Faculty and participants engaged in lively discussion during daily workshops. Photo by Andrew Daddio
For Katie Rice ’13, last week’s 19th Annual Colgate Writers’ Conference served as a chance to escape noisy New York City and focus on her writing in the summer serenity of Hamilton.
“CWC is like summer camp for writers,” said Rice, who returned to the conference for her third year. As a former intern for the Office of Summer Programs at Colgate, Rice is no stranger to the conference. During her senior year, she helped organize the writers’ conference, along with other summer programs on campus.
“Writing is a very personal endeavor, so anytime a group of people share their work with each other or come together to talk about writing, there will inevitably be a personal or emotional element to the conversation,” said Rice, who now works at Random House as a business development and digital publishing assistant.
Throughout the week, the camaraderie of the writers was evident during workshops where they critiqued each other’s writing, offered feedback, and laughed at each other’s literary jokes and references.
Craft talks from the esteemed faculty members kicked off with Brian Hall, author of The Impossible Country. In his talk “Two Openings: A Writer at Work,” Hall discussed the openings of books and their artfully crafted style.
Later in the week, Jennifer Brice, associate professor of English at Colgate, spoke about depictions of nature in writing. Her craft talk, “A Sense of Where You Are,” reflected on the inseparable quality of place and action or character in a piece of literature.
Jennifer Smith ’03 also returned to campus for the writers’ conference and presented a shop talk about the fundamentals of publishing. Smith, senior editor for the Random House Publishing Group, has been an integral participant of previous writers’ conferences. Her talk drew writers seeking advice on improving their social media platforms and crafting the best possible query letter to present to potential agents.
“The faculty and visiting writers are all so impressive but also so accessible to participants,” Rice said. “Participants and writers mingle every night at Merrill House and sit together joking during meals. It was a magical week.”
Participants also had the opportunity to listen to the orchestral sounds of the Manhattan String Quartet and attend screenings and lectures of the Flaherty Film Seminar — both summer programs in town for the week.
Reflecting on her return to central New York, Rice said, “Coming back as an alumna, I feel the inspiration of the conference but I also am hit with a wave of nostalgia. Colgate will always be, in some part, my home, so coming back to the conference felt like coming back home to do my favorite thing: write.”