Nightsun 2014 Overview

The 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference has come and gone in one whirlwind weekend. Participants and faculty all had a great time, and there was much to be learned during the events. From registration to the closing reception, writers from various genres blended together to learn from each other and to share an unforgettable experience with people much like themselves.

For those who could not attend, or for those who want to revisit the weekend, we have provided a rundown of the conference below. Enjoy!

DAY 1

During the first night, everyone simply checked in and sat back to enjoy a reading after dinner.

Gerry LaFemina (Director of the Center for Creative Writing) kicked things off by introducing the readers for the night, Bruce Weigl and Marion Winik.

 Marion Winik read some of her nonfiction work, including some sections of Glen Rock Book of the Dead.

Bruce Weigl shared some of his poems and also read some poetry in Vietnamese followed by the English translations.

DAY 2

Participants were up bright and early the next morning to attend the first writing prompt session of the conference, led by Gerry LaFemina.

This session focused on character, and participants shared work from every genre from nonfiction to poetry.

After the writing prompt session, the workshops were underway!

(Left): Marion Winik reviews some work samples with her nonfiction students.

(Right): Brenda Clough leads the sci-fi/fantasy/horror workshop.

 

Following a lunch break, the faculty members split into two groups to discuss writing with the participants:

Clint McCown, Marion Winik, and Brenda Clough formed the panel that covered the topic of writing prose...

...while Gerry LaFemina, April Lindner, and Bruce Weigl led the discussion for writing poetry.

The last event of the day was the fiction reading held at the Lewis J. Ort Library on the Frostburg State University campus.

Brenda Clough shared some of her science-fiction work during the reading -- a story of a soldier who went missing in a blizzard and woke up hundreds of years in the future.

Clint McCown read a section of his novel War Memorials, sharing a troubling scene for the protagonist Nolan Vann and his pet lizard Randall.

DAY 3

The day began just as the one before -- with a writing prompt session, this time led by YA author April Lindner.

The participants later split into their four separate groups (fiction, nonfiction, sci-fi/fantasy/horror, and poetry) for another round of workshops.

After everyone took a break to relax and eat some lunch, Gerry LaFemina and April Lindner led the next reading.

Gerry LaFemina pulled double-duty at this reading, acting both as a host and as a reader. He shared some of his poetry after being introduced by a colleague. (You didn't think he would introduce himself, did you?)

Though the YA workshop had to be cancelled, April Lindner still attended the conference and read from her YA novel Catherine, a modern adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

Following the reading, all of the faculty members joined together to form the panel for the Publishing Q&A, tackling issues such as ebook versus print.

Gerry LaFemina, Marion Winik, Clint McCown, Bruce Weigl, and Brenda Clough made up the panel for the Q&A.

Bruce Weigl spotted our photographer on the balcony during the discussion and gave him a quick smile.

The day was concluded with the participant reading at Dante's on Main Street.

Work was shared from all of the genres while participants and faculty alike were there to listen. Food, drinks, good writing, and good company -- who could ask for better?

DAY 4

 The very last writing prompt session was led once again by Gerry LaFemina. This time there were two different prompts...

 ...the first to write a piece incorporating the lyrics of a song that affected you during adolescence and the second to write a piece about a memorable movie.

After the final workshop meetings, everyone gathered together one last time at the the closing reception.

The reception was held at Main Street Books, where participants could buy books written by the faculty members and get them signed while enjoying some pizza.

 After a truly memorable few days, it was time to say goodbye to new friends with the hope of seeing some of them again next year.

Bruce Weigl wrapped things up by showing off some musical skills at the store's piano -- a perfect way to end a weekend of creativity.

The 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference was a great experience, and if you enjoyed either attending the conference or learning about it on our blog, be sure to sign up for next summer's session! We hope you liked this summary of Nightsun. To see even more pictures of the weekend, check out the Center's Facebook page. Until next year!

Bruce Weigl Interview

Bruce Weigl will be the poetry instructor for the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference. Beginning in December 1967, he served in Vietnam for one year. In his prose memoir, The Circle of Hanh (2000), he states, "The paradox of my life as a writer is that the war ruined my life and in return gave me my voice." Weigl taught at Penn State for many years and returned to Lorain Community College, his alma mater, as its first Distinguished Professor. There, he started a student veterans group. His early work reflects the horrors of war experiences, and his more recent work shows themes of family and childhood. Weigl has published over 12 books of poetry and has won numerous awards -- including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Poet's Prize from the Academy of American Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes. Weigl states that his free verse poetry seeks "the beauty of a thing said straight."



You have said that James Wright is a major influence on your writing. What do you find particularly inspiring about him?

James Wright is my father confessor. He was, as you know, an Ohio poet, so we had that in common, and he was someone who came from one tradition (the accentual/syllabic one) to another (the free verse one) in his lifetime. Because of that he was the master of the free verse line. More than anything else, I think I learned from Jim, and still learn, that when you write free verse, you have to spend just as much time thinking about the line as you do when you write a metered poem.



Your more recent work shows themes of childhood and family, in contrast to your former theme of war. What brought on the change?

I think I was making a conscious effort to turn away from Vietnam as a subject and so I turned back to childhood. I was away from home, and had been for some time, and I took pleasure in remembering certain very specific moments from my childhood. I like to think about my poems as exploitations of very small and very specific moments, and that if I can obsessively detail those moments, reveal them in all of their ordinary splendor, then I might have a chance for a poem. My mother and father were not literary people; they were working class people, and although they never really knew much about what I was doing as a writer once I had begun to go to school, etc., what they did give me was unrelenting love and support all of my life. I know a lot of folks who grew up in houses filled with books but absent of that kind of love and care. I would always choose what I had over what they had. 



 Did you find yourself drawn to poetry or writing before or during your time in Vietnam?

If we didn’t write home our parents would complain. You’d get a call one day saying you have to go to your battalion, they need to see your battalion. So after the first couple of times I knew what was up and it was them saying 'Sit down'—they had paper and pencils there—'sit down right now and write a letter to your mom and dad,' because I wasn’t a very prolific letter writer at all. And no, I didn’t write about my experiences while I was there. I wasn’t that person then. If I’d gone now, then I’d start keeping a notebook the moment I arrived, but then it wasn’t my nature to do that. I was 18 years old, I just graduated from high school. I spent most of my high school time playing sports and got away with doing very little academic work because I was pretty good at it, and that was it. So, no literary background at all. No reason to become a poet at all or a writer at all. The paradox, I’ve said before, of my life is that’s what the War gave me. I wouldn’t have been a writer without the War because it forced me to go inward. And for some reason when I did, I found these stories. 



Was poetry a source of therapy for you after you came home from Vietnam?

I wish I could say that. My belief is that writing is too hard to be therapeutic. I think therapy’s a lot easier than writing. I do, really. I’ve done both and my experience is it’s a hard way to go if you’re looking for that out of it. It’s hard enough to do.

What it helps you do is externalize things, give a shape to it. And that’s what Denise Levertov kept telling me is that, Look, you control it now. It doesn’t control you anymore. You own it now. And it does that, yes.



There are several recurring motifs that can be found in your work -- such as animals, wings, alcohol, war, etc. Do these recurrences have any special meaning for you?  

I wish I could say it was all highly conscious and all a part of a scheme or plan I may have had when I wrote the poems, but I can’t. I don’t really know why those images recur, or even what they mean fully. Frankly, this is a very instinctive process for me. I love words and I love the sounds of words and that’s the level on which I typically engage the poem. I think I’m also a bit superstitious about trying too hard to analyze my own imagery. I’m not sure I really want to know what it all means. 

Marion Winik Interview

Marion Winik will be the nonfiction teacher at the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference. She teaches creative writing and publishing arts at the University of Baltimore. Growing up, Winik wrote mostly poetry. She has published numerous nonfiction books, including Telling (1994), The Lunchbox Chronicles: Notes from the Parenting Underground (1998), Highs in the Low Fifties (2013), and First Comes Love (1996) which was written based on her first husband's fatal battle with AIDS. She also writes a bi-weekly column for BaltimoreFishbowl.com called "Bohemian Rhapsody."



Was it difficult to make a transition from poetry to working on nonfiction? Do you still work on poetry?
  
When I began writing at the age of nine or so, my form of choice was poetry. Poetry gave me the freedom to examine my experiences and to speak directly from my heart, to figure out who I was and it explain it to everyone else. This urge carried me all the way through the first year of an MFA program, when a couple of poetry professors were a little mean to me and I got discouraged. Well, I thought, I’ll show you. I’ll write prose. Since it was the early 1980s – more than a decade before the first graduate program in non-fiction would open at the University of Pittsburgh – what awaited me on the other side of the line-break divide was fiction. 

Since I was still more interested in excavating my own personality and experiences than in making things up, I wrote a few autobiographical short stories, got my degree, and sputtered to a halt.

Nearly five years later, in 1987, I woke up with an idea for a piece of writing. It was called “How To Get Pregnant in the Modern World,” and it dealt with my adventures doing just that. It wasn’t a short story, it wasn’t a poem, it was a new kind of work for me and I didn’t know what to call it. I settled on the phrase “humor piece” because I had never heard the term personal essay. This turned out to be the start of a trend – for me and everybody else. Soon the personal essays of Rene Montaigne, Sei Shonagon, Virginia Woolf and E.B. White would come marching out of the library and into the pages of anthologies tracing the roots of the hot new genre. So while I had to accept that I hadn’t actually invented the personal essay after all, I did have the fun of being part of a movement.

What liberation I experienced in finding the essay form. I had always wanted to write in my own voice, an internal voice closely related to how I think and speak, rather than the more orchestrated and decorated voice I tended to use in poetry and in my autobiographical fiction. Also, I had always been more interested in writing about real life, about the narratives unfolding around me every day, than in the world of the imagination (or at least the world of my imagination – as a reader, I am a passionate fiction lover.) In discovering personal essay, the vehicle for both of these goals, I gained access to a huge, pent-up store of ideas.  The day I wrote “How To Get Pregnant,” I also wrote a list of potential themes for pieces, and it lasted me about a decade.

But yes, I still write poetry once in a while, and some of my essays are lyric essays -- writing them feels like writing poems.

Writing nonfiction differs from writing fiction, but what similarities do you find?

Writing scenes - description - setting - dialogue - from a craft perspective, these are similar in nonfiction and fiction. One has its source mostly in memory, the other mostly in imagination, but it's far from totally distinct. The blue dress a writer gives the mother in a fictional story could be the very same blue dress her real mother wears in a personal essay.

Is writing nonfiction pieces more personal, since they are rooted directly in your own life? 

Yes and no. I think people reveal themselves in fiction, but not as specifically or as inescapably as in memoir. With fiction, the writer can always say, hey, that's not me, that's a short story. Or -- that's a short story and therefore any factual basis is none of your business. But you do wonder sometimes. For example, in Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, the protagonist's addiction to oxycontin, and his attempts to control it, are described in almost obsessive detail. Of course this doesn't mean Donna Tartt is writing from experience. But at least we know it's an issue she's thought a lot about.  

Do you ever have any reservations about sharing certain life experiences in your nonfiction? If so, how do you handle those reservations? Do you write about the experiences anyway or choose to keep them private? 

I have my limits, but I'm always trying to push them because I believe the material that's scariest to write about is usually the best. That said, I have to respect the boundaries of family and friends, too. As experience has taught me, when you talk very frankly about mistakes you've made or scrapes you've gotten into, you risk being judged. It's more likely that the work will be judged ad hominem than as a piece of writing. For some readers,  confessions or revelations will be TMI, too much information. But for others they are just what is needed, the story they needed to hear most. Memoir is an underground railroad of information about what people do, how they really live their lives. It is an antidote to shame and spiritual loneliness. Sometimes it takes courage to share the darker, more complicated stuff. But far from being all narcissism and navel-gazing, it is something that can actually help other people.

With my book First Comes Love, there were people who said -- ick! I don't want to read about these nasty people and their icky lives. Others said - thank you for writing about love between a woman and a gay man. Thank you for writing about what it's like to have a partner who's an addict. Or who is dying. Plus even though these experiences are far in the past for me, they are still out there, fresh and new for the reader who opens that book for the first time, and possibly finds something she really needs to hear.




Your most recent book, Highs in the Low Fifties, is a #1 Kindle Bestseller. Have you already started working on your next book? If so, do you know what the main focus of it will be?

I've written an essay every two or three weeks for years now, posted on BaltimoreFishbowl.com, and the best have been collected into three short e-books from a new publisher called Shebooks. The collections are called Guesswork: essays on remembering and forgetting, The End of the World as We Know It: essays on parenting, and August in Paris: essays on travel; you can check them out at Shebooks.net. Also for the past few months I've been working on a comic novel about a memoirist. 

 

 

Brenda Clough Interview

Brenda Clough has published works in various genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, steampunk, and mystery. She has lived in Laos, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Germany. Clough has written several fantasy novels (The Crystal Crown, The Dragon of Mishbil, The Realm Beneath, and The Name of the Sun), a children's novel (An Impossumable Summer -- which is set in her own house in Virginia), and a novel entitled How Like a God along with its sequel Doors of Death and Life. Clough will be the teacher for the science-fiction/fantasy/horror workshop at the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference.


Did you have any specific experiences during your time living overseas that
influenced your writing?

Living in a foreign place, and having it be quite ordinary -- that's very good
practice for a science fiction/fantasy writer. Of course the neighbors have an
elephant. Oh sure, why not take a rickshaw. We're sent home from school because
there's a revolution, yay!



Where do you draw the most inspiration from for your fantasy writing? 

It depends when in the process. At the beginning, books, always -- it is said
that we write what we read. But then, when the book is going along well, then it
broadens out. Music. Poetry -- I once turned the entire plot of a novel around
after reading a poem. 



Do you have any tips for aspiring fantasy writers on how to blend "the real
world" and fantasy? 

They say that you only have a few get-out-of-jail-free cards -- occasions when
your readers will give you a pass. So the trick is to not use them all up. Magic
wands, okay. But then everything else around them is mundane -- the licensing,
the buying of them on Ebay, the arguments with your neighbors about the noise
and mess. 



You've written works in many different genres -- fantasy, science-fiction,
steampunk, mystery, non-fiction. Do you have different writing processes for
different genres? Which genre do you feel drawn to the most? 

No, the process is always the same. I begin at the beginning, write until the
end, and then rewrite. I always think of myself as an SF writer, even though I
wander away quite frequently.  



Recently, what type of writing do you find yourself working on the most? Why
do you think that is? 

At this moment I have written my first entirely non-genre novel. It is not SF,
or F, or mystery -- it is a Victorian melodrama. 

April Lindner Interview

April Lindner will be the teacher for the young adult (YA) fiction workshop at the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference. She has written two YA novels so far -- Catherine (a retelling of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights) and Jane (a retelling of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre). She has another YA novel -- Love, Lucy -- that will be released in January 2015. Lindner also has two poetry collections: This Bed Our Bodies Shaped and Skin. She also writes literary criticism, edits poetry anthologies, and works as an English professor at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. You can check out her blog here: http://aprillindnerwrites.blogspot.com/.


How has working with young adults as a college professor affected your writing of young adult literature?

One thing I love about my job is how it keeps me in touch with young adults.  I teach a class on the Young Adult novel, in which half of what we do is read books together.  I learn a lot about the YA audience by seeing how my students react to books like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, David Levithan’s Every Day, John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, and Sara Zarr’s How to Save a Life.  Sometimes my students will fall in utter love with a book, but even so they are willing to ask themselves hard questions about how honest the book is, how believable—the kinds of questions that are useful for me to ask about my own work as I’m revising it.

 

The other half of what we do is write the first four chapters of our own novels and then, at the end of the semester, outline the rest.  There’s such a range of subject matter and style in the novels my students have produced for that class, and their work provides a window into their interests and worries, into how the world of teens and college students has changed since I was their age—and how it hasn’t.

 

 

 

Why does that target audience appeal to you? 

 

I fell into writing YA fiction accidentally, by writing Jane, a book I thought was for adults but that wound up being marketed to a YA audience—and what a happy accident it’s been.  Young readers are unabashedly enthusiastic about reading, and about books as physical objects.  For proof, check out some of the blogs about YA literature.  There are so many of them—some by adults, and some by teens--and every one I’ve seen has been created out of a pure and wholehearted love of YA books.  I’m a fairly unironic soul myself—when I love a book or song or movie my love is deep and geeky—so I really appreciate and relate to the enthusiasm of devoted YA readers.

 

Also, Young Adult books tend to foreground plot in a way literary fiction often doesn’t, and I think that explains why so many adults are reading YA these days.  There’s a basic human hunger for story, and YA feed that hunger.  As someone who began my writing career as a poet precisely because conflict makes me uncomfortable and because I didn’t think I could write a plot to save my soul, writing YA has made me face those fears head on.  It’s given me a crash course in writing plot.

 

 

 

You have written two novels that are retellings of classic novels. Could you describe what it is like to rework another author's work and make it your own? Or, how do you make something that is distinctly someone else's yours?

 

I can only write about things that enthrall me, so novels I adore make a good starting point.  I begin by rereading a novel, even by listening to the audio book version while I fall asleep at night, so that I fully absorb the source material. I write a rough outline of the plot, and then I set the source material aside and let my imagination go to work.  My project so far has been to ask myself if the plot of a classic could work in the present day and, if so, how.  More than anything else, I try to stay true to what’s essential in the characters and to write from an understanding of and respect for the source material. 

 

That said, I can only make my characters come alive by finding bits of myself or people I know in them.  My own personal obsessions surface in each of my novels.  I’m a huge live music fan, and that particular passion fuels the plot of all three of my novels.  Nico Rathburn, the Mr. Rochester character in Jane is a rock star on the brink of a comeback.  Hence, the Heathcliff character in Catherine, is a hungry aspiring musician inspired by punk rock.  And Jesse, a key character in Love, Lucy is a footloose street musician.  As for my protagonists, Jane is a painter, Catherine’s a poet, Lucy’s an actress.   I’ve always been obsessed with the arts, so my characters are too.

 

 

 

Your forthcoming novel – Love, Lucy – is a love story like your previous novels. However, unlike the others, it is not a retelling of a classic novel. Where did you find the inspiration to write Love, Lucy? 

 

Actually, Love, Lucy was inspired by E. M. Forster’s A Room With a View—both the novel and the luminous 1985 Merchant-Ivory film version.  It also takes some overt inspiration from another of my favorite films, Roman Holiday.  But most of all, the novel was inspired by my own travels in Europe, especially my very first backpacking trip when I was 22, fresh out of college, and travelling solo.  That trip was a really formative moment for me—a real YA moment.  It showed me I could be self-sufficient and brave when I needed to be, and it awakened a voracious hunger to see the world and learn new languages.  I’ve been meaning to write about that experience ever since, and Forster’s novel helped me find a way back into that material.

 

 

 

How does your work as a literary critic influence the strategies you use in your own writing?

 

It doesn’t.  When I’m writing, I have to put that critical self on ice, at least for the first few drafts.  There’s nothing more writer’s- block-inducing than that inner critic who questions everything a writer sets on paper.  When I’m drafting a novel, I’m trying to build up an illusion for myself and my reader, and when I’m writing criticism, I’m analyzing--taking apart the illusion to see how it works.   These two urges are antithetical, at least until a strong first, second, or third draft is on the page. 

 

That said, when I take on a critical or editorial project, I always wind up reading more widely than I would if left to my own devices.  And reading widely—as well as deeply—can only make a writer stronger.  

 

 

 

Clint McCown Interview

Clint McCown is one of five teachers that will be present at the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference. He teaches creative writing/fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University. McCown has published three novels (The Member-Guest, War Memorials, and The Weatherman) along with three collections of poems (Sidetracks, Wind Over Water, and Dead Languages). McCown has also done some screenwriting for Warner Bros. He has received numerous awards including the American Fiction Prize, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Bree Book Award, the Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers designation. McCown will be the fiction teacher at the Nightsun Writers' Conference.



How has your work as a college professor affected your own writing?

I'm not sure that teaching has affected my writing, but it has certainly broadened my appreciation of forms and approaches to writing.  Students come up with some pretty clever concepts, and it has been interesting to see how the world of tweets and reality shows and video games has influenced the subject matter of what younger writers are writing about these days.



Do you have a specific voice you try to commit to while writing?

Ultimately, my voice is comic in the sense that my basic approach is one of uplift.  It's far too easy to bludgeon a reader.  Any hack can have daddy back the car over his three-year old.  Shock value holds no aesthetic interest for me.  I'm far more impressed by a writer who can move me through some everyday human interaction.  Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use" is a fine example of the sort of literature that demonstrates the extraordinary power of ordinary people living their lives. I prefer the emotional charge of a quietly closed door to the more standard and predictable emotion of a door that is slammed.  



Could you describe your writing process as a fiction writer? 

My writing process varies, according to the project.  For fiction, I tend to obsess until the project is completed.  This might mean starting out working an hour or two a day to begin with.  After a week or so, my stamina increases--the imagination is like a muscle and takes a little time to build itself back up--and I might be able to work three or four hours at a stretch.  The next week, maybe I can work six hours a day.  Finally, I reach the point where I wake up with the project in mind, begin work at once, and I'll stay with it until I go to bed at night.  Once I reach the point of writing sixteen hours a day, I stay with that until the project is finished.  That's why most of my novels have been written during sabbaticals and summers.  But if I do have to go back to work, the novel stays in my mind and I'll still spend every non-working moment wrestling with it. 



Is there a vision or idea that you'd really like to work on but are restrained from doing?  

I've never had a project that I wanted to write but couldn't.  There have been some that I did badly the first few drafts--primarily because I tried to base the work on something I'd gone through in my life.  Too much biographical closeness to the subject matter can destroy one's editorial distance and make it difficult to separate the real story from the one that needs to be told. 



You have written three plays that have been produced, and you have also done some screenwriting for Warner Bros. How do you think writing scripts has influenced your fiction writing? 

Writing scripts has made me much more aware of structure, for one thing.  Virtually all film scripts are based on the three-act structure, which in turn reflects what Joseph Campbell identified as the monomyth found in all cultures throughout history.  In short, we seem to be hardwired to appreciate one specific storytelling structure.  It's been useful to know that.  

     Also, writing screenplays and scripts has helped me write dialogue in fiction.  I've learned, among other things, to have my characters speak only when there's no way to avoid it.