Donna Vorreyer
Silly Love Songs: Poems that Celebrate What We Love
In solidarity with the old Wings song where Paul McCartney sings "You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs...I look around me and I see it isn't so...oh, no," we will take a look at love poems from Shakespearean sonnets to contemporary pop songs and discuss what makes them work. Exploring pop music, sonnets, odes and aubades, we will write love poems without descending into greeting card sentiments, poems that can be intensely personal and yet still be poems that appeal to a wider audience. Using music, visuals, and discussion, we will use several prompts to write love poems not just to the beloved, but to the world, our strange obsessions, food, film and television, and most importantly, to ourselves.
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Donna is the author of three full-length poetry collections: To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Baltimore Review, and Booth. Her visual art has been featured in North American Review, Waxwing, About Place, Pithead Chapel, and other journals. Donna currently lives and creates in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.
Greg Stolze
Finding Your Creation Mode, or The Plodding Plotter
In this class, we examine two modes of creativity. One is the extremely structured “conscious” method focused on foresight, planning, outlining and structure. The other is the freeform “unconscious” method of cultivating inspiration. The instructor’s intent with this is to dispel the myth that either is the only proper way to write successfully. Instead, through discussion, experiment, explanation and play, I hope to help each student discover the blend or approach that’s individually functional for them.
Greg asks that students familiarize themselves in advance with these readings:
The Philosophy of Composition(https://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm) by Edgar Allan Poe.
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
Kublai Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Greg has been creating games and fiction since 1996 and is a true working writer. An early crowdfunding pioneer, he's got a web site loaded with fiction at gregstolze.com/fiction-library/ as well as a webcomic and games. He has a strong following through Patreon. In addition, he's been known to do podcasts, both fiction and non-, and occasionally create some tangible art as well. Most recently, he's written God Cancer (2020) and I Dream of Insomnia (2023).
Ananda Lima
Seeing Things and Keeping It Real
How do you make your writing feel authentic and real? Together we explore ways to make writing come alive on the page, whether working on a realistic scene (e.g., your character leaves a sunny apartment the morning after a break-up) or a fantastic one (they encounter a ghost while swimming in a silvery lake under the moonlight). We will look closely at work by writers in a variety of styles and traditions (writers like Elena Ferrante, Gabriel Bump, Samanta Schweblin, Marie-Helene Bertino, Marlon James, Ling Ma, Jose Saramago, Kevin Wilson, and more) and consider how voice, style, carefully selected sensory detail and other elements of craft come together to create an immersive experience for the reader. Close readings and craft discussions will be interspersed with generative exercises where we can put what we learn into practice.
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Ananda is a poet, translator, and fiction writer, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (forthcoming with Tor in 2024) and the poetry collection Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers, Witness, and elsewhere. She was awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, was a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Chicago Review of Books Chirby Awards. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her voice was praised as “singular and wise” (Cathy Park Hong), and Craft was described as “an absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic” (Kelly Link). She was born in Brasília, Brazil, and now lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Photo Credit Beowulf Sheehan.
Our Friday Night Keynote Speaker: Meg Cass
Why I Write...
Meg Cass (they/them) is a queer, trans fiction writer, teacher, and editor based in St. Louis, MO. ActivAmerica, their first book, was selected by Claire Vaye Watkins for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and was published in 2017. Recent stories have appeared in Ecotone, Foglifter, Black Warrior Review, and manywor(l)ds. Their flash fiction has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 and the SmokeLong Quarterly Best of the First 10 Years Anthology. In 2021 they co-founded Changeling, a queer reading series. They are also a co-founder of the Craft Chaps series published by Sundress Publications. They teach creative writing, queer theory, and publishing at the University of Illinois Springfield. Meg holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette.
Meg will be reading from their work and speaking about why they write. There will be a discussion with Kristin LaTour after and Q&A from the participants.
Kristin LaTour
Sunday Morning Generative
Kristin will lead a large group generative writing activity on Sunday. This is more fiction-based, but playful and fun for any writer, including poets! We'll each develop a character based on a unique name we're given, then participants get together in small groups. Each group gets a mystery setting, and from there, the group develops a plot for their characters.
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Kristin is the founder of the Aurora Writers Workshop, and has lived in Aurora since 2004. Her poetry has been published in several chapbooks, anotholigies, and in journals such as the Massachusetts Review, Tinderbox, Museum of Americana, Escape into Life, and others. Her full-length collection of poems, What Will Keep Us Alive, came out with Sundress Publications in 2015. She teaches writing at Joliet Jr. College and gives writing workshops at libraries in the far-western Chicago suburbs. She is currently working on a novel set during the 1800s whaling industry in New Bedford, and a collection of poems centered around Gen X.
