How does a non-fiction writer create a voice that feels real, honest, interesting, and authentic?
Mixing fact and creativity is a challenge Alison Hawthorne Deming, award-winning poet and essayist, and author of numerous works focused on the sciences, will address when she visits with writers at the 13th annual Cochise Community Creative Writing Celebration March 25-26.
Deming is the keynote presenter at an event that brings together published writers in several genres with writers from the local community and beyond. Participants at the popular event have the chance to glean wisdom from poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, and publishers. While everyone attends the keynote address, attendees also get a chance to practice and ask questions of authors during smaller break-out sessions on a variety of topics.
This year, they’ll celebrate the life of event co-founder Diane Freund, who passed away last fall (see sidebar).
Deming is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Rope (Penguin, 2009), and three books of nonfiction, including Writing the Sacred into the Real (Milkweed, 2001). Her first book, Science and other Poems, won the Walt Whitman Award of the American Academy of Poets. Her work has been widely published and anthologized, including in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. Among her awards are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and the Bayer Award in Science Writing. She has just finished a new nonfiction book titled A Bestiary for the 21st Century. Her essays have appeared in Orion, The Georgia Review, Sierra, Gnosis, Water~Stone, Isotope, Ecotone, Western Humanities Review and other publications. She is poet-in-residence at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens.
In her keynote presentation Get Real! Why We Love Nonfiction Now, Deming will address a range of creative nonfiction from memoir to literary science writing, from essay to cultural commentary, and will look at how a writer creates a voice that feels real, honest, interesting, and authentic while addressing the pitfalls of pursuing that goal when the work, by definition, must be “creative.”
Deming also will present the breakout session The Creative Nonfiction Toolkit and will work with participants on techniques for weaving memory, imagination, and research into a seamless and compelling voice.
The writing celebration features three additional authors.
Jessica Tribble is associate publisher at Poisoned Pen Press, the second largest publisher of hardcover mysteries in the country. She has a master’s in Renaissance Literature from Arizona State University as well as a certificate in Scholarly Publishing and Editing. She joined the team of Poisoned Pen Press in 2005 after serving as their intern for a summer. She now acts as the first point of contact to authors, seeing manuscripts from their inception to completion.
In her breakout session, But the Butler Did It! What You Should (and Shouldn’t) Do in Mystery Fiction, she will share what publishers want to see and what they’d prefer to avoid.
Patrick Michael Finn is the author of A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich, selected by Tom Barbash as winner of the 2006 Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Competition and published by The Cleveland State University Poetry Center. His second book, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet: Stories, won the 2009 Hudson Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books in 2011. A winner of the AWP Intro Award, selected by Benjamin Alíre Sáenz, and the 2004 Third Coast Fiction Prize, judged by Stuart Dybek, Finn’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Third Coast, QuarterlyWest, The Clackamas Literary Review, The Yalobusha Review, Punk Planet, and Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American Mystery Stories 2004. His fiction has also received citations in the 2005 Pushcart Prize and The Best American Short Stories 2008. He has taught writing at the University of Arizona, Western Nebraska Community College, and the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where he was awarded the 2006 Teaching Excellence Award. In 2007 he founded and currently coordinates the creative writing program at Chandler-Gilbert Community College.
In his breakout Tools for Writing Dynamic Characters in Novels and Short Stories, he discusses techniques to create unforgettable characters and guides participants in character development exercises.
The poetry of Dick Bakken, a dynamic performer of poetry whose reputation rests almost solely on his public readings, has appeared in a variety of journals and has been recorded on radio and tape. His work has been described as lyrical, dramatic, liturgical, and celebratory, and his interest is in the magical, the transformational, and the bardic. His poems appear in more than 200 periodicals and lend themselves to his mixed media performances which may employ masks, mimes, musicians, dancers, choruses, tableau, lasers, and electronic insects.
He presents Poetry on the Wing, multi-generational workshops in which participants learn about transforming factual experience into writing.
The Cochise Community Creative Writing Celebration is co-sponsored by Cochise College, the City of Sierra Vista Parks & Leisure Services, and University South Foundation.
If you go…
What: 13th Annual Cochise Community Creative Writing Celebration
When: March 25-26
Where: Friday, Ethel Berger Center, 10 a.m. – 4:15 p.m.; Saturday, Cochise College Sierra Vista Campus, 8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Cost: $40 for the two-day event; $25 to attend one day only. Registration costs $25 for students and seniors age 60 and older.
Contact: creativewriting@cochise.edu or (520) 515-5490