JUNIPER SUMMER WRITING INSTITUTE DAILY SCHEDULE

JUNE 2430, 2012 SUNDAY, JUNE 24 4-5:45 PM REGISTRATION 6:00 PM WELCOME DINNER 7:30 PM READINGS BY MARK DOTY & LENI ZUMAS MONDAY, JUNE 25 10:30 AM 12:00 PM 1-3:30 PM 7:30 PM Q&A WITH MARK DOTY (MODERATED BY MATTHEW ZAPRUDER) LUNCH WORKSHOPS READINGS BY CHARLES DAMBROSIO & MATTHEA HARVEY

TUESDAY, JUNE 26 10:30 AM CRAFT SESSIONS 12:00 PM LUNCH 1-3:30 PM WORKSHOPS 7:30 PM READINGS BY AMY HEMPEL & MATTHEW ZAPRUDER WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27 10:30 AM Q&A WITH AMY HEMPEL (MODERATED BY DAVID BARTONE) 7:30 PM READINGS BY JOSEPH CARDINALE, TIMOTHY DONNELLY & BETSY WHEELER THURSDAY, JUNE 28 10:30 AM CRAFT SESSIONS 12:00 PM LUNCH 1-3:30 PM WORKSHOPS 8:00 PM READINGS BY HEATHER CHRISTLE & PAUL LISICKY FRIDAY, JUNE 29 10:30 AM 12:00 PM 1-3:30 PM 7:30 PM CRAFT SESSIONS LUNCH WORKSHOPS READINGS BY RIKKI DUCORNET & NOY HOLLAND

SATURDAY, JUNE 30 10:30 AM Q&A WITH RIKKI DUCORNET (MODERATED BY ANDREA LAWLOR) 12:00 PM LUNCH 1-3:30 PM WORKSHOPS 7:30 PM READINGS BY JAMES TATE & DARA WIER 9:00 PM FAREWELL RECEPTION AT UNIVERSITY FACULTY CLUB

2012 JUNIPER INSTITUTE CRAFT SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

********************************** TUESDAY, JUNE 26 Joseph Cardinale On Mystery and Ambiguity Flannery OConnor once said that the essential purpose of fiction is to refresh the readers awareness of the mystery of existence. This statement reminds us of the basic kinship that narrative fiction shares with philosophical inquiry. Both start from a sense of speculative wonder. Both are forms of hypothetical investigation that trace causes and effects. And both guide us to awareness not so much of what we know, but of what we dont know. This is perhaps one reason ambiguitythe capacity to invite and sustain contradictory interpretations and to leave readers wanting to know moreis so essential to enduring fiction. In this session, we will talk about some of the ways we can recognize and deepen the ambiguities and mysteries in our own work. In particular, we will discuss how stories can start from philosophical thought experiments, puzzles, and paradoxes, and we will look at examples of writing that evoke a sense of mystery without sacrificing specificity. Matthea Harvey The Mercurial Worlds of the Mind: A survey of imaginary worlds and their ties to this one. Every time you put pen to paper, you are inventing a world, but perhaps you'd like to try creating one that looks less like your own? In this survey of imaginary worlds (for poets and fiction writers alike), we will look at these inventions as outlandish similes, connected to this world by varying lengths and thicknesses of likeness. We will map out how such worlds are created, focusing on poems by Margaret Cavendish, Rose Auslnder, Terrence Hayes, and Anne Carson, stories by Salman Rushdie, Edwin Abbott, Enid Blyton, and Italo Calvino as well as artwork by Donald Evans (who created stamps for imaginary countries, including ones named for types of pasta), Pippilotti Rist, The Royal Art Lodge, and Nina Katchadourian. At the end of the talk, you will try writing a poem or short prose piece inspired by an entry from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Betsy Wheeler Handmade Bookmaking for Writers, Parts I & II In this intensive two-part craft session, we will consider the art and history of chapbook-making and explore the keen relationship between the written word and the physical object that contains it. Well start by looking at samples of handmade chapbooks whose physical designs engage in direct conversation with the language contained within. As a group, we will study the limitless possibilities of the creative process of bookmaking and its relationship to the writing process; these discoveries will hopefully be generative to both your own writing and the complementary outlet of handcrafted bookmaking. You will be introduced to two simple methods of book-art design and hand binding and create for yourself two handmade books: one full of the writing of someone whose work you admire, and one of your own writing. **This session meets on both Tuesday and Thursday. Dara Wier Some Time to Talk about What's Good about Writing When It Is Emerson had a circular desk with pie-slice partitions built so that he could lazy-susan style roll around all his many on-going kinds of writing. Some writers swear by ambient music. Some say never never never aim your writing platform (whatever it may be) so that you have a good view out a window. A few writers swear by standing,

some write in bed, others on wind-swept mountainsides. Some like cafes. Some libraries. Some kitchen tables. Some someone else's inherited desk. Some barns, shacks, sheds, attics, motel rooms, closets, a studio in a warren of studios. Some organized artists' colonies and retreats. Some are vagrant and prefer no particular place. Because all of these things (and many many other eccentric, idiosyncratic ways) require choices to be made, this is where it might be said any piece of writing begins. We will particularly base our conversation on situations, beginning with where and when you write, locations, settings and particularities of place, beginning with ideas, titles, and opening words or sentences. When you're writing, something sometimes must occur that is so tantalizing, satisfying and right (this could be when you are most convoluted, most not yourself anymore, most unfamiliar with who you are, most alien to your everyday you, most able to be other than your everyday self) that you want to inhabit that zone as often as you can (maybe your time is limited by life's requirements) (whose isn't?) and you want to develop habits that will more often than not produce circumstances you might call primed. During our short time together we'll talk about successes, frustrations, dangers, digressions, and habits writers have found useful, through the years. And what are today's particular disadvantages and advantages. Leni Zumas Astonishing Monsters: Hybrid Forms From Theophrastus of ancient Greece and Sei Shonagon of tenth-century Japan to contemporary figures like Gloria Anzalda, Kamau Brathwaite, Michel Butor, Anne Carson, and W. G. Sebald, writers have always pushed the limits of literary form and genre. What happens when essays act like poems, novels look like encyclopedias, and poems sound like instruction manuals? Well discuss texts that reveal the rich possibilities of hybrid schemes, and well explore with short writing exercises how cross-pollination and genre-bending might galvanize our own work.

THURSDAY, JUNE 28 Rikki Ducornet The Deep Zoo as Haiku The Deep Zoo is what I call the wellspring of the creative imagination. It is the place of our most essential and exemplary memories, reveries, and dreams. There is no Borges without the tiger, no Cortazar without the amorous lion, no Calvino without the moon, no Bachelard without the seashell, no Kafka without the patriarch. Our practice will begin with the evocation of our own unique Zoo. We will trace its most essential itineraries, recognize its unique weather, and explore its aesthetic and existential implications. The intention is to work spontaneously and override received ideas. We will find novel ways to give our work a structure that is cohesive, resilient, not binding. Our object is to become autonomous writers, to be empowered by our own imaginations and, at the end of our brief time together, to have acquired the elements essential to the creation of a powerful piece of writing.

Noy Holland We read, in part, to be lifted away from the daily. We want mystery, scope, relief from the weight of detail. Fiction provides a haven, sometimes even from itself. It can swerve, rupture, disburden. It can lift out and away. This lifting away reminds us of the pleasing elasticity of being we know to be true and forget. On certain pages of prose (poetry too) we are reminded to see more deeply, perhaps more widely, as though an aperture has been opened, as though time has been dilated, and space. What emerges from the rupture might be wisdom, a confession of fear, a declaration of fury, or love. Love and fury and wisdom and fear have accumulated line by line: the rupture feels at once spontaneous and inevitable, an impulse that overwhelms intention. The rupture is larger than the story and yet contained by it and it can take your breath away. Recollection and premonition; accumulation and release. The rupture is not explanation but declaration: People require strengthening before the acts of life. (Grace Paley) I am vacation from love. (William Gass) My questions for the time we have together will be: how do writers accomplish this feat? How might we invite it? Alix Olson Performance Matters! Are you a page poet or writer of fiction who has always been a little tempted by that open-mic list or slam poetry night? Whether you're a regular on the scene or a newcomer to the possibility, this craft session will help guide you through the nerve-wracking but always thrilling page-to-stage journey. During our time together, we will engage in a creative group exploration of all matters performancerelated including: improvisational and movement exercises, "throwing" your voice, and other powerful methods for effectively "embodying" your written word. Betsy Wheeler Handmade Bookmaking for Writers, Parts I & II In this intensive two-part craft session, we will consider the art and history of chapbook-making and explore the relationship between the written word and the physical object that contains it. Well start by looking at samples of handmade chapbooks whose physical designs are in direct conversation with their languageboth poetry and prose. As a group, we will study the limitless possibilities of the creative process of bookmaking and its relationship to the writing process; these discoveries will hopefully be generative to both your own writing and the complementary outlet of handcrafted bookmaking. You will be introduced to two simple methods of book-art design and hand binding and create two handmade books: one full of the writing of someone whose work you admire, and one of your own writing. **This session meets on both Tuesday and Thursday. Matthew Zapruder EAT THIS TILAPIA OR DIE! Rhetoric is the traditional study of how things are said: how sentences are constructed, what structures and formal devices we use in our writing and conversation to organize our thoughts, and what the various effects of those structures and devices are. Literary critics use rhetoric to analyze writing, and to teach people how to write more effectively. But for us writers, rhetoric has a secret power: it can be reverse engineered. We can browse through the long lists of rhetorical devices that have been helpfully compiled by diligent critics, and choose for ourselves powerful, appealing, even exotic ones in order to generate sentences from them, in order to help us begin writing. We can look at sentences that feel brilliant for unknown reasons, and try to take apart their structure, to see and imitate what writers have done. We can set ourselves the task of employing a certain rhetorical device, in order to move a poem or story along. We can rewrite one sentence in many different rhetorical formats, in order to reanimate dead moments in our poems or prose. In this craft talk we will examine these and other techniques,

and try out some ways of using them to begin a new piece of writing, or to revise. Time permitting we will finish by doing some writing based on a combination of these rhetorical devices to generate the beginnings of a poem or piece of prose.

FRIDAY, JUNE 29 Heather Christle Magic Spelling What if a poem is a machine made not of words, but of letters? How can we teach ourselves to notice the smallest unit of our medium? What happens when we do? How are reading and writing even possible? What happens when we rearrange our alphabet? We will look closely at small things to answer big questions, gathering observations from Gertrude Stein, Harryette Mullen, Aram Saroyan, and cognitive science along the way. We might make up some new letters. We will do our best to describe the ones we know. Charles DAmbrosio Point of View In a mix of lecture, discussion and selected readings), well explore point of view, trying to enlarge our sense of its vitality while covering as much as possible, from picking a pronoun to completing the vision. Within any given story the point of view is a living organism, thriving or under threat, struggling for its place in the narrative, registering in tremendously sensitive fashion the moral or aesthetic dilemmas of the narrative. Its presence in the story has desires, insights, limitations, a personality, even, that's not all that different from character. As readers we typically track a story by the movement of character, but as writers we trace the arc of our creation and come to understand it through point of view. POV has a journey to complete as surely as your main character, and it cant remain unmoved. It touches every aspect of your fiction. If a story has a wrong ending, a weakness in character, a slack narrative stretch, its very often a good idea to go back to the angle of vision and see what you can do to sharpen it. It's like dialing in the optic quality of a story, finding the resolution, in the fullest sense of that wordthe focus and concentration, the clarity and definition, but also the courage and determination necessary to seeing the work through. In being true to the POV you declare your allegiance to the story, and you stand up for it, even when things get difficult. It tells the world that you love your creation, that all of it matters, that none of its concerns, whatever they may be, will be overlooked. Timothy Donnelly Patience Like music videos and aspirational commercials, so many of our poems keep their energy up and hold our attention by cutting from one thing to the next as quickly as possible. The brain cant get sick of something it catches only a glimpse of. But maybe it cant come to grasp what rushes past it either, or fathom what it manages merely to graze. In this craft session, well consider some of the ways in which poets and other writers have chosen to slow things down. Well look at poems and some prose in which the eye lingers longer on an image than necessary, or maybe even longer than what we might think advisable. Well also look at work in which a thought or theme is developedbuilt up, prolonged, amplified, restatedpatiently, which is to say in a manner somewhat out of step with a culture that places such a premium on speed and efficiency. How can this writing be made to appeal to

our shortened attention spans? What effect or effects does this slowing down have on our reading of the work? Of particular interest will be writing that changes its pace at different points, speeding up at times to get somewhere fast, but then also pulling overthe way we sometimes do in life, or wish we hadto take in some significant view. Paul Lisicky Part poem, part nonfiction narrative, part song: a lyric essay lives on the borders. It talks to the poem in its fidelity to compression, sound, and image. It talks to the essay in its work of idiosyncratic meditation. What does it mean to test, to try? We'll look at some short examples of the form as a way into wondering about voice and structure. We'll also get started on a lyric essay inspired by the work in front of us. Lisa Olstein Description/Departure or The Brain is a Simile-making Machine How does the data of the senses transform into language in the brain and on the page? When we attempt to describe, what processes and practices do we consciously and unconsciously engage in? In this session well explore not only how and why we turn to description, but also how and why description itself so quickly turns: from the literal to the figurative, from one idea or object to another, from whats in front of us to far-flung places. Paying particular attention to simile and metaphorthe urges that point us towards them, the work that they do or undowell explore ways in which description functions as a tool and a practice, as a manifestation of our imaginations, and as an expression of multiple forms of logic; that is, as a framework for how each of us idiosyncratically knows and represents the world. Examples will be drawn from poetry (more) and prose (less); exercises will be applicable to both.