Conference attendees will be able to choose from more than 15 workshop sessions ranging from traversing the landscape in poetry to creating memorable characters in short fiction. All workshop presenters are practicing writers whose works have appeared in various print and digital publications.
The conference keynote speaker will be Joe Paddock, award-winning author, poet, oral historian, and a creative writing professor. Mr. Paddock’s workshop session, titled Inner Ecology, will be a continuation of his keynote address, both of which gain insight from writers such as William Stafford, Carl Jung, Henry David Thoreau, and John Steinbeck. The workshop discussion will explore the way in which the conscious ego mind often becomes an inner critic that stifles the natural flow from the creative unconscious.
Conference workshop sessions will explore topics relating to character development, the writer’s internal and external landscapes, publishing, and, yes, insects. Attendees of Carol Anne Hough’s session, Creating Characters, will gain hands-on experience creating characters from different perspectives. In their session titled Embodying the Landscape, presenters Kristin Bratt and Cary Waterman will share the embodiment of landscape in their poetry, reading and discussing their work as influenced by both external and internal landscapes and the correspondences between. Ryan Christiansen, in his session titled Rural Writers: Where Publishing and Digital Landscape Intersect, will explore how rural writers and publishers leverage the new digital landscape.
Other session titles include Leaf Flipping: Insects and Literature (Presenter Scott King), Thrift Store Values (Presenter Kevin Zepper), First Pages: Create Captivating Openings (Presenter Angela Foster), Marketing for Writers (Presenter Krista Rolfzen Soukup), Your Life and You: The Landscapey Sonnet (Presenter John Zdrazil), Literary Art in Public Places (Presenters Ruth Solie and Ryan Christiansen), and Reading Literature with a Writer’s Eye (Presenter Steve Linstrom).
Writers interested in attending the conference can register online on the Lake Region Writers Network website. The full-day conference fee, which includes lunch, is $50 adults/$40 for students. To register for the conference, writers should go to http://lakeregionwriters.net/writers-conference.
