Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, and editor of place-based literature. Her books include American Purgatory (Black Spring Press Group, 2017) and Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Press, 2013), as well as Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011), an English-language translation of Amal al-Jubouri's Iraq War memoir-in-verse. Her Best Book of the Year honors include those from The Best Translated Book Awards, Foreword INDIES Awards, The Nautilus Awards, The Banipal Prize (U.K.), The Millions, Book Riot, The Rumpus, and Ms. Magazine, and both American Purgatory and Render were named Bestsellers of the Decade by Small Press Distribution. She makes her home in Northwest Arkansas, where she serves on faculty for the University of Arkansas MFA program as an Assistant Professor of Poetry & Translation. Her latest book is El interior de la ballena / The belly of the whale, the bilingual edition of Claudia Prado’s novel-in-verse of Patagonia, translated by Howell, out now from Texas Tech University Press.

UPDATED WORKSHOP COMING SOON!

Making a Poem Memorable

What makes a poem memorable? Dave Smith says it’s “… a confident use of language which releases feeling and keeps releasing it with repeated readings.” Naomi Shihab Nye says for her it is, “Love and care for elemental details… and a way of ending that leaves a new resonance or a lit spark in the reader or listener’s mind.” We will take a close look at a variety of dazzling poems written by contemporary poets and seek to understand what makes them memorable. Then, we will practice imitation as a striving toward writing our own unforgettable poems.

Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories Cowboys Are My Weakness (1994), which was the winner of the 1993 Western States Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Waltzing the Cat (1999, reissued 2013), which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction; two novels, Contents May Have Shifted (2012); and Sight Hound (2006), all published by W.W. Norton & Co.; and three collections of autobiographical essays, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country (2019), from which Cheryl Strayed chose an essay for inclusion in the forthcoming Best American Travel Writing and another essay will be included in the forthcoming Pushcart Prize anthology, A Rough Guide to the Heart (Virago, 2001), and A Little More About Me (Norton, 1999, reissued 2013). Houston has also edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry entitled Women on Hunting: Essays, Fiction, and Poetry (Ecco Press). She is the author of a stage play called “Tracking the Pleiades”; and she has written the text for Men Before Ten A.M., a book of photographs by the French photographer Veronique Vialle.

About Deep Creek: Finding Hope in High Country, Lidia Yuknavitch reflects: “Deep Creek is a love letter to earth, animals, and the best of humanity. Pam Houston has taken our heartache and woven it back into hope. Her stories of love, loss, and a life lived in relationship to land give us good reasons not to give up on ourselves or each other. This is the book we need right now to remind us how to endure—passionately. An unstoppable heart song.”

Richard Ford selected “How to Talk to a Hunter” for the 1990 Best American Short Stories; a decade later, Houston’s “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” was John Updike’s only addition to the 1999 Best American Short Stories of the Century. Her stories have also been selected for The O. Henry Awards and The Pushcart Prize. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award. She is a regular contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and many other periodicals. Her essays and stories have been widely anthologized, and in 2012 she contributed the prologue to Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press).

Houston is a Professor of English at UC Davis, directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world. She divides her time between Davis and southwestern Colorado at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Turning the Physical World Into Story

This will be a generative prose workshop that will be about using the physical world around us to access our inner depths and draw out the best stories we have to tell. If we move through the world with all of our senses open. If we write the things that arrest our attention all the way down to the bone. I am particularly interested these days in the non-human world and how much we as humans have to learn from it. There will be in-class writing exercises and evening writing exercises, and lots of opportunities (but no pressure) to read aloud in class. Our discussions will range from elements of craft (image, metaphor, dialogue, structure, character, scene) to the importance of honest art making in the face of widespread corruption and climate collapse. Why should we sing about the dying world? Because, because it would be so much worse not to!

Bestselling author, National Book Award Winner, Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction Winner, Pushcart Prize nominee, NAACP Image Award nominee, and Carnegie Medals For Excellence Longlist nominee, Jason Mott has a BFA in Fiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction has appeared in various literary journals. Entertainment Weekly listed him as one of their 10 “New Hollywood: Next Wave” people to watch. He lives in southeastern North Carolina.

Jason is the author of two poetry collections: We Call This Thing Between Us Love and “…hide behind me…” He is the author of four novels: The Returned, The Wonder of All Things, The Crossing, and Hell of a Book.

The Returned, Jason’s debut novel, was adapted for television and aired on the ABC network under the title “Resurrection.”

Jason’s fourth novel, Hell Of A Book, released in June 2021, was a Jenna Bush Hager “Read With Jenna” Book Club pick, Carnegie Medals For Excellence in Fiction Longlist selection, a 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist selection, a 2022 Chatauqua Prize Finalist, a Joyce Carol Oates Prize Longlist selection, the 2022 Housatonic Book Award Winner, the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Prize for Fiction winner, and the winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.

Tackling the Long Form: A Guide to Making it Manageable

This workshop will focus on reducing down the overwhelming job of writing a novel-length piece of fiction. We'll talk about vetting ideas, outlining, developing a writing schedule and, perhaps most importantly, how to revise the work once you've got your first draft in your hands. The goal of this workshop is to make sure that, by the time you leave, you have techniques that will help you build your novel one day, and one step, at a time.