SpaldingCon, June 20 – 27: Four-day Workshop Offerings during the Summer Residency

SpaldingCon, the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing’s conference for alumni, takes place during the summer virtual residency, which is June 20 – 27.

The summer virtual residency features two separate workshops: traditional workshops during the first half of residency (June 21 – 24) and special-topic generative workshops during the last half (June 24 – 27). Alumni become students again. Alumni who participate in a workshop receive the full residency schedule and may attend lectures, panel discussions, readings, and the workshops they sign up for.

Traditional workshops: A traditional workshop is like the workshops you attended as a student. You submit a worksheet and prepare for and fully participate in the workshop by giving and receiving feedback. If interested, email schoolofwriting@spalding.edu with “summer workshop” for the subject line. Let us know what area of concentration you prefer. If space is available in the workshop, alumni participate in the workshop for free. These workshops are taught by Naslund-Mann faculty. The schedule is as follows:

• Wednesday, May 13. Deadline to send worksheets to NMS office.

• Sunday, May 31. 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. Eastern. Required pre-residency workshop meeting.

• Sunday, June 21. 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. Eastern. First workshop meeting to discuss front matter.

• Sunday through Tuesday, June 21 – 23. 3:15 – 5:30 p.m. Eastern. Each student’s work receives one hour of discussion.

• Wednesday, June 24. 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. Eastern. Revision workshop.

Special-topic generative workshops: These workshops are taught by Naslund-Mann faculty. The schedule is

• Wednesday through Friday, June 24 – 26. 3:15 to 5:30 p.m. Eastern.

• Saturday, June 27. 10:30 – 11:30 a.m. Eastern.

Because special-topic workshops are generative, no worksheet is required. There may be pre-reading. Generative workshops can accommodate up to 6 – 8 students and need 5 students to make. The fee to participate in a generative workshop is $350, due by May 31. A link to pay will be emailed. Workshop descriptions are below.

To register for generative workshops: When you’ve chosen the workshop you wish to take, go to the registration form and add your name under that workshop. Both alumni and students select their preference for the generative workshop. Each workshop has room for 6 or 8 students. If your preferred workshop is full, please choose another. Confirmation of registration for a workshop will be send by April 30.

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Voice: Infusing Personality into Your Prose

with Beth Ann Bauman

Students from any area are welcome to join this fiction and writing for children & young adults workshop.

What is this elusive thing we call “voice”? Is it something writers need to create from scratch? The good news is voice is not something you need to invent or overhaul. It’s already part of your writerly DNA. It’s the unique way you express yourself. Yet, through subtle adjustments of language, syntax, and rhythm, voice can be enhanced to nail characterization and texturize the emotional landscape.

In this workshop, we’ll look at some short, masterful excerpts from kidlit, YA, and general fiction to see how authors capture characterization and tone through the narrative voice. Students will bring short excerpts of their writing to the sessions, where they’ll experiment with various techniques to get characters on the page more clearly and better create the general ambience of the writing.

In talking about voice, we’ll focus more directly on first-person narration since so much kidlit and YA is written from this perspective. But we’ll examine third-person narration too, because whether you’re writing in first or third, voice is the expression of the content.

The Three-Day Story: How to Write (and Complete) a Short Story in Less Than a Week

with Whitney Collins

Students from any area are welcome to join this fiction workshop.

Did you know it’s possible to write an amazing short story, that’s ready to submit to literary magazines, in less than a week? As writers, we often feel overwhelmed by the generative process and assume we need lots of hard-to-find alone time to actually produce finished work. In this workshop, we will discover that that’s (amazingly) not the case. We will use a step-by-step process to craft each portion of a story, starting with a “Big Beginnings” exercise, following with a “Three-Part Middle” exercise, and ending with a “Round Ending” exercise. The goal is for you to leave workshop with a story that, save for minor clean-up, is ready for the world!

Homecoming | Crafting the Sensory Language

of Setting & Place

with Ellen Hagan

Students from any area are welcome to join this prose (fiction, creative nonfiction, or writing for children & young adults) workshop.

How do we honor and hold the homes and places our characters live in? How do we craft authentic hometowns, cities, countries, hollers, mountainsides, ocean communities, metropolises and small towns with accuracy and tenderness? How do we make them alive on the page? How do we turn them into their own characters? By examining and exploring writing from Crystal Wilkinson, Bushra Rehman, Silas House, Elisabet Velasquez, Renée Watson and Jesmyn Ward, we will discuss what makes a place sing, vibrate, bounce. What are tools of making it elevated? What makes us keep reading, keep discovering and keep unearthing the elements that make a setting so visceral and so real,? The ones that make us want to return to them again and again? Using sensory-based meditation, free-writing, map-making and writing samples, we will build settings that are layered with sensory details and craft rich and nuanced places for our characters to live in and interact with.

The Structure of Story

with Leah Henderson

Students from any area are welcome to join this prose (fiction, creative nonfiction, or writing for children & young adults) workshop.

Regardless of where you are in your writing process—forming a new story idea or deep in the trenches of drafting or revision—this workshop will focus on ways to strengthen a story’s structure.

By breaking down the beginning, middle, and endings of stories, as well as exploring pre-writing and brainstorming techniques, participants will gain a better understanding of what is needed to create an engaging story. Writing prompts, mini exercises, and text examples will help us craft compelling openings, avoid often muddled middles, and create satisfying endings. Through considering how character, setting, dialogue, pacing, emotion and other key elements come together at each stage of the writing process, we will learn to construct engaging stories that fulfill promises and endear readers from the very first page to the last. There is no pre-reading for this workshop.

Personal Essays on Pop Culture Obsessions

with Erin Keane

Students from any area are welcome to join this creative nonfiction workshop.

Are you mourning Rob Reiner? Obsessed with Sade? Know way too much about Animal Crossing? Feeling some kind of way about Stranger Things? Writing personal stories through the lens of pop culture—from indie film to chart-topping hits to mass-produced toys to pulp paperbacks to even chain restaurants and cartoon breakfast cereal—is both invitational and invocational, for fans and haters alike. In this class we will take a layered approach to writing about our pop culture obsessions, combining critical observations, research, and memoir to draft and revise the obsession essay that only you could write.

Endings and Beginnings

with Karen Salyer McElmurray

Students from any area are welcome to join this fiction and creative nonfiction workshop.

Novelist Graham Greene says that “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” The arbitrariness—catching hold of an idea or a dream or a moment of insight—is certainly part of the sheer magic of writing. But beginnings and endings are also the weaving and unweaving of words. Deciding how to start a story and how to end it involves careful translation of our original moments of insight. This generative workshop will look at examples of openings and endings from classic and contemporary stories. Each day we will work on some openings of our own.

Line/Dance—On 7 Different Types of Line Breaks (And How to Use Them!)

with Keith S. Wilson

Students from any area are welcome to join this poetry workshop.

If there are no rules in poetry, for many people the one exception is the line break. A poem’s got to have them (right?). But how do they work? In this workshop, we'll look at poems demonstrating a number of different techniques for handling the line break, break them down, and then choose one of them (each line break has its own writing prompt) to try them out ourselves. The pre-reading will include at least one example of a poem working in each style of line break written by a different contemporary poet, and we’ll talk about the strategies for choosing one line break over another in the first workshop session to guide our choices and discussion. We'll look at one poem per poet spread across workshops, with a special focus on line breaks.

Writing the Scene

with Sam Zalutsky

Students from any area are welcome to join this screenwriting workshop.

All writers need to know how to write a good scene, no matter what genre you write. This workshop will examine the basic building blocks of the dramatic scene, including visual description, structure, dialogue, conflict, character, obstacle, and objective to explore what works in a scene and what doesn't. Then you will do multiple screenwriting exercises as well as a revision exercise to strengthen your scene-writing skills. There will be several short screenplays to read beforehand. Open and beneficial to all genres.

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When you’ve chosen the workshop you wish to take, go to the registration form and add your name under that workshop.