Sarah Burnes, Charles D'Ambrosio and Abigail Thomas.
Moderator: Susan Bell
This panel will discuss the discipline and creativity of editing. Through the perspectives of a trade book editor, an agent, and writers of fiction and non-fiction, we will explore what editing means and how it is best practiced—with others and alone. We will debate the risks, demands, and pleasures of editing an author, of being edited, and of editing oneself.

Tuesday, July 15th 2008
2pm  EDITING OURSELVES WITH SUSAN BELL
What a bitch of a thing prose is!   —Flaubert
This seminar explores the often misunderstood—or simply overlooked—art of editing. All writers must edit. Understated or lyrical, traditional or avant-garde, fiction or non-fiction, no matter: every writer has to examine his or her draft, determine its needs, and then try to fulfill them. Editing is usually taught as an intrinsic part of writing. As a result, it can feel elusive and random. This seminar, based on Susan Bell's book, The Artful Edit, offers no rules or formulas, but practical insights to help students make their way through the tall grass of text with increased ease and authority.

3pm  SHOW VS. TELL II WITH PETE ROCK
A Series of Provocations from Inside the Story, or, Tell’s Revenge
"Show, Don’t Tell" is advice repeated endlessly in writing workshops (even if, for shame, we disguise this phrase behind different words). This talk, with exercises and examples, will explore the difference between showing and telling in fiction.  It will endeavor to question whether a halfway decent telling is also a kind of showing, and what, if anything, can and should be told. Other areas of intrigue: Why do readers embrace a writing that shows, while writers seem so eager to avoid it? Can too much be shown?  And how do these questions play out in the realms of dialogue, figural language, and choice of narrator?

3pm RECALLED IN CHAOS WITH MARY JO BANG
Rocking the emotional boat.
In "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." But what happens when the vacant mood produces not a state of blissful solitude that gives rise to dancing daffodils, but instead to a volcanic eruption? When the resulting text that follows the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" bears the imprint of this eruption? We’ll examine a number of texts where the writing suggests a troubled interiority. Where the reader senses that what "does itself actually exist in the mind" is disquietude. Where formal constraint becomes the slim means of exerting control. Some examples to be used: Emily Dickinson, Hannah Weiner, Lucie Brock-Broido (The Master Letters), John Berryman (77 Dream Songs), Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath (Ariel), Claudia Rankine (The End of the Alphabet), Sexton, Artaud, Rimbaud, Eliot (The Wasteland), and Freud.

Wednesday, July 16th 2008
2pm DEFAMILIARIZATION WITH ANTHONY DOERR
Break the pre- off the –dictable
We are creatures of habit. A bald Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky said in 1917, "Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war." What he meant is that the mind makes a sort of algebra out of the world and in doing so robs us of some of the intensity of experience.  To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time.  To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time.  Shklovsky argued that the role of art is to remove objects from the "automatism of perception."  That is, successful art gives the sensations of life back to us. We’ll look at how words are arranged within sentences, the songs of baby white-crowned sparrows, a couple lines by Herbert Spencer, Doritos, and lots of other stuff to try to discover how we can use our work to crack apart the habitual and make the world new again. No required reading.

3pm  HOW TO WRITE & HOW TO READ WITH COLSON WHITEHEAD
A Comprehensive Examination of Examining Comprehensively
A seminar in which our hero, King Author, will explore how he became forever and always wed to the noble pursuit of Authorhood, how he endured the not insignificant psychic travails on the path thereto, battling, among other things, the axis of fearsome beasts: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Nicotine Addiction, Iron Chef Marathons, Lumbago, and Mid-Afternoon Ennui. King Author, our hero, will then discuss how others might wed themselves to this, the noblest of pursuits.

Thursday, July 17th 2008
2pm RESEARCH IN FICTION WITH ANDREA BARRETT
Where do the facts end and the fun begin?
Research can be intoxicating, especially for writers, always searching for new and exciting ways to procrastinate.  There are a hundred ways to use it badly—most having to do with wedging too much poorly digested material into all the wrong places—and a couple of ways to use it well. We’ll talk about the sifting and sorting by which we find the few right details, about casting a wide net but then tossing much overboard, and about the misguided ideas of ‘efficiency’ (who said writing was supposed to be efficient?) and of ‘waste’ (as in: "I can’t believe I did all that research and then wasted it!). We’ll also look at some examples of work in which writers used research well. Handout provided.

3pm  STUDENT STORIES: ON THE COUCH WITH STEVE ALMOND AND AIMEE BENDER
Together they’ll attack the bad habits before they start.
Bender and Almond—both the offspring of therapists—will discuss how and why less experienced writers manage to sabotage their own fiction. Among the topics covered will be: simplicity phobias, the artistic unconscious, OMD (obsessive metaphor disorder), fear of emotional exposure, prose envy, and obfuscation in the service of the id. The format will be an informal discussion, with questions from the audience encouraged.

3pm POETRY AND TECHNOLOGY WITH EILEEN MYLES
How the Sound Bite and a ubiquitous ADD afflict our poetic impulses
I have been thinking for a while about the impact of technology on poetry. For instance, the century that ended about eight years ago now was the century of the copy. How does poetry change with all this recording and xeroxing going on. And yet how often have you depended on technology and been failed by it and wound up being less present for a reading or an event either because you were trying to make something work or worse—weren't paying attention because you figured you'd listen to it later. And then it wasn't there. Does technology just cause us to miss everything. Or miss everything a little bit and that's what everything sounds like now. How do we make poems with this new kind of attention and inattention? In this seminar be looking at contemporary poetry and writing and art that works this way, talking about some of their strategies and why this is not so much avant garde as natural, being an extension of how we already think and do things all over the place. Do you mind if I take this call?

Friday, July 18th 2008
2pm THREE PROPOSITIONS ABOUT THE RELATION BETWEEN SPACE AND TIME IN A POEM WITH FRANK BIDART

3pm CHARACTERS AND CRISIS, A STORY'S DOUBLE-HELIX
A Panel with Denis Johnson, Charles DíAmbrosio and Yiyun Li; moderated by Lee Montgomery
How about this for a chicken-or-the-egg pickle: what comes first, the character or the conflict? What do you do with a character who refuses to be conflicted or a conflict that repels a character? Do they have to evolve in unison, or can a writer proceed by oscillating between the two? How does one build a compelling character through using equally engaging conflicts? This panel will explore the relation between characters and their crises, and give strategies for developing the two.

Saturday, July 19th 2008
2pm THE IMPULSE TOWARD MEMOIR
A panel with David Shields, Walter Kirn and Nick Flynn
With every new fracas over "truth" in non-fiction, with every passing scandal, it might be nice to step back and consider the basics: why do we, in the first place, even write memoir and non-fiction? What does the form offer that, say, fiction and poetry do not? What happens to the experimental impulse in the genre and how do we take risks within the bounds of "truth"? This panel, with authors who have written in multiple genres, will address the pros and cons, the limitations and freedoms, of non-fiction writing.

3pm THE CREATION OF PLACE WITH DOROTHY ALLISON
Putting the 'there' there
Where are we? Luckinbuck county or the Cote de Azur?  It makes a hell of a difference, but you know that, or think you do. The question is what have you not thought about? What makes place so vitally important in telling a story? How does one go about fully utilizing a story’s setting, allowing it to breathe as much life into the story as its characters? Dorothy Allison knows two or three things she might be able to say about that.

All seminars and panels will be held in Vollum Lecture Hall on Reed College Campus. Door charge to seminars is $15.

READINGS

Sunday, July 13th 2008
8pm Reading and signing with Peter Rock, Eileen Myles, Dorothy Allison

Monday, July 14th 2008
8pm Reading and signing with Steve Almond, Aimee Bender, Walter Kirn

Tuesday, July 15th 2008
8pm Reading and signing with Andrea Barrett, Nick Flynn, Charles D’Ambrosio

Wednesday, July 16th 2008
8pm Reading and signing with Anthony Doerr, Mary Jo Bang, Abigail Thomas

Thursday, July 17th 2008
8pm Reading and signing with Frank Bidart
Interview with Brenda Shaughnessy to follow

Friday, July 18th 2008
8pm Reading and signing with Yiyun Li, David Shields, Colson Whitehead

Saturday, July 19th 2008
8pm Reading and signing with with Denis Johnson
Brief Q&A session to follow

All readings to be held in Cerf Amphitheater on Reed College Campus
Door charge to readings is $5.

For more information or to purchase tickets, please call Cheston at 503-219-0622 or email cheston@tinhouse.com