This Event Has Been Cancelled.
Learn to Write Well, or Not to Write at All. – John Dryden
Take Dryden’s Advice: Sign Up For The
Zion Canyon Arts and Humanities Council’s
Writing Workshop
Saturday, September 22nd, beginning at 8:15 a.m.
8:15 to 2:30 with morning orientation, snack & lunch.
Canyon Community Center
126 Lion Blvd., Springdale, Utah
Tickets are $60 and space is limited!
To reserve your ticket, contact Joyce Hartless.
Learn what these three successful authors and poets have to say about writing well.
Paisley Rekdal was named Utah’s Poet Laureate in May of 2017. She teaches at the University of Utah. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017 and 2018), and on National Public Radio, among others.
She is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. Her newest work of nonfiction is a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam.
Paisley will be speaking about “The Art of Revision: What to Keep, What to Cut in a Poem, and Why.”
Poets are often asked, by editors and writing workshops, to cut back what “doesn’t work” in a poem. But without the aid of editors or fellow writers, how can we determine for ourselves what stays or goes? In this workshop, participants will look at rough drafts and final versions of published poems (some famous) to determine why the authors kept what they did, and why they cut what they cut, and what – ultimately – holds a poem together.
Danielle Dubrasky is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Utah University (SUU) and Director of the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values. Danielle’s poetry has appeared in Terrain.org, Pilgrimage, Sugar House Review, Salt Front, Cave Wall, Contrary Magazine, and Quilt & Parchment. Her poems have also been published int he limited edition art book Invisible Shores, by the Red Butte press of the University of Utah. Her chapbook “Ruin and Light” won the Anabiosis Press chapbook competition. She was a finalist for White Pines Press, a semi-finalist for Backwater Press and Elixer Press, and a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Twice Danielle was a recipient of the Utah Arts Council first place award in poetry. She is the poetry editor for Contemporary Rural Social Work journal and has developed a curriculum for poetry writing exercises for use in poetry therapy groups. Danielle conducts poetry writing workshops on “Metaphors and Symbolic Landscapes.” She is the recipient of SUU’s Award of Distinguished Scholar and Achievement in Experiential Learning Award. She directs the Art of Literature program, a partnership between SUU and the Utah Humanities Council designed to bring writers to Southern Utah communities and the classrooms.
Danielle will be speaking about “You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Character Development in the Short Story.”
What does your protagonist want and what is the main obstacle in the way? Will you resolve that obstacle through character development or plot turns? This workshop will use Ethan Canin’s short story “The Year of Getting to Know Us” as a model for how character development can drive a story’s trajectory more effectively than an elaborate plot. We will look at key scenes from the story that use dialogue and setting to give participants insight into a character’s emotional state and discuss how to create a scene of inner awareness and transformation. (Reading Canin’s story before the workshop will benefit you in this section.)
Cindy King is an Associate Professor of English at Dixie State University and Faculty Editor of The Southern Quill and Route 7 Review. Cindy’s work has appeared in Callaloo, North American Review, American Literary Review, Jubilat, TriQuarterly, Black Bird, River Styx, Cimarron, Black Warrior, Barrow Street, The Pinch, Cincinnati Review, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her work can be heard on NPR’s Weekend America, and is published in The Cortland Review and Rhino Poetry. Cindy is winner of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop and the Agha Shahid Ali Scholarship in Poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Recently, she was a Fellow at the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. She serves on the Artistic Committee of the Blank Theater in Hollywood, California, as a reader of scripts for the theater’s Living Room Series.
Cindy will be speaking about “The Poetry of Prose: The Art of Lyric Essay.”
This generative workshop will explore the relationship between prose poetry and lyric essays through examining genre-bending hybrids of writers such as Lee Martin, Brian Doyle, and Maggie nelson. Then, by completing a writing exercise that combines personal experience, researched fact, and free association, participants will take their first steps toward producing a collage or braided lyric narrative.
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Thank you to the Town of Springdale and the Canyon Community Center for supporting this event |