Elizabeth Daniels Squire Summer Writing Residency 2008

July 25 - 27, 2008
Queens University of Charlotte
1900 Selwyn Avenue
Charlotte, NC 28274

(registrations are now closed)

An affordable, intimate alternative to the large summer conferences, offered especially for North Carolina writers but open to writers nationwide. This year's Summer Writing Residency offers intensive workshops and great value, with exciting new faculty in diverse genres, evening readings, and the opportunity for local area residents to commute to their workshops at a reduced cost.

The 2008 Summer Writing Residency will begin Friday morning with registration and move-in, followed by lunch together and the first two workshop sessions in the genre of your choice -- Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, or Poetry. This three day-long workshop creates a community of common ground and a safe place to explore the art of refining and polishing your work, as well as opportunities to try something new.

Group meals will be accompanied by faculty readings, allowing participants rare insight into other genres of writing.

Morning and afternoon breaks between workshop sessions give writers a leisurely writing period.

Evening brings writers together for dinner, preceded by faculty readings and followed by "Table Talk" and Open-Mic sessions.

Location and Housing

This year the Summer Residency Program will be held on the campus of Queens University in Charlotte. (Get directions)

On-campus housing is modest but comfortable. Dorm rooms are shared, two residents per room. Sharing a room is a great way to get to know another writer! A limited number of single rooms are available at additional cost. No private bathrooms are available.

Registration

We recommend that you register early, particularly if you want to stay on-campus. Workshops are small, dorm space is limited, and they fill fast.

A $250 deposit is required with registration; the balance is due July 9. (Or you're welcome to pay the entire fee at once; we won't mind.)

You may register online or by mail or phone. Your registration is not complete until you mail us a copy of your typed workshop manuscript (please see course descriptions for manuscript requirements). If you do not mail in your workshop manuscript with registration, your workshop space may be taken by another registrant, so MAIL IN YOUR WORKSHOP MANUSCRIPT THE SAME DAY THAT YOU REGISTER.

Commuters

Registrants who wish to commute daily from home may register at the commuter rate of $400 (for members) or $500 (for non-members). This rate includes all meals Friday - Sunday, attendance at the workshop sessions of your choice, all afternoon and all evening programs and readings.

Support for this residency provided by the NC Arts Council, the Oak Tree Fund of the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, and Queens University of Charlotte.

Faculty Biographies
Elizabeth Daniels Squire Summer Writing Residency 2008

We are especially proud of our expanded faculty roster this year, which features seasoned teachers whose writing and teaching are known both within and beyond the borders of North Carolina.

(registrations are now closed)

	JULIE FUNDERBURK (Poetry) Julie Funderburk has taught in the English Department of Queens University of Charlotte since 2003. Previously, she served as Assistant Director of the MFA Writing Program at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and as Managing Editor of The Greensboro Review. Her poems appear in the anthology Best New Poets and in literary magazines such as Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, Third Coast, 32 Poems, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has been a Howard Nemerov Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and is an Associate Editor of the on-line literary magazine storySouth.   “Essentially Julie is a lyric poet whose work compresses narrative elements — and she is a narrative poet whose words are alive with the strum of the lyre. There is a supreme tension in her work between the assuring surface of craft and the wilder waves of impulse. Many of her poems . . . seek to retrieve an instance in time by seizing, illuminating, and ultimately transforming it. Like Robert Penn Warren, she is a poet whose major subject is time and how events and people endure through the various lenses of separation and distortion.”   - Stuart Dischell
	AARON GWYN (Fiction) Aaron Gwyn has been an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte since 2003.He is the author of two books of fiction, Dog on the Cross: Stories, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2004; and the forthcoming novel The World Beneath, to be published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2009.His stories and essays have appeared in New Stories from the South 2002, A Dixie Christmas, The Longwood Guide to Writing, McSweeney’s, Glimmer Train, Black Warrior Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other anthologies, textbooks, and periodicals.He is the recipient of a North Carolina Council on the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions award. “Aaron Gwyn's stunning yet disturbing debut collection of stories, Dog on the Cross, range far and wide across the Pentecostal landscape of a rural Oklahoma town, exploring voices, visions, faith, sin, depravity, temptation, and dreams. In the large majority of his stories in Dogs on the Cross, Aaron Gwyn writes with an understated and graceful prose about some of the most culturally complex issues in America today.” - Jordan Adair, Independent Weekly
	CYNTHIA LEWIS (Creative Nonfiction) Cynthia Lewis began teaching at Davidson College in 1980, having earned her Ph.D. from Harvard.A specialist in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, she has published many articles on Shakespeare and a book-length study, called Particular Saints, about characters in Shakespeare’s plays named Antonio or Anthony.She also teaches and writes nonfiction, mostly essays about American culture, including such topics as American women bodybuilders, spousal murder, professional gambling in Las Vegas, women’s obsession with shoes, and the world of debutantes.Her reported and personal essays have been published in Southern Cultures, The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shenandoah, and other publications.For each of the last two years, one of her essays has been cited as a “Notable Essay” by the editor of The Best American Essays.At Davidson, she has received the ODK teaching award from students (1984), the CASE Silver Medal in the national Professor of the Year program (1987), and the Hunter-Hamilton love of teaching award at graduation (1998).She was named a Charles A. Dana Professor in 2000.On sabbatical for the 2007-08 school year, she has been moonlighting as a bartender at local establishments and recently published an essay about her alternative career in Charlotte Magazine.

Workshops
Elizabeth Daniels Squire Summer Writing Residency 2008

POETRY with Julie Funderburk

Sometimes, even a polished draft is lacking, but it’s hard to know where or how to revise.This poetry workshop will focus on giving participants specific ways to analyze and classify poems.We’ll look at structure and at pattern, reading several published poems and then applying concepts to participant poems in a workshop setting.We’ll explore targeted ways of viewing poems in order to discover fresh approaches to the revision process.

Each registrant should submit five pages of poems, no more than one poem per page, by July 9.Participants should submit poems they consider to be in progress or poems they are willing to reconsider.

FICTION with Aaron Gwyn

This workshop will take a look at contemporary literary fiction, addressing both the work of registrants (in the form of sample chapters and short stories) and several pieces of published fiction. We will explore what successful authors do to start their novels/stories as well as potential pitfalls they avoid. We will pay particular attention to structure and form, finding ways in which preparation for writing (through synopsis, through brainstorming, through character query and graphing of plot elements) can benefit the process of composition and the finished product. Finally, we will discuss effective ways of shaping the beginning of novels/stories to attract the attention of agents and editors. Recommended reading: All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy; Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler; Falling Man, by Don DeLillo.

Registrants should submit one short story, or the first chapter from a novel-in-progress, by July 9.All samples should be double-spaced, on one side per sheet.

CREATIVE NONFICTION with Cynthia Lewis

This workshop will focus primarily on group review of participants’ writing samples and secondarily on topics relevant to the craft of creative nonfiction.Each participant will have work discussed twice (i.e., in 2 of 8 workshop sessions) during the course of the residency.In preparation for these workshops, each writer will submit 10 pages of prose no later than 5 p.m., July 9.This submission may be one of the following: a single part of a longer work; one self-contained work; 2 excerpts from 2 longer works; 2 short, self-contained works.In any case, the submission should not exceed 10 pages.Submissions will be circulated to the group in advance before the workshop convenes so that participants can prepare to discuss one another’s work.

Furthermore, each personwill have a choice as to how to use each of the two sessions: a) have one 10-page submission workshopped in each of two sessions; b) have one shorter piece workshopped in the first session, then revise it before the second session and have the revision workshopped; c) have 2 shorter pieces workshopped, one in each session.Please express your preference when you submit your prose.

In the same e-mail, please also submit any topics that you’d like to have covered briefly during our sessions.Examples might include tips on interviewing; essential elements of memoir / personal writing; beginnings, middles, and closings; and writing humor.We will use 15 to 30 minutes during several sessions to talk about such focused topics.

Schedule
Elizabeth Daniels Squire Summer Writing Residency 2008

Fees and Deadlines
Elizabeth Daniels Squire Summer Writing Residency 2008

(registrations are now closed)

Fees

• $500 - NCWN Member rate, double occupancy.
• $600 - NCWN Member rate, single room with shared bath.
• $400 - Member Commuter Rate: includes lunch
• $500 - Nonmember Commuter Rate: includes lunch
• $700 - Nonmember rate, double occupancy. (Nonmembers may join for $75 [adult] / $55 [student or senior] and be eligible for the member rate.)

A $250 deposit is required with registration, with balance due July 9.

Deadlines

• July 9 - Registration Deadline

Required Manuscripts
Elizabeth Daniels Squire Summer Writing Residency 2008

You must send two copies of your workshop manuscript with your registration:

• See Course Descriptions for specific manuscript guidelines
• Send 1 copy, in MS Word, as an e-mail attachment to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Send a printed copy, with our Workshop Manuscript Cover Sheet, to P.O. Box 78002, Charlotte, NC, 28271
• Please include our Workshop Manuscript Cover Sheet with your submissions

The manuscripts will allow us to be sure you are in the right workshop and to send your work to your faculty leader in advance.

You are responsible for bringing enough copies of your manuscript to the workshop. We will inform you of the size of your class in advance.