2010 SPC Annual Writing Conference
This year's SPC Annual Writing Conference features Joseph Lease, Toni Mirosevich, Donna de la Perriere, Flatman Crooked, Indigo Moor, Peter Grandbois and Foshang with Lawrence Dinkins and Ross Hammond
Friday April 16, 2010 7:30 PM
Saturday April 17, 2010 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM
@R25 at 1719 25th Street
Sacramento, California
All readings and workshops are FREE
For registration, contact Tim Kahl at tnklbnny@frontiernet.net
Friday April 16, 2010 at 7:30 PM
Reading: Indigo Moor and Peter Grandbois
Saturday April 17, 2010 at 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
1st Workshop Session
Indigo Moor • “Writing to History and Culture” In this workshop participants will discuss examples of poetry and prose to discover: How does a writer handle emotionally charged events in a professional manner? How does a writer maintain objectivity without obscuring the heart of the past? How do we uncover the passion in dry facts, accounts, testimonials, and interviews? [lecture, discussion, writing exercise, and take home materials]
Peter Grandbois • “Leaping Prose: How to Create Story Between Your Sentences.” With a title that pays homage to Robert Bly, participants will examine the bridge between poetry and fiction with parataxis. Parataxis — n. the justaposition of phrases and sentences without coordinating or subordinating conjunctions.
Tim Kahl • “InDesign, Photoshop and POD: A Step-by-step Introduction to Bringing Your Literary Publication into the World” This workshop will be a brief overview of bringing a literary publication into the world using InDesign, Photoshop and print-on-demand technologies (such as Lulu). The workshop will focus on practical resolution of production hang-ups and keeping one’s costs down as a part of production. Screenshots of the various different crucial steps in using these software programs will guide you through from the moment of conception to the moment of realization in the world. [lecture, demonstration, take home materials]
Saturday April 17, 2010 at 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
2nd Workshop Session
Joseph Lease • “Images and Voice” In this hands-on workshop participants will explore images and voice. We will write and read poems in which each word makes the story and the music clear, when there is nothing in the way. When the music is right, that's when a poem reaches people, lets people in. Participants will explore how poems animated by powerful images and voices can also become acts of resistance. Participants will write poems that open the possibilities of image. Participants will also move between verse and prose to explore narrative and imaginative shifts.
Toni Mirosevich • “In Through The Small Door: Using the random, the Inconsequential, and the Discarded, to Find Entry into New Poetic Material.” In this workshop participants will turn their attention away from attempting to write ‘the big poem’ to find other approaches that can yield the important poem. Along the way participants will utilize oblique strategies, such as “Honor thy error as hidden intention” (Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt) to help us find the small key that fits the small lock.
Donna de la Perriere • “Writing Place, Family, and Identity.” This workshop will explore the ways in which poets write about family, place, and identity. Just as a poem is a space where the poet can construct a version of “self,” family and place also function as a spaces in which people build identity/-ies; thus, not so surprisingly, the story of identity is often the story of how a person, in this case a writer, understands and translates her/his place of birth and family of origin. We'll explore the ways in which various poets and writers write about their families and places of origin, their various identities, the often-conflicting demands those identities make, the difficulty (perhaps the impossibility) of being accountable to one aspect of one’s identity without potentially betraying another--then through a series of writing prompts, we'll begin to write into our own versions of place, family, and self.
Flatman Crooked [Elijah Jenkins/Deena Drewis] • “Intro to the Indie Publishing World”
Saturday April 17, 2010 at 3:15 to 5:00
Reading: Donna de la Perriere, Joseph Lease, Toni Mirosevich
Saturday April 17, 2010 at 5:00 to ??
Reading/Performance: Lawrence Dinkins and Ross Hammond
Indigo Moor's Through the Stonecutter’s Window was selected for the 2009 Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize. His first book Tap-Root was published in 2007 as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. Other honors include: Cave Canem writing fellowship; former vp of the Sacramento Poetry Center; 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers; 2008 Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize.Other honors include: finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in the Arkansas Review, Xavier Review, LA Review, Mochila Review, Boston University’s The Comment, the Pushcart Prize nominated Out of the Blue Artists Unite, Poetry Now, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry, Cave Canem Anthologies VIII and IX, The Ringing Ear, the NCPS 2006 Anthology, Blue Moon Literary & Arts Review, Breathe 101: Contemporary Odes, and Gathering Ground. He was recently the featured artist for the Suisun Valley Review. Indigo is a graduate member of the Artist's Residency Institute for Teaching Artists and he teaches residencies and workshops across the country. Recent appearances include Johnson C. Smith University’s World of Words Poetry Festival ‘09 and the GoldRush Writer’s Conference. Collaborative efforts include readings for the Artists Embassy Intl. Dancing Poetry Festival, the Livermore Ekphrastic Project, and the Davis Jazz Arts Festival.
Peter Grandbois is the author of The Gravedigger (Chronicle Books, 2006), a Borders “Original Voices” and Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, (Spuyten Duyvil 2009), as well as the forthcoming novel, Nahoonkara (Etruscan Press, forthcoming in 2010). His essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and recently received an honorable mention for the 2007 Pushcart Prize. In addition, his translation of San Juan: Memoir of a City was recently nominated for a PEN Translation award. He is a professor of creative writing and contemporary literature at California State University in Sacramento.
Tim Kahl (http://www.timkahl.com) is the author of Possessing Yourself (Word Tech Press, 2009) He has published work in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review, Illuminations, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated German poet Rolf Haufs, Austrian avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poets, Lêdo Ivo and Marly de Oliveira; and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the video, poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.wordpress.com/). He is also the editor for Bald Trickster Press, which is dedicated to works of poetry in translation into English.
Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Broken World (Coffee House Press) and Human Rights (second edition forthcoming from Talisman House). His poem "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was selected for The Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribner). His poems have also been featured on NPR and published in The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, Bay Poetics, No Gender, and elsewhere.
Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money”), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!”
Michael Bérubé called Broken World “remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.”
Ron Silliman wrote: “One test of a book is how you feel about the writer & his or her work on completing the volume. In the case of Joseph Lease’s Broken World , I want to read everything he’s ever written, and for everything that’s written but not yet in print to get published as soon as possible. Broken World is a dazzling performance whose only weakness, to my eye & ear, is that it could have been much longer.”
The Boston Phoenix wrote: "Joseph Lease is making a reputation as one of the exciting young voices in American poetry . . . Few poets these days are publishing verse this musically alive."
Thomas Fink’s book A Different Sense of Power: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century U.S. Poetry includes extensive critical analysis of Lease’s poetry.
Lease is Associate Professor of Writing and Literature and Chair of the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Toni Mirosevich is the author of a collection of nonfiction stories, Pink Harvest, (winner of the First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award, Lambda Literary Award Finalist in 2007), and three poetry collections; Queer Street, My Oblique Strategies, (winner of the 2005 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award) and The Rooms We Make Our Own. Her multi-genre work has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and journals including The Discovery of Poetry, The Progressive, Zyzzyva, Best American Travel Writing, Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, AutoBioDiversity, Gastronomica, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere. Literary honors include fellowships with the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Blue Mountain Center, Astraea Emerging Writer in Fiction Award, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. She is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at SFSU and former Associate Director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives.
Donna de la Perrière is the author of True Crime (Talisman House, 2009) and the forthcoming St. Erasure (Talisman House, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Agni, American Letters and Commentary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, The New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, New American Writing, Parthenon West Review, Volt, and other journals, as well as in Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books, 2009). The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry award, she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University, and curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series at San Francisco’s The Lab gallery and performance space.
Elijah Jenkins is the Executive Director and founder of Flatmancrooked. At California State University Bakersfield, he majored in, of all lucrative fields, Religious Studies. Suffice it to say, he neither became a pastor nor a professor. Instead he has worked as a debt collector, teacher, case manager at various non-profit organizations, social worker to sex offenders, promoter of independent bands, and graphic designer to the stars.
He also writes. His work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Concern, NOO Journal, Underground Voices and Flatmancrooked's Anthology, all under a pseudonym. He does not approve of blogs, and was alarmed to hear that the New York Times has several (accordingly, you can't read his blog here). He frowns upon MFA programs, though secretly wishes he'd studied in one. He also climbs V3/5.10d routes/problems, enjoys and advocates the regular use of tobacco products, is an unapologetic fan of Kafka, and is an avid typographical nerd. As the photograph suggests, he has excellent breath and a fine taste in belts.
Deena Drewis is the Senior Editor and a managing partner at Flatmancrooked Publishing. She is not a hippy but still managed to graduate from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Once, Newsweek gave her money for an essay. Most recently, she had a very, very short story appear in SMITH Magazine's Six Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak. If you happen to read it, she hopes you will not think less of her personal hygiene.
Friday April 16, 2010 7:30 PM
Saturday April 17, 2010 10:00 AM to 6:30 PM
@R25 at 1719 25th Street
Sacramento, California
All readings and workshops are FREE
For registration, contact Tim Kahl at tnklbnny@frontiernet.net
Friday April 16, 2010 at 7:30 PM
Reading: Indigo Moor and Peter Grandbois
Saturday April 17, 2010 at 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
1st Workshop Session
Indigo Moor • “Writing to History and Culture” In this workshop participants will discuss examples of poetry and prose to discover: How does a writer handle emotionally charged events in a professional manner? How does a writer maintain objectivity without obscuring the heart of the past? How do we uncover the passion in dry facts, accounts, testimonials, and interviews? [lecture, discussion, writing exercise, and take home materials]
Peter Grandbois • “Leaping Prose: How to Create Story Between Your Sentences.” With a title that pays homage to Robert Bly, participants will examine the bridge between poetry and fiction with parataxis. Parataxis — n. the justaposition of phrases and sentences without coordinating or subordinating conjunctions.
Tim Kahl • “InDesign, Photoshop and POD: A Step-by-step Introduction to Bringing Your Literary Publication into the World” This workshop will be a brief overview of bringing a literary publication into the world using InDesign, Photoshop and print-on-demand technologies (such as Lulu). The workshop will focus on practical resolution of production hang-ups and keeping one’s costs down as a part of production. Screenshots of the various different crucial steps in using these software programs will guide you through from the moment of conception to the moment of realization in the world. [lecture, demonstration, take home materials]
Saturday April 17, 2010 at 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
2nd Workshop Session
Joseph Lease • “Images and Voice” In this hands-on workshop participants will explore images and voice. We will write and read poems in which each word makes the story and the music clear, when there is nothing in the way. When the music is right, that's when a poem reaches people, lets people in. Participants will explore how poems animated by powerful images and voices can also become acts of resistance. Participants will write poems that open the possibilities of image. Participants will also move between verse and prose to explore narrative and imaginative shifts.
Toni Mirosevich • “In Through The Small Door: Using the random, the Inconsequential, and the Discarded, to Find Entry into New Poetic Material.” In this workshop participants will turn their attention away from attempting to write ‘the big poem’ to find other approaches that can yield the important poem. Along the way participants will utilize oblique strategies, such as “Honor thy error as hidden intention” (Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt) to help us find the small key that fits the small lock.
Donna de la Perriere • “Writing Place, Family, and Identity.” This workshop will explore the ways in which poets write about family, place, and identity. Just as a poem is a space where the poet can construct a version of “self,” family and place also function as a spaces in which people build identity/-ies; thus, not so surprisingly, the story of identity is often the story of how a person, in this case a writer, understands and translates her/his place of birth and family of origin. We'll explore the ways in which various poets and writers write about their families and places of origin, their various identities, the often-conflicting demands those identities make, the difficulty (perhaps the impossibility) of being accountable to one aspect of one’s identity without potentially betraying another--then through a series of writing prompts, we'll begin to write into our own versions of place, family, and self.
Flatman Crooked [Elijah Jenkins/Deena Drewis] • “Intro to the Indie Publishing World”
Saturday April 17, 2010 at 3:15 to 5:00
Reading: Donna de la Perriere, Joseph Lease, Toni Mirosevich
Saturday April 17, 2010 at 5:00 to ??
Reading/Performance: Lawrence Dinkins and Ross Hammond
Indigo Moor's Through the Stonecutter’s Window was selected for the 2009 Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize. His first book Tap-Root was published in 2007 as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. Other honors include: Cave Canem writing fellowship; former vp of the Sacramento Poetry Center; 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers; 2008 Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize.Other honors include: finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in the Arkansas Review, Xavier Review, LA Review, Mochila Review, Boston University’s The Comment, the Pushcart Prize nominated Out of the Blue Artists Unite, Poetry Now, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry, Cave Canem Anthologies VIII and IX, The Ringing Ear, the NCPS 2006 Anthology, Blue Moon Literary & Arts Review, Breathe 101: Contemporary Odes, and Gathering Ground. He was recently the featured artist for the Suisun Valley Review. Indigo is a graduate member of the Artist's Residency Institute for Teaching Artists and he teaches residencies and workshops across the country. Recent appearances include Johnson C. Smith University’s World of Words Poetry Festival ‘09 and the GoldRush Writer’s Conference. Collaborative efforts include readings for the Artists Embassy Intl. Dancing Poetry Festival, the Livermore Ekphrastic Project, and the Davis Jazz Arts Festival.
Peter Grandbois is the author of The Gravedigger (Chronicle Books, 2006), a Borders “Original Voices” and Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, (Spuyten Duyvil 2009), as well as the forthcoming novel, Nahoonkara (Etruscan Press, forthcoming in 2010). His essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous magazines and recently received an honorable mention for the 2007 Pushcart Prize. In addition, his translation of San Juan: Memoir of a City was recently nominated for a PEN Translation award. He is a professor of creative writing and contemporary literature at California State University in Sacramento.
Tim Kahl (http://www.timkahl.com) is the author of Possessing Yourself (Word Tech Press, 2009) He has published work in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review, Illuminations, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The Journal, Parthenon West Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated German poet Rolf Haufs, Austrian avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poets, Lêdo Ivo and Marly de Oliveira; and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the video, poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.wordpress.com/). He is also the editor for Bald Trickster Press, which is dedicated to works of poetry in translation into English.
Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Broken World (Coffee House Press) and Human Rights (second edition forthcoming from Talisman House). His poem "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was selected for The Best American Poetry 2002 (Scribner). His poems have also been featured on NPR and published in The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, Bay Poetics, No Gender, and elsewhere.
Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money”), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!”
Michael Bérubé called Broken World “remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.”
Ron Silliman wrote: “One test of a book is how you feel about the writer & his or her work on completing the volume. In the case of Joseph Lease’s Broken World
The Boston Phoenix wrote: "Joseph Lease is making a reputation as one of the exciting young voices in American poetry . . . Few poets these days are publishing verse this musically alive."
Thomas Fink’s book A Different Sense of Power: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth Century U.S. Poetry includes extensive critical analysis of Lease’s poetry.
Lease is Associate Professor of Writing and Literature and Chair of the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Toni Mirosevich is the author of a collection of nonfiction stories, Pink Harvest, (winner of the First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award, Lambda Literary Award Finalist in 2007), and three poetry collections; Queer Street, My Oblique Strategies, (winner of the 2005 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award) and The Rooms We Make Our Own. Her multi-genre work has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and journals including The Discovery of Poetry, The Progressive, Zyzzyva, Best American Travel Writing, Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, AutoBioDiversity, Gastronomica, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere. Literary honors include fellowships with the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Blue Mountain Center, Astraea Emerging Writer in Fiction Award, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. She is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at SFSU and former Associate Director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives.
Donna de la Perrière is the author of True Crime (Talisman House, 2009) and the forthcoming St. Erasure (Talisman House, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Agni, American Letters and Commentary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, The New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, New American Writing, Parthenon West Review, Volt, and other journals, as well as in Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books, 2009). The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry award, she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University, and curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series at San Francisco’s The Lab gallery and performance space.
Elijah Jenkins is the Executive Director and founder of Flatmancrooked. At California State University Bakersfield, he majored in, of all lucrative fields, Religious Studies. Suffice it to say, he neither became a pastor nor a professor. Instead he has worked as a debt collector, teacher, case manager at various non-profit organizations, social worker to sex offenders, promoter of independent bands, and graphic designer to the stars.
He also writes. His work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Concern, NOO Journal, Underground Voices and Flatmancrooked's Anthology, all under a pseudonym. He does not approve of blogs, and was alarmed to hear that the New York Times has several (accordingly, you can't read his blog here). He frowns upon MFA programs, though secretly wishes he'd studied in one. He also climbs V3/5.10d routes/problems, enjoys and advocates the regular use of tobacco products, is an unapologetic fan of Kafka, and is an avid typographical nerd. As the photograph suggests, he has excellent breath and a fine taste in belts.
Deena Drewis is the Senior Editor and a managing partner at Flatmancrooked Publishing. She is not a hippy but still managed to graduate from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Once, Newsweek gave her money for an essay. Most recently, she had a very, very short story appear in SMITH Magazine's Six Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak. If you happen to read it, she hopes you will not think less of her personal hygiene.
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