By Judy Carmack Bross
The Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference, directed by Amy Danzer and taught by Northwestern faculty, returns this year on Friday, July 19 – Saturday, July 20, online again, so writers of all genres and backgrounds can join from anywhere in the world. Sign up is open now and through the duration of the conference.
Amy Danzer, Director of the Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference.
Award-winning authors, including Rebecca Makkai, Paula Carter, Christine Sneed, Juan Martinez, Gioia Diliberto Faisal Mohyuddin, Lori Rader-Day, Kate Harding, Laurie Lawlor, Christine Sneed, and Megan Stielstra, tell how to uncover the heart of a story, use nature to make sense of the world, tease universal insights from personal experiences, and navigate the complexities of flashbacks. The conference features a variety of specialized workshops on flash fiction, imaginative travel writing, and character development. Participants can also receive pro tips on publishing as practice and how to embrace the concept of ‘good enough.’ For those seeking personalized feedback, individual manuscript consultations with conference faculty are available.
Award Winning Writer Rebecca Makkai who will be teaching at the Writers Conference. Her class on “I can’t remember how to do this: Writing Memory in Fiction and Non-Fiction” will be held from 11-12 on July 20. She is the author of this year’s New York Times bestselling I Have Some Questions for You, as well as the novels The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize among other honors.
Author and Writers’ Conference Lecturer Paula Carter.
We spoke with Paula Carter recently about nature writing, the subject of her class. Carter is the author of the flash memoir collection No Relation, which was shortlisted for the Stanford Libraries William Saroyan International Prize. Her award-winning essays have appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The Offing and elsewhere. She was an Administrative Staff Fellow at the Bread Loaf Environmental Conference in 2022 and 2023 and she attended Ragdale and the Shannaghe Artists Residency. She teaches creative writing to grad students at Northwestern.
Carter’s class. “Let’s Get Down to Earth: Writing as Witness for the Natural World Around You” will be held from 9:30 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 20.
“I urge my students to take time to notice nature all around them and whether it is for fiction, poetry or essay format, to do a draft following class. There are now several publications such as Orion and Ecotone that focus on nature and the environment and students should look at their submission goals.”
“I grew up in rural Illinois and was in a more wild and natural setting. My parents were campers and hikers, and I was just a witness to this background and place. Right now, with so much focus and so many changes happening in the environment, it is very essential to be aware.”
“Of course there has always been a reverence for nature, whether it is poetry or prose. Think of Thoreau, but nature writing is having its moment now as well.”
“There is much reverence an awe now I see in writers—there are elements of an elegy, of sadness as well as activism, the urgency to do something about climate change. You see lots of people working on this now.”
Carter is currently working on a book about the history of the Midwest and about pioneer ancestors. “It is about how the past shapes us and how we separate from the prairie and the land.”
How was her topic selected?
“Amy Danzer who manages several masters programs at Northwestern, invites the Summer Writers Conference Faculty to
submit topic ideas. Having been involved with the Breadloaf Environmental Writers Workshop I have thought about the topic a lot,” Carter told us.”
“These last few years, since we’ve moved the conference entirely online and feature faculty who teach for our MFA in Prose and Poetry and MA in Writing programs, I poll current faculty to see what sorts of ideas they have for workshops, and we work together to determine what makes the most sense for that year’s programming. I also take into consideration feedback we receive from surveys we send to attendees each year,” Danzer added.
Faisal Mohyuddin will be teaching “No Passports or Visas Required: Imaginative Travel Writing to be offered from 11-noon on July 19.
Faisal Mohyuddin’s debut full-length poetry collection, The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear 2018), won the 2017 Sexton Prize for Poetry, was selected as a 2018 Summer Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society, and was named a “highly commended” book of 2018 by the Forward Arts Foundation. Also the author of the chapbook The Riddle of Longing (Backbone 2017), he is the recipient of the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner and a Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award.
We spoke recently with Mohyuddin recently about the Writers’ Conference:
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve had regular opportunities to travel, and I feel lucky enough to have visited more than 20 countries and more than 40 states. So it’s natural that when I write, I often return to places I’ve been for inspiration. In addition to relying on my own memory of places I’ve been, as well as consulting people I traveled with or who are familiar with particular places, I often find myself turning to imagination to fill in gaps, to add depth to what I remember, and to relive my experiences of a particular place. For me, there is an enchantment of places I’ve been — a sense of wonder and curiosity that transcends what I can feel about places close to home.”
“However, I recognize that memory and imagination are limited and incomplete, and they can be inaccurate too. I tend to take a lot of photos when I travel, and I often look back at these photos as I write in order to more clearly and accurately see various settings. To expand my grasp of a place, I turn to online research to get even more information and insight, and to see and hear it as a living place with people, sounds, colors, smells, textures, etc. So I will go to YouTube, for example, and watch videos of people walking through towns, driving through the countryside, and visiting key sites. I will watch drone footage over landscapes and neighborhoods, and watch tour guides giving video tours of various places. For example, last year, prior to a trip to Sarajevo, I went on a few virtual tours of the city. Of course, in real life, the city was so much more vibrant, warm, and compelling than it can be on a screen; however, I got a preview of a place that way. And to go back and watch the tour after having visited, I notice and feel much more than I did before.”
“In the Northwestern workshop, we’ll use YouTube, Google Maps, Google Earth, image searches, etc. to imaginatively visit places we’ve never been. We will gather details about time and place, and use these to imaginatively create these places on the page in our work. There is, naturally, an ethical complexity to this approach: can we really write about a place we’ve never been with respect and fidelity, and do so without caricaturing the place and its people and customs? There is no way to do perfectly do a place justice from a distance; however, by recognizing our own limitations, biases, and lack of knowledge, we can strive for precision and accuracy, avoid generalizations, and hopefully arrive at a place closer to truth.”
Gioia Diliberto will be teaching “How to Find the Heart of the Story” on July 19 from 3:30-4:30 p.m. July 19. The author of three novels, four biographies and a play, her work, which centers on the lives of women, has been praised for combining rich storytelling with deep research to bring alive worlds as varied as Jazz Age Paris, nineteenth century Chicago, Belle Epoque Paris and disco era Manhattan.
Sign-up is open now throughout the duration of the conference. Attendees can register for one workshop at $30, multiple workshops, or $150 for unlimited access.
Private manuscript consultations are $125.
For details and to register visit: sps.northwestern.edu.
