Dublin 12/12-19/2015

BUTLERS TOWN HOUSE–DUBLIN, IRELAND

DECEMBER 12 – 19, 2015

This winter we are returning to Ireland to the UNESCO City of Literature, DUBLIN. For one week we will be celebrating our return with past friends, new participants and Irish authors.

Our small Salon events are personable and alive with discussions from Award Winning authors and Professional Writers.

AUTHORS:

JOHN BANVILLE — MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER and FRANZE KAFKA Prize

KEVIN BARRY — EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE for LITERATURE and ROONEY PRIZE for Irish Literature

JOHN BOYNE — #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller

MARY COSTELLO — THE BEST IRISH BOOK OF 2014

NOEL DUFFY — Shortlisted Strong Award for best debut collection by an Irish author

DEBORAH HENRY–Kirkus Reviews Best of 2012

JACQUELYN MITCHARD — #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller, BRAM STOKER Award and THE SHIRLEY JACKSON AWARD

SINEAD MORRISSEY — 2013 T.S. ELLIOT PRIZE for her fifth collection Parallax.

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH — 2013 MAN BOOKER PRIZE finalist

RUTH PADEL — 5 time winner of UK National Poetry Competition, shortlisted TS Eliot Prize

MICHELE ROBERTS — MAN BOOKER PRIZE finalist twice –MICHELE ROBERTS

ETHEL ROHAN — BRYAN MacMAHON SHORT STORY AWARD winner

MICHAEL RUHLMAN –Chef, James Beard Award winning author of 20 books, co-wrote 4 books w/THOMAS KELLER

GABRIELLE SELZ — 2015 BEST MEMOIR AWARD, AMERICAN SOCIETY OF JOURNALIST & AUTHORS

BRITT TISDALE STATON – Psychotherapist and Creativity Consultant

DELTA WILLIS – Travel writer & nature writer. Published in Audubon, Natural History, Fodor’s

AND FINISHING LINE PRESS AUTHORS

Price:

$2,250 for a shared twin room — we will do our best to match you with a perfect roommate.

$3,250 for a single room

Includes–Your choice of taking as many workshops as you want, room for 7 nights at Butlers Townhouse or Ariel House, 7 Full Irish Breakfast, Nightly Readings and Events.

Dinner with the authors is based on a first come basis. Our fabulous four course dinner including wine is $75 per dinner. Space limited, must reserved in advance.

Menu for the week:

Saturday:

Appetizer

Wild Mallard Duck with apple brandy served with Irish colcannon–mashed potatoes with kale, cabbage and onions.

Cheese

Chocolate and Pear Cheesecake

Wine: 2010 Chinon AOC – Cuvee Terroir
Sunday:

Appetizer

Braised lamb in white wine with heirloom beans

Cheese

Queen of Chocolate Fudge Cake

Wine: 2010 Santenay 1er Cru – Jacques Girardin
Monday:

Appetizer

Langoustines in a buerre monte w/white truffle oil

Cheese

Pistachio eclair

Wine: 2011 Meursault, Louis Latour
Tuesday:

Appetizer

pheasant with chantrelles

Cheese

Queen of Heart’s Favorite Christmas Pie

Wine: Chinon AOC – Cuvee Terroir
Wednesday:

Appetizer

Venison with pumpkin and cranberry chutney

Cheese

Orange & Cranberry Seville Cake

Wine: 2010 Santenay 1er Cru – Jacques Girardin
Thursday:

Appetizer

Monkfish w/mussels

Cheese

Strawberry Sponge Cake

Wine: 2011 Meursault, Louis Latour
Friday:

Appetizer

Chateaubriand with black truffles served with root vegetable

Cheese

Chocolate Pecan Tart

Wine: 2010 Chinon AOC – Cuvee Terroir and 2010 Santenay 1 er Cru

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

Author Class Date Time Room

SINEAD MORRISSEY POETRY Dec. 12 – 13 10:00 – 5:00 BR

MICHELE ROBERTS FICTION Dec. 12 – 14 1:15 – 5:00 CB

DEBORAH HENRY Connecting With Your Readers Dec. 13 – 18 9:00 – 11:00 LB

GABRIELLE SELZ MEMOIR Dec. 13 – 15 1:15 – 5:00 AH

BRITT TISDALE Creative Formation Dec. 13 – 18 11:00 – 1:00 AH

MICHAEL RUHLMAN & DELTA WILLIS Travel & Food Dec. 13 – 18 10:00 – 1:00 LB

ETHEL ROHAN FLASH FICTION Dec. 14 – 16 1:15 – 5:00 BR

JACQUELYN MITCHARD Full MS Edit Dec. 15 – 18 1:15 – 5:00 CB

RUTH PADEL POETRY Dec. 14 – 16 9:00 – 1:00 BR

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH FICTION Dec. 16 – 18 1:15 – 5:00 AH

NOEL DUFFY POETRY Dec. 17 – 18 10:00 – 5:00 BR

Workshop description

NOEL DUFFY

Noel Duffy was born in Dublin in 1971 and studied Experimental Physics at Trinity College, Dublin. After a brief period in research he turned to writing and went on to co-edit (with Theo Dorgan) Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry (Poetry Ireland, 1999).

He was the winner in 2003 of the START Chapbook Prize for Poetry for his collection, The Silence After , and also won The Firewords Poetry Award (Galway City Council) in 2005. A play, The Rainstorm, was produced for the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2006. His work has appeared widely in Ireland and the UK (including Poetry Ireland Review, The Financial Times and The Irish Times) as well as in the US, Belgium, Argentina and South Africa. His poetry has also been broadcast on RTE Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany and Today with Pat Kenny. He has been a recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary for Literature in 2003 and 2012. His debut collection In the Library of Lost Objects was shortlisted for the 2012 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish Poet

Noel holds an MA in Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and has taught creative writing there as well as at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin, and scriptwriting at the Dublin Business School, Film & Media Department.

Gravity’s Angel

This workshop is aimed at those who have already written poetry and would like to explore in more depth both the general strategies that can applied to approaching subject matter and the more technical aspects of how the music of the poem can be used to ‘enact’ the meaning of the work. The morning sessions will be devoted to exploring certain key concepts using examples from poems as the basis for discussion among the participants, the spirit of which will be far more interactive than didactic. The afternoon sessions will be given over to work-shopping individual poems put forward by members of the group. The main thing is that there will be a relaxed ambiance through both morning and afternoon session and that we all enjoy it!

DAY 1: ‘Stillness, Movement’ In this session I’d like to explore with the group ways in which the music of poetry (rhythm and sound) can help to enact the ‘meaning’ of a given piece, including rhythmic techniques to create harmony or tension (or both at different points) in a poem, and musical techniques that again aid in reflecting the feeling, subject and tone of a given work.

DAY 2: ‘Image & Idea’ This session will focus on the ways in which concepts can be explored in poetry by employing different strategies as required. As someone who has extensively written poetry about science, I’d like to look at some approaches that can be Page 2 of 2useful in making such ideas move beyond mere abstraction. For me, I always try to avoid using footnotes for such poems and believe pieces should carry their own meaning and be comprehensible to a non-specialist. These notions and strategies naturally apply to ideas beyond science also. Afternoon Sessions: The afternoon sessions will be devoted to workshopping material from the group. Such sessions always throw up unexpected questions and discussions around given poems and the only requirement is that they are undertaken in a spirit of mutual respect and good grace. We learn from each other!

DEBORAH HENRY

Deborah Henry attended American College in Paris and graduated cum laude from Boston University with a minor in French language and literature. She received her MFA at Fairfield University.
Deborah Henry has been an expert guest on radio shows across America including CBS, FOX, Clear Channel, SiriusXM and Pacifica Public Radio Networks as well as on NBC, FOX and CBS television in top markets nationally.She is is graduate of the MFA program at Fairfield University. First-class novelists, including Pulitzer Prize Winner Robert Olen Butler, have provided endorsements for her debut

Workshop Description: Connecting With Your Readers

We will discuss in three part sections the myriad ways we can find our niche and connect with our readers in the digital age.

Part One: Four to Six months before publication date.

Part Two: Before and After Launch Date.

Part Three: After initial launch and onward – How to build a wider audience.

Throughout the three segments, we will have Q & A which will be organic to the flow of discussion as we share the journey — including utilizing traditional and social media skills to land an agent, an editor, a publisher, blurbs and much more as well as how to build a global writing community with ever increasing innovative marketing models.

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

Open only to six students, #1 New York Times Bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard (‘The Deep End of the Ocean’) will host a full-manuscript intensive critique. Each student will receive advance digital copies of the other writers’ manuscripts and, at Lismore Castle, Mitchard will lead a full half-day session on each completed book of fiction or creative non-fiction. Admission to this class is based on individual manuscript potential, and application must be made well in advance of the conference in order to assure that the extra demands of a full-book seminar can be met. Mitchard also will provide a written critique with editing and revision suggestions to each participant. Contact conference organizer Nancy Gerbault for guidelines and specifics.

Jacquelyn Mitchard has written nine novels for adults, including several New York Times bestsellers and several that have enjoyed critical acclaim, recently winning Great Britain’s People Are Talking prize and, in 2002, named to the short list for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. She has written seven novels for Young Adults as well, and five children’s books, a memoir, Mother Less Child and a collection of essays, The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Her essays also have been published in newspapers and magazines worldwide, widely anthologized, and incorporated into school curricula. Her reportage on educational issues facing American Indian children won the Hampton and Maggie Awards for Public Service Journalism. Mitchard’s work as part of Shadow Show, the anthology of short stories honoring her mentor, Ray Bradbury, currently is nominated for the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Audie Awards. She served on the Fiction jury for the 2003 National Book Awards, and her first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, was the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, later adapted for a feature film by Michelle Pfeiffer. Mitchard is the editor in chief and co-creator of Merit Press, a new realistic YA Fiction imprint. A Chicago native, Mitchard grew up the daughter of a plumber and a hardware store clerk who met as rodeo riders. A member of the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa tribe, she is a Distinguished Fellow at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. Mitchard taught Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction at Fairfield University and was the first Faculty Fellow at Southern New Hampshire University. Her upcoming YA novel, What We Lost in the Dark, will be published in January by Soho Teen. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband and their nine children.

T.S. ELIOT PRIZE WINNER, SINEAD MORRISSEY

Raised in Belfast, she was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she took BA and PhD degrees, and won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1990. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), and Through the Square Window (2009), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. After periods living in Japan and New Zealand she now lives in Belfast, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen’s University, Belfast and currently lectures.

Her collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. The same collection won the Michael Hartnett Poetry Prize in 2005. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for “distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work”. Her poem “Through the Square Window” won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition. Her collection, Through the Square Window, won the Poetry Now Award for 2010.

In 2013 Morrissey won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax.The chair of the judging panel, Ian Duhig, remarked that the collection was ‘politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.’

BOOKER FINALIST, JOSIP NOVAKOVICH

Josip Novakovich will be teaching a Fiction/Nonfiction Workshop for us in Dublin.

Josip Novakovich emigrated from Croatia to the United States at the age of 20, and recently to Canada at the age of 53. He has published a novel, April Fool’s Day (in ten languages), a novella in three forms, Three Deaths, and story collection (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk and Salvation and Other Disasters) and three collections of narrative essays as well as two books of practical criticism, including Fiction Writers Workshop.
His work was anthologized inBest American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection and O. Henry Prize Stories. He received the Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award and an American Book Award, and in 2013 he was a Man Booker Internatinal Award Finalist.
Novakovich has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library and has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Die Freie Universitaet in Berlin, Penn State and now Concordia University in Montreal.
This fall, Esplanade Books will publish his most recent collection of stories in Canada. He is revising a novel, Rubble of Bubles, and putting together another story collection, New and Selected.

Workshop Description:

The Art of the Microforms

A Multi-genre course, concentrating on the short forms, from a short paragraph to vignettes up to approximately 1500 words. The boundaries between narrative poems, lyrical essay, and flash fiction are frequently arbitrary, so let’s not worry about the definition of what we do in the short form, and play. The definition can come later.

Course Objective: To play with words in order to come up with good moments.

Come to class with several short pieces for us to give you constructive feedback now how to revise and improve.

The class time will be divided among the following activities:

Critiquing your work constructively.
Analyzing published paradigms of short form writing.
Sketching and writing vignettes from prompts and assignments.
Even in the short form, the elements of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction can be at play productively, so we will concentrate on plotting stories from the basic motives. Man is his desire, sid Aristoteles. We’ll sketch several stories based on primary motives, desire and fear.

Paradigms of microforms to be discussed and covered:

Examples of quick writing
Grace Paley, Robert Coover

2. Myths, Parables

Story of Jonah, Prodigal Son. Tolstoy’s, Three Parables. Johann Peter Hebe, Man is a Strange Creature.

3. Fables and Fairy Tales

Aesop, Brothers Grimm

4. Short-Shorts

Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Hemingway

5. Flash Fiction

Lydia Davis, Jonathan Wilson, Diane Williams, Dave Eggers

6. Absurdist and Surrealist Stories

Etgar Keret, Daniil Kharms, Dino Buzzati, Aimee Bender

7. The Lyrical Essay

Death of the Moth, Virginia Woolf

8. Very Short Essay, True Story

Mikhail Iossel, Why…, JN, “Ice”

9 Story as one scene:

The Use of Force by William Carlos William. http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html

10. Prose Poems

Sandra Cisneros, Monkey Garden

Reading list:

Parables:

Prodigal Son: http://www.allaboutjesurchrist.org/parable-of-the-prodigal-son-faq.htm

Story of Jonah: http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1704.htm

Johann Peter Hebel: http://www.amazon.ca/The-Treasure-Chest-Unexpected-Reunion/dp/1870352432 and http://johnshaplin.blogspot.ca/2011/07/two-stories-by-johann-peter-hebel.html

Tolstoy, Three Parables: http://www.nonresistance.org/docs_pdf/Tolstoy/Three_Prables.pdf

Aesop’s Fable: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21/21-h.htm#link2H_4_0001

Brothers Grimm, Fairy Tales: http://www.pit.edu/~dash/grimm001.html

Franz Kafka Short Shorts: http://franzkafkastories.com/shortStories.php?story_jd=kafka_passers_by

Dino Buzzati, Falling Girl: https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1tb7kGoJ3mhPONLIMeWj7ugYJGpJtILy3C5o2uHCQj4k

Lydia Davis: http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c24-Id.htm

Aimee Bender: http://www.missourireview.com/anthology/we-content/uploads/2011/10/theremembererwithmaterials.pdf

JN: http://www.thebluemoon.com/4/spr99prevnovakovich.html

Mikhail Iossel: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-why-why and http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/mouse.html

Daniil Kharms: http://www.sevaj.dk/kharms/kharmseng.htm

John Cheever, Reunion: http://www.puffchrissy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/REUNION.pdf

Ernest Hemingway, A Very Short Story: http://records.viu.ca/~lanes/english/hemingway/veryshort.htm

Robert Coover: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/14/going-for-a-beer

Diane Williams: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2005/11/fiction/stories

Eudora Welty: http://grammar.about.com/od/shortpassagesforanalysis/a/Weltyteacher07.htm

Virginia Woolf: http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/everythingsanargument4c/content/cat_020/Woolf_DeathoftheMoth.pdf

Jonathan Wilson: http://www.esquire.com/fiction/napkin-project/wilson-napkin-fiction

Etgar Keret: http://www.theguardian.com/books/interactive/2012/feb/23/unzipping-etgar-keret-short-story

Grace Paley: http://www2.southeastern.edu/Academics/Faculty/scraig/paley.html and http://biblioklept.org/2014/03/08/wants-grace-paley/ and http://radashort.blogspot.ca/2008/06/mather-by-grace-paley.html

Dave Eggers: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/11/shortshortstories.fiction

Kurt Vonnegut: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

RUTH PADEL

The weekly column Ruth wrote for the Independent on Sunday from 1998 to 2001 helped foster a wider appreciation of poetry among readers across the UK. She expanded these columns in two popular books, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (2002), in which she discussed 52 contemporary poems and explained how and why poetry developed as it did in 1980′s Britain, and The Poem and the Journey (2006), which discussed 60 poems by a wide range of British, Irish and American poets from popular and mainstream to modernist, around the image of the “journey of life”, suggesting ways of reading a poem as a journey of thought and sound.

In 2004-6 Ruth was Chair of the UK Poetry Society, overhauled the Society’s Constitution and oversaw the creation of poetry “Stanzas” across the UK, linking local poetry groups to the Society.

In 2008 she gave the Bloodaxe Lectures on poetry at Newcastle University, published as Silent Letters of the Alphabet, which addresses poetry’s use of silence and white space; and explores questions of metaphor, voice and tone.

In 2009 Ruth became the first woman to be elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. The election took place amid a media storm over unproven allegations of a smear campaign against Derek Walcott, the other main contender for the post. Ruth resigned, not wanting to be drawn into continuing controversy over her election.

In 2011 Ruth gave the Housman Lecture at Hay on Wye Books Festival, published by the Housman Society as The Name and Nature of Poetry, and began presenting Radio 4’s pioneer series POETRY WORKSHOP which ran for two years with poetry groups across the UK. Other broadcasts on poetry includes talks on Tennyson and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

MICHELE ROBERTS

Michele Roberts is an English writer of mixed French-English background, the author of numerous highly acclaimed novels, dramas, poems, short stories and essays. She examines the nature of love and the female identity, based on her experience as a woman, of two cultures – French and English, and, later, comparing women through history blurring time, paces, and identities. This way she attempts to re-write the history and to imagine what the future might have been in the light of different historical events. Inspired by the Feminist Movement, she is deeply concerned with the identity of women, but not only the way society view it. She pictures the women as a productive and successful member of society, but also as an individual in search for true self, regardless of social restrains. Her heroines are “whole”, individuals who recognize and live in peace with their own contradictions and differences. They love, interrogate the nature of love, sexuality and explore the possibility of sharing the experience in more than one-way, symbolically representing a conflict between the public and the private, and modes associated with masculinity and femininity.
One of the most significant themes in her work is the mother-daughter relationship. Her style uniquely combines fantasies and myths, described in classical and religious language.
She was Poetry Editor for Spare Rib (1974) and City Limits magazine (1981), formed a writers’ collective (with Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Zoe Fairbairns) as a feminist activist with the Women’s Liberation Movement, serves as a Chair of the British Council literature advisory panel, and is a regular book reviewer and broadcaster (contributor to “Night Waves” and “Woman’s Hour”), as well as a strong literary translation supporter.
She won the Gay News Literary Award 1978 for “Piece of the Night”, the W.H.Smith Literary Award 1993 for “Daughters of the House.” Michele Roberts is Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

CREATIVE JUICES OF FOOD AND SEX

One of the pieces of advice I offer in the morning workshop to students tackling writer’s block is to have something delicious to eat. Another tip is to practise automatic writing. Given a phrase, you then write non-stop for three minutes, whatever comes up, without censoring. A good way to get the juices flowing is to begin with “I hate” or “I am disgusted by . . .” Hate and disgust are helpful energies and provoke original writing.”

None of us gets nostalgic about school dinners, do we? From primary school, I remember fatty mutton in greasy gravy. Rice pudding, tapioca pudding, semolina pudding, macaroni in warmish sweetened milk. Slimy and disgusting. At secondary school, a convent, the nuns’ speciality was carrots boiled to a pulp, tasting of soap. Slimy. Or spinach, bitter and sour and, yes, slimy. Too close in texture and appearance to spit and sick, to all those bodily wastes we shun, which the feminist author Julia Kristeva calls “the abject”. Giving an abstract name to wanting to throw up helps keep it at bay. Kristeva refers somewhere to “those currents of bodily feeling we call emotion”. In the writing workshop, we begin by translating abstract words like bliss and desire and contentment into sensual, physical images.

ETHEL ROHAN

Ethel Rohan’s first novel, The Kingdom Keeper, will publish from St. Martin’s Press in early 2017. She is also the author of two story collections, Goodnight Nobody and Cut Through the Bone, the former longlisted for The Edge Hill Prize and the latter longlisted for The Story Prize. She wrote, too, the award-winning chapbook Hard to Say (PANK) and the award-winning e-memoir single, Out of Dublin (Shebooks).

Winner of the 2013 Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award, and shortlisted for the CUIRT, Roberts, and Bristol Short Story Prizes, her work has or will appear in The New York Times, World Literature Today, PEN America, Tin House Online, The Irish Times, BREVITY Magazine, and The Rumpus, among many others. She has reviewed books for New York Journal of Books, and elsewhere.

Her most recent work appeared in the anthologies THE LINEUP: 20 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press, 2015); Winesburg, Indiana (Indiana University Press, 2015); DRIVEL: Deliciously Bad Writing by Your Favorite Authors (Penguin: Perigee, 2014). She is also a contributor and associate editor to the anthology Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015).

She will/has guest-lectured and/or taught writing at Book Passage; San Francisco State University; the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto; San Francisco Writers’ Conference; Green Mountain Writers Conference; The London Short Story Festival; The Abroad Writers’ Conference; and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival, among others. She received her MFA in fiction from Mills College, CA, 2004. Raised in Dublin, Ireland, Ethel Rohan lives in San Francisco where she is a member of The Writers’ Grotto and PEN America.

Brilliance of Brevity

Dynamic Writers Workshop

San Francisco-based Irish writer, Ethel Rohan, will teach a “Brilliance of Brevity” workshop, as part of Abroad Writers Conference. This three day master class will focus on the crafting of electric and concise narratives. The workshop runs December 14 – 16th, 2015, and is for writers of both fiction, creative non-fiction and poets. The class goal is to hone the art of selectivity and write one’s best and briefest work. In-workshop writing will encourage fearless enjoyment of the process and the careful construction of the stories that participants are most burning to tell.
Participants will study and write amidst a fun and dynamic collective spark. Ethel Rohan is an award-winning writer and the author of two story collections, her latest titled Goodnight Nobody. She invites writers at all levels to join her and says, “We will do great things together.”

GABRIELLE SELZ

3 Day Memoir Intensive

The American essayist and poet, Kenneth Rexroth wrote, “Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: The creative act.” Memoir is a creative act, one that marks the intersection of truth and storytelling.

Whether writing personal essay-length pieces or a book, this workshop will show you how to best tell the stories from your life.Together, we will analyze methods for creating a narrative through imaginative reconstruction. Participants will be asked to submit a 2,500-word sample—a stand-alone essay or an excerpt.

After introductions, we will begin with a series of essential questions that will guide us in clarifying and defining our projects. The answers are meant to be flexible, opening us up to an ongoing process that will help illuminate our material and choices as we progress.

Over the course of our three days together, each writer’s work will be work- shopped in a safe, honest environment. The whole group will help the writer identify what is unique and exciting in their work, as well as what might be getting in their way. If you are embarking on something new, it is okay to submit a skeletal description. We will then focus on helping you sketch and fill out your memoir project.

We will emphasize issues of craft with discussions on:

 Prologue: How to hook readers, set up the stakes and foreshadow the arc of the story.

 Structure: How to shape through Conflict and Turning Points.

 Character/Dialogue: Making characters dimensional through desire and contrast.

 Desire Line: Ask yourself, “What did I want more than anything else? What is my underlying question, my underlying want?” Create a desire line. It’s all about wanting.

 Writing the personal outward and within the context of history.

 Setting/Place: Creating setting, mood and emotion of place.

 Emotional authenticity

 Theme and how to weave it in so that it informs all the aspects of the story.

 Revision and its various stages.

 The Business/The Writing Life

Britt Tisdale Staton–is a psychotherapist and creativity consultant with a master’s degree in Counseling and an MFA in Creative Writing. She works with writers, artists and performers at Alive Studios, her private practice in downtown Orlando, Fla. Britt is an adjunct professor at Rollins College, and her own short stories have placed in contests by Bellingham Review, Ruminate Journal, and the Royal Palm Literary Award.

Creative Formation

Britt will offer a workshop on creative formation—fostering the writer’s gifts so the whole person is nurtured. Through both group meetings and individual consultations, Britt will work with participants on the following topics: creative process, artistic blocks, combating anxiety, making meaning, generating balance, and goal-setting.

TRAVEL & FOOD WRITING

MICHAEL RUHLMANDELTA WILLIS

MICHAEL RUHLMAN wrote more than twenty books, mostly about food and cooking, half with chefs, some non-food non-fiction, and a lot of opinions here on the fundamental importance of food and cooking to our families, our communities, our world. He

Michael co-authored four cookbooks with celebrity chef, Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry. He was a contributor to the Alinea Cookbook with chef, Grant Achatz’s tour de force on the new cuisine. He wrote Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing.

Michael has been on several television shows, “Cooking Under Fire” on PBS, a judge on “Next Iron Chef” and “Iron Chef America”. He has also been a featured guest on Travel Channel’s “Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”–Las Vegas and Cleveland episodes.

Michael is a James Beard Award Winning Cookbook writer. List of some of his books: How to Braise, How to Roast, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, Ruhlman’s Twenty, Ration: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing, The Book of Schmaltz, The Elements of Cooking: Translating the Chef’s Craft for Every Kitchen, Salumi, Books about Chefs and Professional Cooks, The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooking in the Age of Celebrity, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America, A Return to Cooking with Eric Ripert, Michael Symon’s Live to Cook, Ad Hoc at Home, Bouchon, The French Laundry Cookbook, Under Pressure.

DELTA WILLIS A member of The Explorers Club, Delta Willis profiled Richard Leakey for The Hominid Gang and has written for Adventure Travel, Audubon, Diversion, Outside, People and The New York Times. A former publicist for the National Audubon Society and Earthwatch, she tracked lions in Kenya. She is currently writing My Boat in the City, about living onboard her houseboat at New York’s 79th St. Boat Basin, base camp for journeys to Africa, Australia, China, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.
In the footsteps of James Joyce, we’ll become flaneurs, discovering the streets and tastes that inspired him.

Willis will teach the first 3 days on travel writing, then chef MICHAEL RUHLMAN, will lead the group. A James Beard award-winning author of 20 books including 4 co-authored with chef Thomas Keller of the French Laundry, one of the top 50 restaurants in the world,

EXPLORING OFF THE BEATEN PATH

In the footsteps of James Joyce, we’ll become flaneurs, discovering the streets, alleys and voices that inspired Joyce to employ Homer’s Odyssey. “I always write about Dublin,” Joyce explained; “because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”
In a shrinking universe, we’ll focus on how your travel reports can tap readers’ hunger for discovery (including themselves) gain insights from other cultures, and travel frugally and sustainably. Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown challenges us to taste a region with our senses, and taps the power of video in storytelling, which demands at least one visit to a classic pub with music. We’ll seek new ways to cover a popular destination, revisit adventure travel in the age of Siri, and discuss how to profile, or become, a modern-day explorer or digital nomad. How To Pitch your stories to editors, and other industry tips will be one day’s workshop, but most classes will focus on feedback to your submissions, how to discover the particular that is universal, and finding mentors beyond Joyce to follow.

READING SCHEDULE

Dec. 12

BARBARA MOSSBERG

Barbara Mossberg is dedicated to poetry in the civic ethos (“no place safe from poetry”) in roles ranging from President of Goddard College to one of California community Poet Laureates, Poet in Residence, Pacific Grove (CA), humanities activist, cultural diplomat, dramaturg, playwright, actor, literary critic, and professor (Clark Honors College, University of Oregon), as well as founder and host of the weekly hour Poetry Slow Down (Radiomonterey.com, podcast BarbaraMossberg.com, @BarbaraMossberg), “the news without which men die miserably every day” (William Carlos Williams), plating lyric recipes for living. In poetry slams (“old lady moxie, strutting her poetic gear”), YouTube, poetry flash mobs, lit crawls, arts and culture blogs on Huffington Post, lectures worldwide on poetry and culture from Yosemite National Park and Oregon Country Fair, to Chulalonghorn and Oxford Universities, dramaturgy (Cherry Center (CA), Oxford Playhouse (UK), 58E59 (Off-Broadway), and scholarship of poetry’s role in transformational cultural leadership, Dr. Mossberg celebrates the power of the word to change the world. As Senior Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer, Bicentennial Chair of American Studies at the University of Helsinki, and Fulbright Professor University of Rome American Poetry Seminar, and in her federal appointment as U.S. Scholar in Residence (USIA), Mossberg has lectured and read in over twenty countries. A prizewinning international poet, teacher, and scholar, her academic book on Emily Dickinson was Choice Outstanding Book of the Year in 1982. Mossberg is a contributor to Tupelo Press erotic poems anthology, Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke, one of a set of poets contributing daily on-line postings to the fundraising 30-30 project to support literary translations, the Spring Creek Trillium Project/Writer in Residence at Shotpouch Creek, Oregon State University; recent poetry is in Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Series, Sometimes the Woman in the Mirror Is Not You and appears in New Millennium Writings, Cider Press Review, Tupelo Quarterly Launch Edition, and others; honors include Semi-Finalist: the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize, Snowbound Chapbook Award, Sunken Gardens Chapbook Award, and Word Works Washington Prize. A Mellon Fellow and recipient of NEH and ACLS Awards, as well as the Jane Grant Award from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon, Dr. Mossberg attended the Colrain Manuscript Conference, and has been invited for poetry retreats with A Room of Her Own (Ghost Ranch, NM), In Claritas (Assisi, Italy, Seattle, WA), Lilly Arctic Institute and Lilly Conference (Poet in Residence), Transformational Leadership Retreat (Kalamazoo, MI), Aspen Institute (Wye, Maryland, Aspen, CO), and as regular speaker on poetry for the International Leadership Association (London, Prague, Denver, Asilomar, CA). A Professor of Practice at the Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, and Global Education Professor with the Department of International Education, teaching green and revolutionary imagination, epic, drama, and eco-literature, she has been writing and publishing poetry and criticism since age twelve ($2 payment). Mossberg, a mother of two and wife of over forty years, does research on creativity and aging.Three Legs in the Afternoon, focuses on poetry written between ages 50 to 100. Her book project is “the power of nobody to change the world, the unlikely role of poetry and music in civil and human rights, war and peace, and the environment.” Well-known inspirational speaker and fundraiser for the role of humanities in resilience, she is 67, and appears with a detaching vitreous but new right hip, “King Lear on the outside, but the Fool on the inside.”

Dr. Barbara Mossberg
Professor of Practice, Clark Honors College,
Global Education Oregon Professor of Practice,
Department of International Affairs,
University of Oregon
President Emerita Goddard College
Founder and Host, The Poetry Slow Down with Professor Barbara Mossberg
RadioMonterey.com (podcast BarbaraMossberg.com)
Poet Emerita, City of Pacific Grove (CA)
Affiliated Faculty, Interdisciplinary Ph.D., Ethical and Creative Leadership,
Union Institute and University
Visiting Scholar, Department of Biochemistry, UCLA
Director and Professor, Integrated Studies,
California State University Monterey Bay

ALISON SUSSMAN

Alison Carb Sussman won the Abroad Writers’ Conference/Finishing Line Press Authors Poetry Contest for her poems “Acting Like a Woman” and “Reuniting With Mother at the Zoo.” She was awarded a full conference registration and stay at the Butlers Townhouse in Dublin from December 12th to 19th, 2015. Her chapbook, “On the Edge,” a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition 2012, was published by FLP in 2013. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times and other publications. Alison was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2015. She lives and writes in New York City.

JOANNE PREISER

JoAnne Preiser lives, writes and teaches in Massachusetts. She received a MA from the University of Massachusetts where she worked with Martha Collins. More recently JoAnne worked with Brookline poet and teacher, Judith Steinbergh, and with Barbara Helfgott Hyett of Poems Works in Boston.

As a high school Englishteacher JoAnne has been instrumental in bringing poetry into the school system. She created a Poetry Workshop class for juniors and seniors and has brought a number of poets to her school.

Publications include: Penwood Review, IRIS and Pyramid Magazine. She received an Honorable Mention from the Friends of Acadia Journal, and won third place in The Ledge’s 2006 poetry competition and first place in the 2005 Inkwell poetry competition.

The newest member of FineLine Poets, JoAnne is happy to work with such talented and dedicated poets.

MARY COSTELLO

Mary Costello debut novel, Academy Street, is published by Canongate, it won the Eason Novel of the Year award, the pre-eminent category in the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards 2014.
Costello, whose short story collection The China Factory was first published by Stinging Fly in 2012 and positively reviewed in The Irish Times, faces stiff competition from five more well-established authors, Colm Tóibín (Nora Webster), Joseph O’Connor (The Thrill of it All), David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks), John Kelly (From Out of the City) and John Boyne (A History of Loneliness), the current Irish Times Book Club selection.

SINEAD MORRISSEY

In January 2014 Morrissey won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax. The chair of the judging panel, Ian Duhig, remarked that the collection was ‘politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.’

Dec. 13

NOEL DUFFY

MARILYN ASCHOFF MELLOR

Marilyn Mellor is a Pediatric Physician and an poet. She received her MFA at Hamline University. She published North Woods Refuge with Finishing Line Press.

BARBARA KNOTT
Barbara Knott is host of The Grapevine Art and Soul Salon, an online literary and art journal based in Atlanta where she lives. She has a Ph.D. from the drama therapy program at New York University. Publications include poems in Permafrost, New Millennium Writings, and Minerva Rising, as well as a short story in The Distillery and articles in Pilgrimage. Her novel Muscadine has been short-listed in the James Jones First Novel competition and excerpted for publication in Now and Then. In 2009, Nikki Giovanni chose her poem “Boxwood” as winner of first prize in the New Millennium Writings’ Awards 28 poetry competition. Francois Camoin selected her short story “Song of the Goat Man” as winner of third prize in the Writers@Work 2010 fiction competition. The Atlanta Writers Club named her short story “The Legend of Abigail Jones” as their spring 2014 first prize winner of the Wild Card competition. Her first chapbook of poems, Soul Mining, was published by Finishing Line Press in summer 2011, and her second, MANTA Poems, in spring 2015.
Website: grapevineartandsoulsalon.com
She says of her work:
I am interested in the world and its diversity of creatures and in what makes us human and in whatever lies in the depths of human experience, where oppositions lay down their arms, where the erotic meets the sacred, and where serious sits down with humor to sort it all out.
My goal as a writer of fiction and poetry is to get the reader to feel part of an ongoing conversation I am having with myself about themes and images that appeal to my imagination, and to become as excited about them as I am.

GWEN BURNYEAT

Gwen Burnyeat was born in Cambridge UK nd is currently teaching Political Anthropology at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, where she is a Masters/PhD candidate in social anthropology and a Leverhulme Trust Study-Abroad Scholar She is a Student Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Association of Social Anthropologists, and a member of The Bogotá Writers Club. She holds a BA and M.Phil. in Literature from the Universities of Leeds and Cambridge, has lived in Colombia since 2010, working in Human Rights organisations including the International Centre for Transitional Justice and Peace Brigades International.
She has published academic articles in both English and Spanish, on transitional justice and community peace initiatives in Colombia, as well as short fiction and literary essays in books and magazines, frequently drawing on her experience in humanitarian work from Colombia’s war-torn farming communities.
Latest publications include ‘The Banana Republic of Urabá’, in Was Gabo an Irishman? Tales from Gabriel García Márquez’s Colombia (2015) and ‘Two Rivers’, a short story in The Dublin Review (2014). She is currently researching the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, writing her thesis, selling organic chocolate and producing a film documentary with co-director Pablo Mejía Trujillo called ‘Chocolate of Peace’ (Chocolate de Paz), forthcoming 2016.

RUTH PADEL

In 2004-6 Ruth was Chair of the UK Poetry Society, overhauled the Society’s Constitution and oversaw the creation of poetry “Stanzas” across the UK, linking local poetry groups to the Society.

Dec. 14

MOLLY SCOTT

Molly Scott has enjoyed overlapping careers: as a poet, singer, composer and performer, and as a clinical psychologist, educator and international workshop leader. She has recorded albums of her own music, written scores for musicals, taught psychotherapeutic counseling at the university level and led training and workshops in her Creative Resonance embodied voice therapy in the United States, Europe and Central America. Dr. Scott did her undergraduate degree at Smith College in English and music, and graduate studies in counseling psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In her early career in New York, she was part of the folk music revival in the 1960’s and later went on to work in theater, television, and film. Much of her published work has focused on therapeutic and social justice issues. In 2015 she published “Up to the Windy Gate: poems of grief and grace” with Finishing Line Press and this same year won the Robert Frost Foundation poetry prize for her poem “Two Girls, Woodpile”. She lives on a farm in the hills of Western Massachusetts, where she writes and also works with horses in Equine Assisted Psychotherapy.

JESSICA PURDY

Jessica Purdy teaches Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University. In 2014, she was nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.

GABRIELLE SELZ

Gabrielle Selz is a writer and a live storyteller. Combining her dual passions for words and images, she holds a BA in art history from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an MA in writing from City College of New York. She has worked in commercial television and on the political campaigns of two Greek democratic presidential candidates: Michael Dukakis and Paul Tsongas. She is the recipient of a fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Moth Story Slam winner. She has published in magazines and newspapers including, The New Yorker, The New York Times, More magazine, Los Angeles Times, Fiction, Newsday, and Art Papers. She now writes art reviews for The Huffington Post, and you can read her blog about art and life.

MEDBH MCGUCKIAN

Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 to Catholic parents in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She studied with Seamus Heaney at Queen’s University, earning a BA and MA, and later returned as the university’s first female writer-in-residence.

McGuckian’s poems are layered collages of feminine and domestic imagery complicated by a liminal, active syntax that, in drawing attention to the weight of one phrase on another, emphasizes and questions our constructions of power and gender. Her work is reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke in its emotional scope and John Ashbery in its creation of rich interior landscapes. Praising McGuckian’s Selected Poems (1997), Seamus Heaney said, “Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20th-century Ireland.”

McGuckian has earned significant critical acclaim over the course of her career. Her poem “The Flitting,” published under a male pseudonym, won the 1979 National Poetry Competition. In 1980 McGuckian published two chapbooks of poetry and also won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council. On Ballycastle Beach (1988) won the Cheltenham Award, and The Currach Requires No Harbours (2007) was short-listed for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

Her honors also include the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award. She won the Forward Prize for Best Poem for “She Is in the Past, She Has This Grace.”

She edited The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985) and co-translated, with Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, the Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s collection The Water Horse (1999). She is the author most recently of Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999), and the poetry collections My Love Has Fared Inland (2010) and The High Caul Cap (2013).

MICHELE ROBERTS

Dec. 15

LINDA IBBOTSON

Linda Ibbotson was born in Sheffield, England, lived in Switzerland and Germany and travelled extensively before finally settling in County Cork, S. Ireland 20 years ago.

A poet, artist and photographer her poetry and essays have been published in various international journals including Episteme, Levure Litteraire 9 and 10, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review XX, Iodine and forthcoming a future issue of Poetry Bus. Her poetry and paintings have been published in the newspaper Eastern World Uzbekistan and her book reviews have appeared in a number of international journals and newspapers.

She has had poetry read on radio in Australia and formerly written a regular poetry feature in Musicians Together on-line music journal and a feature for Plum Books UK. She was interviewed on CRY 104 fm radio, Youghal, Ireland. Linda was also invited to read at the Abroad Writers’ Conference, Lismore Castle, Lismore, Co. Waterford, Ireland in December 2013. Her poem “A Celtic Legacy” was performed in France at a number of venues including 59 Rivoli, Paris and on French radio by Irish musician and performer Davog Rynne. Linda was invited in May 2015 to be one of the 3 judges for the Rabindranath Tagore Award International in India. Her painting “Cascade” was used as a CD cover “OUTSIDE” by Irish musician Tony Floyd Kenna.

WANITA ZUMBRUNNEN

Wanita Zumbrunnen has a PH.D in American and Russian Literature from the University of Iowa. She has won Awards at the St. Louis Poetry Center; appeared in Inspirations, a publication of Quald-E-Azam Library in Pakistan, The Cloverdale Review, the University of Iowa’s Daily Palette, and received International Publication Awards in 1996 and 2000 from the Atlantic Review. In 2012 Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, All Mortals Shall Dream Dreams. In 2014, she attended the Abroad Writers’ Conference in Lake Como, Italy. She is assembling a 70 to 100 page manuscript of travel poems based on her travels in Pakistan, to which she received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1988 and 1992, and in Japan, Germany, Kosovo and Turkey, where she taught on military bases from 1996 to 2010.

MICHAEL RUHLMAN

MICHAEL RUHLMAN wrote more than twenty books, mostly about food and cooking, half with chefs, some non-food non-fiction, and a lot of opinions here on the fundamental importance of food and cooking to our families, our communities, our world. He

DELTA WILLIS

A member of The Explorers Club, Delta Willis profiled Richard Leakey for The Hominid Gang and has written for Adventure Travel, Audubon, Diversion, Outside, People and The New York Times. A former publicist for the National Audubon Society and Earthwatch, she tracked lions in Kenya. She is currently writing My Boat in the City, about living onboard her houseboat at New York’s 79th St. Boat Basin, base camp for journeys to Africa, Australia, China, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

JOHN BOYNE

John Boyne was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1971, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, where I was awarded the Curtis Brown prize.

He published 9 novels for adults and five for younger readers, including The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas which was a New York Times no.1 Bestseller and was made into a Miramax feature film. It has sold more than 6 million copies worldwide.

He was a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times and have been a judge for both the Hennessy Literary Awards and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. I am currently chair of the jury for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada.

In 2012, he was awarded the Hennessy Literary ‘Hall of Fame’ Award for my body of work. I have also won 3 Irish Book Awards, for Children’s Book of the Year, People’s Choice Book of the Year and Short Story of the Year. I have won a number of international literary awards, including the Que Leer Award for Novel of the Year in Spain and the Gustav Heinemann Peace Prize in Germany. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia.

John’s novels are published in 48 languages.

John’s most recent adult novel, A HISTORY OF LONELINESS, is published in the UK by Doubleday and in the USA by Farrar Straus & Giroux.

His first collection of short stories, BENEATH THE EARTH, is published in the UK by Doubleday.

A new novel for younger readers, THE BOY AT THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN, was published in the UK/Ireland in October 2015 and will be available in the US and in foreign language editions during 2016.

Dec. 16

THEODORA ZIOLKOWKI

Theodora Ziolkowski’s poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, and Short FICTION (England), among other journals, anthologies, and exhibits. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and she is the author of a chapbook of poems, A Place Made Red (Finishing Line Press).

DOUGLAS COLE

Douglas Cole has published three poetry collections: Interstate (Night Ballet Press, 2014); Western Dream, (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and The Dice Throwers, (Liquid Light Press, 2015), as well as a novella, Ghost (Blue Cubicle Press, 2013). His work is in anthologies such as Best New Writing (Hopewell Publications 2015), Bully Anthology (Kentucky Stories Press, 2015) and Coming Off The Line (Mainstreet Rag Publishing, 2015). His work appears or is forthcoming in journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Owen Wister Review, Iconoclast, Slipstream, Red Rock Review, Wisconsin Review, Two Thirds North, San Pedro River Review, Badlands, Common Ground Review, The Ocean State Review, and Midwest Quarterly. More is available online in The Adirondack Review, Ithaca Lit, Talking Writing, Salt River Review, and Avatar Review, as well as recorded stories in Bound Off and The Baltimore Review. He received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry; the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House; and First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway. He was also recently the featured poet in Poetry Quarterly. He is currently on the faculty at Seattle Central College. His website is douglastcole.com.

DEBORAH HENRY

JOHN BANVILLE

William John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945, the youngest of three siblings. He was educated at Christian Brothers schools and St Peter’s College, Wexford. After college John worked as a clerk for Ireland’s national airline, Aer Lingus, before joining The Irish Press as a sub-editor in 1969. Continuing with journalism for over thirty years, John was Literary Editor at The Irish Times from 1988 to 1999.

John’s first book, Long Lankin, a collection of short stories and a novella, was published in 1970. His first novel, Nightspawn, came out in 1971, followed byBirchwood (1973), Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981), The Newton Letter(1982), Mefisto (1986), The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), Athena(1995), The Untouchable (1997), Eclipse (2000), Shroud (2002), The Sea (2005),The Infinities (2009) and Ancient Light (2012). His non-fiction book, Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City, was published in 2003 as part of Bloomsbury’s ‘The Writer and the City’ series. In 2012, an anthology comprising extracts from John’s fifteen novels to date, together with selections drawn from his dramatic works and various reviews, was published under the title, Possessed of a Past: A John Banville Reader.

Among the awards John’s novels have won are the Allied Irish Banks fiction prize, the American-Irish Foundation award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, theGuardian Fiction Prize. In 1989 The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and was awarded the first Guinness Peat Aviation Award; in Italian, as La Spiegazione dei Fatti, the book was awarded the 1991 Premio Ennio Flaiano. Ghostswas shortlisted for the Whitbread Fiction Prize 1993; The Untouchable for the same prize in 1997. In 2003 John was awarded the Premio Nonino. He has also received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation in the US. In 2005, John won the Man Booker Prize for The Sea. In 2011 he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize. Last year, John was awarded the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature.

Under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, John has published the following crime novels: Christine Falls (2006), The Silver Swan (2007), The Lemur (2008), Elegy for April (2010), A Death in Summer (2011) and Vengeance (2012). Later this year, Mantle will publish Holy Orders, the sixth book in the Quirke series. The first three have been adapted by Andrew Davies and Conor McPherson for the BBC, and will be broadcast later this autumn, starring Gabriel Byrne in the title role.

John (again writing as Benjamin Black) has also been commissioned by theRaymond Chandler Estate to pen a new Philip Marlowe novel which will be published by Holt in the US in 2014.

Dec. 17

CATHERINE MOORE

Catherine Moore’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Tahoma Literary Review, Southeast Review, Cider Press Review, Southampton Review, Blue Fifth Review, and in anthologies most recently by Pankhearst Press. Her poems have garnered First Place prizes with both the Mississippi and Alabama State Poetry Society Contests. She is the winner of the Southeast Review’s 2014 Gearhart poetry prize and has work selected for “The Best Small Fictions of 2015” anthology by guest judge Robert Olen Butler. Her chapbook “Story” is available with Finishing Line Press. Selections from this book were featured on Nashville area television, Poets From the Neighbourhood.

Catherine helped shepherd the creation of a literary & arts journal, Tampa Review Online and served as the Poetry Editor. She currently is a Guest Editor at Toe Good Poetry and reviews poetry books for literary journals, such as Prick of the Spindle and Up the Staircase.

VICTORIA KORTH

Professional Organizations: American Psychiatric Association, New York State Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, Monroe County Medical Society, Poetry Society of America.

Victoria has an MA in English/Creative Writing from SUNY College at Brockport. She was long listed twice by the Montreal International Poetry Contest and she was a finalist in May Swenson First Poetry Book Award, University of Colorado Press. She won first prize for a single poem, Newtowner Magazine International Poetry Contest. She’s written two books, Cord Color (Finishing Line Press( and Tender Warnings: Narrative Tension in Lyric Poetry with State University of New York, College at Brockport.

BRITT TISDALE STATON

Britt Tisdale Staton–is a psychotherapist and creativity consultant with a master’s degree in Counseling and an MFA in Creative Writing. She works with writers, artists and performers at Alive Studios, her private practice in downtown Orlando, Fla. Britt is an adjunct professor at Rollins College, and her own short stories have placed in contests by Bellingham Review, Ruminate Journal, and the Royal Palm Literary Award.

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH

Dec. 18

JUDY MICHAELS

Dr. Judy Rowe Michaels is poet in residence and English teacher at Princeton Day School in Princeton, New Jersey, as well as a poet in the schools for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.The author of two books on teaching poetry and writing, both published by NCTE (Risking Intensity and Dancing With Words), she has also two collections of poems, The Forest of Wild Hands and, most recently, Reviewing the Skull (WordTech Editions). A five-time ovarian cancer survivor, Michaels participates in Survivors Teaching Students, a program currently in over seventy medical schools around the country. She has been awarded three poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Arts Council and nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She is a member of the nine-women performance and critique group, Cool Women.

TERRY BLACKHAWK

Terry Blackhawk is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length collections of poetry including Escape Artist, winner of the John Ciardi Prize, as well as The Dropped Hand and The Light Between, both available from Wayne State University Press. Among her awards are six Pushcart Prize nominations, the Foley Poetry Award, The Springfed Arts Prize and the 2010 Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod International. Her work has appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and in Numerous anthologies including Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry and When She Named Fire: Contemporary Poems by American Women. She is a 2013 Krege Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow. In 1995, Blackhawk founded InsideOut Literary Arts Project (iO), Detroit’s acclaimed writers-in-schools program, which she directed until her retirement in June 2015. WSU Press has just released To Light a Fire: Twenty Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a collection of essays co-edited with iO Senior Writer Peter Markus.

ETHEL ROHAN

KEVIN BARRY

Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of two collections of short stories, and the novel City of Bohane, which was the winner of the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Born in Limerick, Barry spent much of his youth travelling, living in 17 addresses by the time he was 36. He lived variously in Cork, Santa Barbara, Barcelona, and Liverpool before settling in Sligo, purchasing and renovating a run-down Royal Irish Constabulary barracks. His decision to settle down was driven primarily by the increasing difficulty in moving large quantities of books from house to house. In Cork Barry worked as a freelance journalist, contributing a regular column to the Irish Examiner. Keen to become a writer, he purchased a caravan and parked it in a field in West Cork, spending the next six months writing what he described as a “terrible novel’.

Barry has described himself as “a raving egomaniac”, one of those “monstrous creatures who are composed 99 per cent of sheer, unadulterated ego” and “hugely insecure and desperate to be loved and I want my reader to adore me, to a disturbing, stalkerish degree.” He is highly ambitious, saying: “I won’t be happy until I’m up there, receiving the Nobel Prize.” He confessed to “haunting bookshops and hiding” to “spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone’s tempted by my sweet bait” and has also placed copies of his own work in front of books by other “upcoming” authors.

In 2007 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his short story collection There are Little Kingdoms. In 2011 he released his debut novel City of Bohane, which was followed in 2012 by the short story collection Dark Lies the Island. Barry won the International Dublin Literary Award for his novel City of Bohane in 2013. When City of Bohane was shortlisted for the award in April 2013, Barry said: “Anything that keeps a book in the spotlight, and keeps people talking about books is good. And a prize with money attached to it has a lot of prestige.”[8][9] He received €100,000 for winning the award. The prize jury included Salim Bachi, Krista Kaer, Patrick McCabe, Kamila Shamsee, Clive Sinclair and Eugene R. Sullivan. Lord Mayor of Dublin Naoise Muirí said he was “thrilled” that someone of “such immense talent [should] take home this year’s award”. Muirí also said the characters were “flamboyant and malevolent, speaking in a vernacular like no other.”

The Gazette described him as: “If Roddy Doyle and Nick Cave could procreate, the result would be something like Kevin Barry.

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