Colgate Writers Conference Program

You bring an idea or two, and our workshop will help you turn them into a manuscript. Come prepared to do a little bit of writing every day. Exercises in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry will help unlock your creativity and clarify your aims. Those who wish to may read their work aloud for on-the-spot critiques in a safe and supportive environment. After a week of mini-lectures on the art and craft of writing as well as a one-on-one conference with the instructor, you should head off with a clear plan and a few more pages.

This workshop is open to anyone who wishes to take it. If you’d like to provide a brief description (<500 words) of your project, feel free to do so.

There are no submission requirements
Workshop Size: 10 participants

You bring an idea or two, and our workshop will help you turn them into a manuscript. Come prepared to do a little bit of writing every day. Exercises in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry will help unlock your creativity and clarify your aims. Those who wish to may read their work aloud for on-the-spot critiques in a safe and supportive environment. After a week of mini-lectures on the art and craft of writing as well as a one-on-one conference with the instructor, you should head off with a clear plan and a few more pages.

This workshop is open to anyone who wishes to take it. If you’d like to provide a brief description (<500 words) of your project, feel free to do so.

There are no submission requirements
Workshop Size: 10 participants

*Intensive workshop*
The memoirist and critic Sven Birkerts said writing a memoir is about “getting hold of vanished experience.” Sometimes that means activating our memory to reach deep into the past, or our family’s. Sometimes, the experience isn’t vanished but all too present, a story still in progress. Either way, we’re faced with choices about how to give form to formless experience. In this intimate and intensive workshop, we’ll address these choices—structure, time, scene, voice, dialogue, distance, and the ethics of writing about others. To ground our practice, participants will respond to in-class writing prompts and discuss memoir excerpts and craft texts. They will also read and give feedback on the first 50 pages of the other participants’ memoirs and receive the same from the other participants. The instructor will provide feedback on the entire manuscript, up to 200 pages, and meet one-on-one with each participant. Together we’ll help each other “get hold” of our experience and invite others to witness it.

Submission Limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop Size: 5 participants
 

“It’s a lofty goal," essayist Jo Ann Beard writes in her collection Festival Days, "to imagine translating one’s own personal experiences in a way that instructs and illuminates, moves and inspires, another human being. Even attempting to do such a thing is heroic." Our workshop will take these words to heart. What have you attempted to do? How can we make you aware of it, and more intentional? What is this piece about below the surface? How can we help shape the voice and the music of that exploration? During the workshop, we will focus on intensive discussion of each participant’s work as well as dive into short reading assignments that consider sentence, voice, and structure. We will look at how one can synthesize tools from fiction, poetry, memoir and reportage, as well as experimental approaches drawn from visual art and art writing.

Submission limit: 10,000 words (Up to 40 pages)
Workshop size: 10 participants

This workshop will be built around discussions of original short prose works submitted by participants. We will take up two pieces of creative nonfiction each morning that we meet, which everyone will have read and carefully and critically considered beforehand. I will also add one piece of published nonfiction per meeting for us to analyze and critique for both meaning and craft, as time permits. Memoir, personal essay, nature and travel writing, creative cultural criticism, autofiction, and hybrid/cross-genre and lyric/experimental work are all welcome. My belief is that workshops should center the creator and their work and be supportive and frank. Ultimately, a workshop should illuminate a draft’s meanings, layered intentions (implicit and explicit), and the effect of a writer’s techniques and craft decisions on the text overall. Our mission will be to have friendly, focused, purposeful, and free-flowing conversations to help one another push our drafts toward their finished, publishable forms.

Submission Limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop Size: 5 participants

In this workshop, we’ll read and discuss student work with the same curiosity, regard, and rigor with which we approach published literary works. In other words, we’ll treat your poems as texts: making non evaluative observations about how they operate on the page, engage various cultural and literary traditions, and act upon our minds and bodies as readers. From there, we may discuss strategies for revision and/or manuscript development. But the bedrock of this workshop is mere noticing: paying deep, sustained attention to each other’s language. You will emerge with a clearer sense—and a richer appreciation—of your own idiosyncratic style, themes, and lineages as a writer.

Submission Limit: 6 poems, (Up to 20 pages)
Workshop Size: 10 participants

The artistic night mind, the dream power that radiates from it, can be represented by the demon.  The luminous counter-figure, the angel, is the other vital spirit of the creative imagination.  This workshop will explore Garcia Lorca’s black sounds and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s white fire as manifestations of two poles of poetry.  The demon charges and electrifies a work of art from below.  The angel falls out [or is evicted] from above. 

This workshop will concentrate on a close reading of your work. The emphasis will be both on the craft -- the language and the shaping and forming of the writing, and the imagination -- the vision that's unique to everyone.  By craft and imagination, I mean everything one brings to a poem in the way of personal and cultural angels and demons.

Submission Limit: 6 poems, (Up to 20 pages)
Workshop Size: 10 participants

*Intensive workshop*
Randall Jarrell once said that "a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it."  In this novel workshop, we'll of course try to diagnose and address your novel's flaws. But we'll also talk about how a novel's flaw might be something that makes the novel interesting, beautiful, funny, compelling, unique, and how to turn the novel's aberrances into a virtue rather than a liability. We'll do this by paying attention to what a novel sets up at the beginning, whether the novel's middle (which is where many novels go awry) remembers what it has already set up, and whether it fulfills its promises at the end. The ultimate goal is not to make your novel like other people's novels, but to better and more artfully emphasize what makes it your own. As part of this workshop, you'll read each other's work in advance, workshop your novels in class, and meet with me individually. We'll also be reading published fiction and essays--including Patrick DeWitt's ‘French Exit’--that will help inform our discussion.

Submission Limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop Size: 5 participants

*Intensive workshop*
Using Jane Alison's craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative, as a source of inspiration, participants will workshop their novels with a focus on structure.  Where possible, we'll look for opportunities to move beyond Freytag's Pyramid or the traditional Aristotelian arc by examining patterns already present in the narrative that create some of the alternative novel shapes that Alison describes--waves, spirals, fractals, etc. We'll examine how these shapes create dramatic tension, and we’ll also examine the structure of recent and classic novels that use these patterns. Participants will read one another’s work in advance, workshop their own novel in class, and meet with the instructor one-on-one.

Submission Limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop Size: 5 participants
 

Ending novels well is pretty hard, but beginning well is arguably harder, and inarguably more important. We will look at each other's opening scenes/chapters with a focus on voice, on establishing structure, and on how much information is too much. We'll also talk about different disciplines that might help you reach the end of this long endeavor without getting stuck or losing heart. In the words of E.L. Doctorow: "It's like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights; but you can make the whole trip that way."

Submission Limit: 60,000 words (200 pages)
Workshop Size: 5 participants

Together, we will endeavor to create joyful community around the act of writing by exploring our stories in terms of voice, shape, and tension in order to enhance and refine our work. We will accomplish this by paying careful attention and sharing impressions and curiosities in order to determine what may be misplaced, extraneous, or missing from our pages, as well as what already rings true or sings. Through workshopping, we will strive to see our writing more clearly, determine how to move forward, and gain insight into how our stories relate to the larger project of art and artmaking. I look forward to meeting you.

Submission Limit: 10,000 words (Up to 40 pages)
Workshop Size: 10 participants

The process of writing a novel is thrilling, exhausting, bewildering, illuminating, discouraging, and maddening, and the novelist is lost and found and lost again many times along the way. Use this workshop to bring before a supportive and attentive group an excerpt from your novel or a short story, and then take a step back with your fellow writers to see more clearly what you’ve made, and where you might be headed next. We’ll examine every manuscript to understand what’s on the page so far in terms of structure, character, plot, setting, and style, an exercise designed to help writers recognize more fully the developing work, and how they might give it greater strength and purpose. Be prepared to commit the time in advance of the conference to reading carefully the work of the other workshop participants and to provide each member of the workshop with a written, one-page response, so that you can talk about the manuscripts with sensitivity and in detail. I’ll also meet individually with each participant. Expect to return to the writing desk with plenty of fuel for the road ahead.

Submission limit: 10,000 words (Up to 40 pages)
Workshop size: 10 participants 

The novel is an enormously elastic form, capable of embracing a variety of structures and modes of writing. In this workshop, we will discuss the shape of your novel, and how character, setting and point of view can come together for maximum effect. We will especially look at scenes as building blocks for your novel, and discuss ways of inviting the reader into your fiction through dialog and action; we will also consider how summary can be used to navigate time and space. Participants will be asked to write a synopsis of their novels to facilitate discussions. Participants will provide feedback on the first 30 pages, and the instructor will provide comments on up to 60 pages. 

Submission limit: 15,000 words (Up to 60 pages)
Workshop size: 10 participants

The Retreater option offers ultimate freedom and flexibility. Instead of participating in a workshop, you’re welcome to write, rest, and recharge as you see fit. You can choose to attend any combination of craft lectures from our award winning faculty, shop talks with editors and agents, literary readings, and social events. You’ll also have lightly guided sessions to build community with other retreaters and generate new work. You’ll have the opportunity to use the campus library, fitness facilities, and network of hiking trails. This option includes full room and board.

Query Letters & First Pages Critique
Get feedback from agents on how to make your first pages and query letter shine. Participating agencies include: Aevitas Creative, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents
Submission limit: First ten pages and query letter
Limited Availability

Get professional feedback on your manuscript for a limited period following the conference. To access the post-conference manuscript consultation, you must attend the conference.
Submission limit: 50,000 word max
Limited Availability

7:30–9:00 a.m. | Breakfast and Early Bird Activities

• Breakfast served at The Coop dining hall. 
• Coffee and tea available throughout the morning.
• Activities include campus walking groups, morning meditations, and writing time in the library.

9:00–10:00 a.m. | Craft Talks
Rotating faculty-led discussions on topics such as:

• Character development
• Plot structure
• Voice and point of view
• Revision techniques

10:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m. | Workshop Sessions

• Workshops
• Retreater Write-Ins

12:15–2:00 p.m. | Lunch Break

• Lunch served at The Coop dining hall. 
• Time for informal meetings with faculty.

2:00–3:00 p.m. | Panel Discussions

Each day features a different industry-focused panel with 3-4 experts and a moderator. Panels include a Q&A session.

3:30–5:00 p.m. | Your Choice
Participants choose one:

• One-on-one agent consultations (pre-scheduled)
• Participant readings
• Writing sprints
• Free writing time
• Informal faculty office hours

5:00–7:00 p.m. | Dinner
Dinner served at The Coop, food trucks on the lawn, or Merrill House.

7:00–8:00 p.m. | Evening Programming
Rotating schedule includes:

• Faculty Readings
• Open Mic Night

9:00 p.m. onward | Late Night Options

• Gathering at Merrill House
• Writing time in designated spaces
• Rotating activities: Literary trivia, game night, participant-led activities