Creative Writing Celebration - March 28-29, 2008
Presenters and Workshops

Richard Shelton, retired Regents’ Professor of English at the University of Arizona, is the author of 12 books of poetry and three books of nonfiction, including Going Back to Bisbee. His works have been published in more than 200 journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and The Antioch Review. In 1974, Shelton began offering creative writing workshops at the Arizona State Prison and has continued to do so since that time. The prose and poetry of several of his students, among them Paul Ashley, Greg Forker, Ken Lamberton, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, have been widely published. Shelton is currently directing writers’ workshops at the Arizona State Prison Complex near Tucson. His book Crossing the Prison Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer chronicles his experiences with the men and women he considered “monsters” before becoming their teacher.

WORKSHOP - The Real Story: Writing Creative Nonfiction
Shelton will discuss his own writing process and then engage participants in creative and challenging writing exercises that they will use to generate ideas for their own writing. They will write from those ideas and share what they’ve written with the group, offering feedback on each other’s work.

KEYNOTE ADDRESS - Crossing the Yard: 30 Years as a Prison Volunteer
In 1970, Charles Schmid, a notorious killer, dubbed the “Pied Piper of Tucson,” wrote from death row asking Richard Shelton to review his poetry. Shelton says, “My immediate reaction was typical...but I am ashamed of it now. Here was my chance, I thought, to read the poetry of a monster.” Shelton wrote back, agreeing to critique Schmid’s poetry. Thus began his forays into the Tucson prison system to teach creative writing to inmates. Using excerpts from Crossing the Yard and Walking Rain Review, a collection of works written by inmates, Shelton will discuss the transformative power of writing.

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Lisa Bowden, a publisher since 1993, holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy from the University of Arizona. A co-founder of Kore Press, a Tucson publishing house, Bowden is dedicated to Kore’s mission “to publish and distribute excellent works of literary and artistic value by a diversity of women, those traditionally underrepresented in the cultural mainstream; to promote those voices; and to educate young people about bookmaking, printing, the literary arts as social activism, and publishing.” Kore Press has published the works of internationally esteemed writers Adrienne Rich, Eavan Boland, Tedi Lopez Mills, Nancy Mairs, Ani DiFranco, Ofelia Zepeda, and Barbara Cully, as well as those of emerging writers Jennifer Barber, Deborah Fries, Elline Lipkin, and Sandra Lim. Bowden also works as an editor; in 2006, Kore released “Autumnal: A Collection of Contemporary Elegies,” an audio CD edited by Bowden.

WORKSHOP: Publishing - From Concept to Book
From a small press perspective, Bowden will discuss the publishing process from concept, to book, to reader. She will address such questions as: How are writers getting published? What resources are available to writers? How do writers find a publisher? What is the publisher’s role? What is the writer’s role? She will also explore how the editorial process works (including contests).

Allen Woodman has published six books of fiction, including Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a collection of humorous stories, and The Cows Are Going to Paris, a children's picture book (selected for Doubleday and Literary Guild book clubs). He has published short stories in magazines and anthologies, including Flash Fiction, Micro Fiction, Sudden Fiction Continued, Mirabella, the Washington Post Magazine, and Story. He is the chair of the English Department and directs the Creative Writing Program at Northern Arizona University.

WORKSHOP: The Joy of Writing the World's Shortest Story
Allen Woodman has written and published scores of short-short stories for children and adults. In this presentation/workshop, writers will discover everything they need to know about writing their own short-short stories, turning their anecdotes and seeds of memory into brilliant miniatures.

Rebecca Seiferle, a resident of Tucson, has regularly reviewed for The Harvard Review and Calyx and is the founding editor of the online international poetry journal, The Drunken Boat. Seiferle holds a bachelor's degree from the University of the State of New York, with a major in English and History and a minor in Art History. In 1989, she received her Master of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. She taught English and creative writing at San Juan College, the Provincetown Fine Arts Center, Key West Literary Seminar, Port Townsend Writer's Conference, Gemini Ink, and the Stonecoast MFA program. Most recently, she was Jacob Ziskind poet-in-residence at Brandeis University. Rebecca Seiferle has written four poetry collections, Wild Tongue, recently published by Copper Canyon; Bitters, winner of the Western States Book Award and a Pushcart prize; and The Music We Dance To, winner of the 1998 Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Ripped-Out Seam, won the Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Writers' Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and the National Writers' Union Prize, and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poetry, essays, and translations of several Cuban authors have appeared in more than 25 anthologies, and her poetry has been translated into several languages. In 2004, she was awarded a Poetry Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

WORKSHOP: The Poem's Intention
Often a poet may begin a poem with a particular intent of subject matter or approach only to find that the poem has a will of its own. Disruptive tones, subject matter, and metaphors will interrupt and be resistant to later editing. These intrusions, rather than problems, are often opportunities to reach a new level of poetic utterance, to express a wilder, more unique sensibility, or to express what has been kept at the margins of being. We will explore how to listen in order to hear the poem's intention, how to identify and follow its wildness into new levels of poetic intensity.

Carey Alstadt holds a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing from Taylor University and a Master of Arts in Psychology from Trinity International University. He has been an actor, editor, gorilla (he’s not kidding), a marketing research director, therapist, and waiter. Alstadt, who has a knack for developing wonderfully engaging stories, attributes his talent in part to his graduate training and work experience as a clinical psychotherapist, where delving deep into human motivation and emotion was a normal routine. While living in Los Angeles, he was an intern for television sitcoms Everybody Loves Raymond and Becker. First place winner in the television category of the Palm Springs 2001 Writing Contest, Alstadt has written 15 television scripts: eight specs, four family sitcoms, two pilots, and one drama.

WORKSHOP: Writing for TV Sitcom and Drama
Using a very interactive format, Alstadt will give participants the true feel of sharing in the process of developing a TV story, aligning the beats, outlining the acts, and writing for characters, just the way a show’s producers do week in and week out for television serial comedies and dramas. He will discuss a number of tips, rules, and strategies for how to write a dynamite Hollywood-ready spec script.

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