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Greensboro, NC – More than one hundred writers from across North Carolina (and beyond) came together at the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s annual Spring Conference last Saturday. Held once again at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the 2009 Spring Conference featured ten workshops in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, playwriting, and public speaking, as well as readings by instructors and attendees, a panel discussion with magazine and small press publishers, and a keynote address by bestselling novelist Sharyn McCrumb. “I was well fed,” one metaphorically inclined attendee said. “I’m grateful that I was given the opportunity to partake of this banquet.” The 2009 Spring Conference offered attendees a chance to study fiction with Quinn Dalton, Valerie Nieman, and Jack Riggs; nonfiction with Marianne Gingher, Ed Southern, and Lee Zacharias; poetry with David Roderick and Carolyn Beard Whitlow; playwriting with Alan Cook; and public speaking with Carol Roan. Attendees also had the chance to get to know these authors and their fellow registrants better at “Lunch with an Author,” in which small groups signed up to take a faculty member to lunch. “I loved (my) session,” an attendee said. “I learned how to better get inside a character’s head, what questions to ask them, and what drives them.” Another attendee described the conference as “time well spent. This was my first conference of this type. I will attend more!”
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