Spring Conference 2005 was held at Peace College in Raleigh, NC. The conference is over, but we have left this conference information on the site so that you can refer to it as a model of what our Spring Conference is like.

Session I Classes

Saturday, May 21, 9:00-11:00 am, Flowe Hall

FICTION - When Your Characters Get Sick, with Tommy Hays
My most recent novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, is in part about a woman with Alzheimer's and her family's struggle to cope. The novel was inspired by my own family's struggle with my father's Alzheimer's. I actually started out writing a memoir about my father's decline, but after about a year and almost three hundred pages, I found myself so weighed down and depressed by the tedium of the truth, that I dropped the memoir and began to write a novel. I invented characters and situations, while at the same time, I used what I'd learned about Alzheimer's to inform the writing. The structure of the novel gave me an enabling distance. And in the end I think I embodied my family's emotional struggles more successfully than I had with the memoir. This class will look at how we can write about illness in such a way that we don't make ourselves sick.

POETRY - Inspiration as a Poetic Art, with Lavonne Adams
What makes a poem inspirational? As poets, how can we create work that, in sharing our most profound insights, will prove to be inspirational to our readers? What are the pitfalls of this type of poetry? In this session, we will endeavor to answer these questions by examining an array of poems that deal with topics ranging from love to spirituality. We'll then share poems, workshop-style, by participants.

CROSS GENRE - The Healing Power of Words, with Maureen Ryan Griffin
What benefits can writing provide-physically, mentally, spiritually? Are some ways of writing more beneficial than others? And is it possible to create quality literary work as we heal? In this workshop that incorporates Dr. James Pennebaker's ground-breaking ideas, we'll discuss and implement ways to use writing as a transformational tool. And, if you're looking, you just may find the genesis of new poetry, creative non-fiction, and/or fiction. Warning: Laughter likely. Inspiration guaranteed.

CROSS GENRE - Find Your Natural Style, with Carol Shumate
Do you think out loud? Do you like to live spontaneously? Are you detail-oriented? Answers to questions like these can help you discover your innate style of expression. This experiential workshop uses the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to identify participants' natural writing styles. It uses type-related exercises to shine light on your blind spots, showing you that you have more to write about than you know. A previous participant said this technique offers "an experience that broadens and deepens the nature of insight itself." Participants should arrive knowing their four-letter type. To find it, they can take an online quiz at (http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp), or they may take the full-length version by contacting Dr. Shumate at: Paraphrase@nc.rr.com.

CROSS GENRE - Writing From Our Emotional Core, with Darnell Arnoult
How can writing a poem help you write a better novel? How can you use the idea for a short story to spawn a novel? Where do you go when you hit a wall with your writing? Why do some writing projects seem to have more energy than others? What should you do when the energy fades? One of the great lessons we can learn as writers is that we almost always write about the same things over and over. Not always recognizably the same characters, or the same place, or the same plot, but we are driven by the same passions and questions, the same obsessions and experience, the same vein of mineral ore to return to the page over and over again. If used as a reservoir, the emotional core is a resource for countless poems, stories, memoir pieces, and novels. Notice my use of plurals. In this class we will use a variety of exercises and assignments to mine our personal mother lodes, identifying and working the veins to extract the ore we possess by simple virtue of our experience, curiosities, knowledge, and eccentricities. And we will explore how writing across genres may help us become better and more prolific writers in our genres of choice. Our goal is for you to go home with some understanding of your natural material and enough pay dirt to keep you writing for a long time to come. Bring pencil and paper!