WRITERS IN PARADISE 2020

• Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate, as Closing Speaker
• Dani Shapiro, NYT’s best-selling memoirist, as Opening Keynote Speaker
• Gregory Pardlo, 2015 Pulitzer Prize Winner, will lead the Poetry Workshop
• Michael Koryta, NYT’s best-selling crime thriller author and WiP favorite, returns to lead a Narrative Suspense Workshop
• WiP welcomes Stephanie Elizondo Griest, award-winning nonfiction & travel journalist, to lead a Creative Nonfiction Workshop
• By popular demand, Conference Director Les Standiford, will teach a 3-day Screenwriting Workshop (Jan. 19-21)
• For novel-tacklers, Conference Founder Sterling Watson, will lead a 3-day Planning & Opening the Novel Workshop (Jan. 23-25)
• Flash Fiction makes its way to WiP 2020 with award-winning fiction guru, John Dufresne
• Ashley M. Jones, Rona Jaffe Award and Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize winning poet, will join WiP as 2020’s Emerging Artist
• WiP 2020 welcomes back beloved core faculty Ann Hood, Andre Dubus III, Laura Lippman and Stewart O’Nan
• Poets Laureate Helen Pruitt Wallace and Peter Meinke will round off 2020’s poetry collective
• Agent, Ann Rittenberg (Ann Rittenberg Lit Agency) and Executive Editor, George Gibson (Grove/Atlantic) will anchor agent/editor/publishing panels

Full manuscript guidelines for submissions will be available on our applications page via Submittable starting August 1.

• Narrative Suspense (fiction & nonfiction) with Michael Koryta

  The workshop is open to both fiction and nonfiction writers who are interested in improving their storytelling and broadening their range of techniques. Focus will be on how the handling of core issues such as character, plot, tension, and emotion are imperative regardless of the form, and demonstrating that fiction writers can benefit from seeing how journalistic techniques can add depth and realism to their own work, while nonfiction writers can benefit from learning how to build scenes, create suspense, and use dialogue.

• Crime & Suspense (fiction/novel only) with Laura Lippman

  Are there really “rules” for crime-writing? Only one: Keep the reader turning pages. Students interested in crime fiction will learn about the specialized challenges of pacing their stories, playing fair with readers and why less is often more when it comes to mysteries.

• Novel with Stewart O’Nan

  The class will be primarily a workshop.  Students will read one another’s novel excerpts, interrogating character, action, language, ideas and setting with an eye toward revision.

• Flash Fiction with John Dufresne

  We’ll demystify the writing process, which may once have seemed intimidating. Writing is work; it’s a physical, if sedentary, activity. Writers write even when the writing’s not going well—especially when the writing’s not going well. We’ll discuss the craft of storytelling, explore the elements and techniques of short fiction, and examine the qualities that make for vivid and compelling flash fiction. You’ll read exemplary short-short stories that will inspire, provoke, and serve as models for your own stories. You’ll write up a storm following the prompts and exercises. You’ll play with found forms and invent your own. You’ll get writing and you’ll keep writing. You’ll learn that your characters, your settings, and your themes are out there in the world. You’ll learn to look, to listen, to pay attention, and to notice, the fiction writer’s first job. The act of writing itself, you’ll realize, the act of making up people you come to care about, the fun of playing with words and with worlds, is its own reward. And the more you write the more you’ll want to write.

• Short Story with Andre Dubus III

  If I teach nothing in my writing classes, I teach this: do not outline your novel or novella or short story or essay. Do not think out the plot, the narrative arc, the protagonist’s journey, whatever you want to call it. Instead, try to find the story through an honest excavation of the characters’ total experience of the situation in which they find themselves. Do that, and I promise the story will begin to write itself, with little need for the controlling hand of the godly, intelligent, well-read, and ambitious author. But how, precisely, does one go about this “excavation”?  And how, technically speaking, can we ignite a story into“writing itself”?  Come to this workshop, and I will seek to demystify those writerly tools and skills that time and time again, if they are sharp enough, and if the writer can summon enough daily faith and nerve, can penetrate the mystery of story itself.

• Memoir with Ann Hood

  In this workshop we will read and discuss published essays every day to examine what makes a good piece of memoir writing. We will then critique pages from your own memoirs and essays with an eye toward revision.

• Creative Nonfiction with Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  Elevating Life into Art — Memoirs. Travelogues. Lyric Essays. Literary Journalism. No matter whether you are pursuing internal excavations or external investigations, this workshop will empower you to take risks both in content and in form. Questions we’ll be asking: Where is the essay’s pulse? How can it beat louder—or deeper? Should the story follow a classic rise-fall arc or be a fractured narrative with a scrambled chronology? In addition to critiquing each other’s manuscripts, we will strategize on sustainable ways of fueling our practice as we strive toward our literary goals. So join us. Together, we will be pilgrims wandering the wilderness of memory. Arbiters of the dynamic Fourth Genre. We will write words that matter.

• Poetry with Gregory Pardlo

  In this craft-based workshop, we will begin with a high-altitude view to help analyze the poet’s overall writing practice. Using both generative homework exercises and representative samples of previous poems, we will look for trends, tendencies and idiosyncrasies to identify distinctive characteristics of the poet’s voice. This is not necessarily a workshop for “fixing” individual poems or acquiring tricks of the trade. We will use our grasp of the poet’s unique style to devise a path toward building on her strengths and expanding her practice of constructing poems in general.

• Special 3-Day Structure Workshop with Sterling Watson
  (Jan. 19-21 | limited to 6 participants)

  Planning & Opening the Novel
  We will cover as many matters of craft and art (character, theme, point-of-view, language, structure, and setting) as we can fit into the time allotted with especial attention to problems and possibilities that arise from our reading of the students’ manuscripts.  Using the manuscripts as prompts, I will suspend discussion occasionally for mini-lectures and demonstrations of key ideas.  This class will help participants fashion a better synopsis and sample chapter to send out to agents.

• Special 3-Day Screenwriting Workshop with Les Standiford
  (Jan. 23-25 | limited to 6 participants)

  The workshop will focus on the refinement of a feature film synopsis and its first act (or a complete dramatic short of up to 25 pp), with attention to the particular nature of screenwriting language and form, dramatic structure, scene, character and dialogue.  Applicants will submit a synopsis of no more than 500 words along with a first act of no more than 25 pp.  Each day’s session will consist of an hour’s discussion of principles, followed by an hour’s discussion of each of two submissions, including the cogency of the synopsis and the efficacy of the opening act.

Our applications period runs from August 1 to November 1 ( 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time).   Apply starting August 1 on Submittable.

For more information on workshop selection, deadlines and conference costs, click on Application.