2022 Squire Summer Writing Workshops to Come to Davidson, at Last
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- Category: Network News
In 2020, the Squire Summer Writing Workshops were supposed to be held, for the first time ever, at Davidson College.
Instead, of course, they were held online.
In 2022, the Squire Workshops at last will bring their four days’ worth of intensive workshops, conversations on the craft and business of writing, and collegiality to Davidson’s historic campus.
Registration is now open for the 2022 Squire Workshops, scheduled to be held Thursday—Friday, July 14—17.
Registrants can choose one of three intensive, weekend-long workshops, focusing on creative nonfiction with Cynthia Lewis, fiction with Alan Michael Parker, or poetry with Jack Jung.
They also can choose to stay in on-campus housing in a block with other registrants, or to secure their own accommodations in the adjacent town or on the shoreline of nearby Lake Norman.
Whether staying on or off campus, all Squire registrants will take their meals together, and join each other for readings, panel discussions, and more.
Lewis’s workshop, “Storytelling through Scene-writing in Creative Nonfiction,” will “focus on scene-writing as the foundation of storytelling,” and will feature in-depth discussions of the registrants’ own submitted work.
Lewis is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Davidson College, where she has been teaching Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and creative nonfiction since 1980. Her latest book is “The Game’s Afoot”: A Sports Lover’s Introduction to Shakespeare, and her creative nonfiction ranges from American culture to personal essays.
The fiction workshop will ask “How many sentences does it take to cross a room?” and will explore “ideas of pace, narrative time, POV, room sound,” and more. Its instructor promises that “not only will the class be substantive, it will also be fun. I mean, really, really fun: we’ll learn a lot together, play, and spend significant time looking at your work in critique sessions.”
Parker is a cartoonist, novelist, and poet; he has written four novels, including Christmas in July (Dzanc Books, 2018), and nine collections of poems. He has won three Pushcart Prizes, three Randall Jarrell Poetry Competitions, the North Carolina Book Award, and many more, and also served as a judge for the 2021 National Book Award in Fiction. He is the Houchens Professor of English at Davidson.
Jung’s workshop, “Poetry as Starship,” will look at “the ways in which language is a means of construction and communication,” while workshopping at least one of each registrant’s submitted poems, and generating new work.
Jung is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was Truman Capote Fellow. He is a co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books 2020), the winner of 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of Literary Work. His poems and translations have been published in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, and others.
Because registration is limited, after fifteen hours of workshop time and seven group meals, including a celebratory picnic on Saturday night, attendees at the Squire Summer Writing Workshops tend to form even closer bonds than at other Network events.
"We had a wonderful, supportive, knowledge-filled (workshop) group," wrote a 2017 attendee.. "I have several special memories. The support and outpouring of writing suggestions from my workshop group will stay foremost in my mind. The exposure to the various writers from so many different paths, converging into this writing community, surpassed my expectations."
Out of an abundance of caution, some changes have been made to ensure the well-being of the attendees. For 2022, there will be no "tag-along" registrations; only those who attend workshops will be allowed to use overnight accommodations at Davidson. The "Shared Campus Room" registration option is only available to attendees who live in the same household. Commuters are still very welcome.
For more information about the NCWN 2022 Squire Summer Writing Workshops, and to register, click here.
Support for these workshops is provided by the NC Arts Council, the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, and the family of Chick and Elizabeth Daniels Squire.
The non-profit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to all writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.
Sally Buckner Emerging Writers’ Fellowship Open to Applications from Poets
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- Category: Network News
The North Carolina Writers’ Network will award its next Sally Buckner Emerging Writers’ Fellowship to a North Carolina poet.
Created in memory of the late Sally Buckner, one of North Carolina’s most beloved poets, editors, and educators, the $500 Buckner Fellowship supports an emerging North Carolina writer, between the ages 21-35, whose work shows promise of excellence and of commitment to a literary career.
Applicants must be in the early stages of their careers and will not yet have achieved major recognition for their work. No specific academic background is required or preferred, but students enrolled in degree-granting programs are not eligible to apply.
Poet Zachary Lunn of Hoke County won the inaugural Buckner Fellowship, followed by fiction writer Jasmine Kumalah of Durham. After an involuntary COVID hiatus in 2020, prose writer Sophia Stid of Wilmington is the current Buckner Fellow.
The fellowship awarded this year will cover the calendar year 2023. The fellowship recipient will use the $500 award to allay the costs associated with the business of writing: paper, printing, writing supplies, submission fees, research expenses, travel, conference registration fees, etc. In addition to the cash award, recipients will receive a complimentary one-year membership in the NCWN, as well as scholarship aid to attend the Network’s 2022 and 2023 Fall Conferences and the 2023 Spring Conference.
To honor and carry on the lifelong generosity displayed by its namesake, the Buckner Fellowship will invite each recipient, during their award year, to help at least one other writer—by mentoring a less-experienced writer, by critiquing another’s work, by writing references or editing applications, or in whatever other way the recipient sees fit.
Applications will be accepted as PDF attachments sent to
For more information about the Sally Buckner Emerging Writers’ Fellowship and NCWN, click here or contact June Guralnick, Fellowship Program Coordinator, at
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