THE ESSENCE OF POETRY
With Ellen Kort

This workshop is for those who are in love with the playfulness, the mystery, and the humble intensity of poetry, and the role it plays in our lives. Using a variety of exercises and prompts, we’ll explore ways of bridging the outside world with our own personal, complicated, glorious human need for poetry. We’ll commit ourselves to the process and discussion of poetry as a way of accessing and refining our personal style, inner voice, what makes a good poem, and the delicate blend of truth and fiction in poetry. Come with a notebook and favorite pen and an expansive heart. Come with a willingness to shed all obligations for the day, to experience the power of playing with words, and the privilege of breathing in the light of poetry.



Ellen Kort is Wisconsin's first poet laureate. She is the author of eleven books, including seven books of poetry. Her most recent book is Wisconsin Women and Their Quilts: Stories in the Stitches. In addition to awards that include the Pablo Neruda Literary Prize for Poetry, her work has achieved some unusual prominence. Her poems have been featured in a wide variety of anthologies, and architecturally incorporated in downtown Milwaukee's Midwest Express Center, the Green Bay Botanical Garden, and the Fox River Mall in Appleton, Wisconsin. Kort's writing has also been performed by the New York City Dance Theater, and recorded on audio cassette by Ellen Burstyn, Ed Asner, CCH Pounder, and Alfre Woodard, as well as included in the 1997 "Re-Membering" exhibit in Wichita Falls and the 1998 "Women and Their Work" exhibit in Austin. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and at the Renaissance Fine Arts Charter School in Appleton, and carries a bucket of glow-in-the-dark chalk in her car so she can write poems on city sidewalks.

THE THREE-IN-ONE WRITING WORKSHOP - Free yourself to write with passion, meaning and purpose!
With John Lehman

In this workshop, participants at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels will find out what they need to know now to become the writers they want to be. Most people who write do well in one or two of the three areas critical for success: 1) written execution, 2) recognition & publication, 3) personal gratification. But substantial results depend upon accomplishing all three. This workshop examines the hidden dynamics of fiction and creative nonfiction. It explores how dramatic scenes hook attention and satisfy a reader, and it helps participants unblock positive channels through which more meaningful material will flow. Specific techniques, such as capturing memorable descriptive detail and making dialogue come alive on the page, make sense when they fit a scene's well defined purpose and the clear direction of an article or book.

JOHN LEHMAN is the founder and original publisher of Rosebud, poetry editor of Wisconsin People and Ideas as well as managing partner of Zelda Wilde Publishing and publisher of the new web-zine, www.Cool Plums.com. He has presented writing seminars in dozens of cities throughout the country, including New York, Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Cape Cod, San Diego and St. Louis. His latest poetry books, Dogs Dream of Running and Shorts, as well as his nonfiction, Everything Is Changing and his biographical book on Wisconsin's Lorine Niedecker, America's Greatest Unknown Poet, are available at Borders and Barnes and Nobles as well as from Amazon.com. In 2001, he was given the Council for Wisconsin Writers top award for outstanding encouragement of Wisconsin writers. In 2004, he was selected as one of two Wisconsin "Commended Poets." He has recently presented his one-man play, A Brief History of My Tattoo, at the Cornerstone Theatre in downtown Milwaukee. His second production, The Jane Test, was given a dramatic reading at The Overture Center in downtown Madison in 2006. John is a graduate of Notre Dame University and has a Masters Degree from the University of Michigan. He grew up in Chicago, but now lives with his wife, Talia Schorr, and their four dogs and multiple cats in Rockdale, the smallest incorporated village in Wisconsin.

COMMERCIAL FICTION PRIMER
With Shari Anton

It's all about Story. To succeed in the competitive arena of mass-market, your story must meet or exceed your readers' expectations. Some of those expectations include captivating beginnings, compelling characters, intriguing plots, and satisfying endings. During this workshop, using your own novel, we'll explore several methods to ensure your story has the depth and zip it requires to attract an editor's attention. Handouts and a list of books for further study will be provided. Class participants may also submit a five-page, double-spaced synopsis for critique.

SHARI ANTON’s resume lists an impressive string of job titles, from personnel clerk to administrative assistant. When she took a creative writing class and found she possessed some talent for writing fiction, she dared to dream of a career that allowed her to work at home, shun panty hose and take unlimited coffee breaks. Her dream came true with the publication of her first book in 1997. Her thirteenth historical romance, Magic in His Kiss, will be released by Grand Central Publishing in August 2008. To learn more about Shari, visit her web site at http://www.sharianton.com.

FROM POEM TO SEQUENCE: Writing into chapbooks and books.
With Robin Chapman

In this workshop we’ll work from the poem(s) you bring to create new work: journeys, portraits, stories, meditations, cinema, sonatas, rengas, odes (or your choice!) For poem starts, bring 1 to 5 poems (or, if you prefer, 5 images or objects). We’ll consider the many ways that one poem can lead to another, write the first drafts of new ones, and make a list of new poems to focus on at home. Bring your poem starts, images, or objects; your notebook; and a pen.

ROBIN CHAPMAN is author of ten collections of poetry, including the two Posner Award-winning books The Way In (Tebot Bach) and Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (with J.C. Sprott’s fractal images; World Scientific); the chapbook The Only Everglades in the World; and the recent collections The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead (WordTech Editions) and Smoke and Strong Whiskey (WordTech Editions). She co-edited with J. Strasser the anthology On Retirement: 75 Poems (University of Iowa Press). Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, Poetry, and OnEarth, among many other journals; and the anthologies The First Yes and Poetry Comes Up Where It Can, among others. She is co-organizer of the Epidemic Peace Imagery exhibit and has collaborated with composers, painters, and textile artists in producing work; she posts her watercolors, with fellow and sister poets’ published poems, on her blog, Robin Chapman’s Poem a Day Blog; and she teaches poetry workshops at The Clearing. A professor emerita of communicative disorders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she lives in Madison with her husband, Will Zarwell.

ILLUMINATING THE WALLS OF MYSTERY
With Susan Elbe

T. S. Eliot said, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." And Major Jackson said, "…one of poetry's chief aims is to illumine the walls of mystery, the inscrutable, the unsayable." In this workshop, we'll challenge the ways we perceive in order to discover new or unexpected meanings in our writing. This can be done in a variety of ways, including:
• changing the context of a familiar experience,
• using imagery and metaphor in new ways,
• finding not only the appropriate word but the startling word, and
• taking risks with form and content.
Together, we'll generate new work, exploring ways to alter the language and structure of our ordinary experiences to make them new.
Bring your notebook and pen, an image (photo, painting, drawing), a favorite object, and a draft of one of your own poems or short piece of writing (500 words or less) that you feel isn't working. This workshop is designed for poets, as well as for prose writers, who want to stretch their boundaries.

SUSAN ELBE is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press, 2007) and Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including Ascent, Blackbird, Calyx, MARGIE, The North American Review, Salt Hill, Wisconsin People & Ideas, A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women's Poetry (Calyx Books), On Retirement: 75 Poems (University of Iowa Press), Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses (Yarroway Mountain Press), and Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath (Backwaters Press). She is the recipient of the 2006 Lorine Niedecker Award, the inaugural Calyx Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, a Rowland Foundation residency to the Vermont Studio Center, and two residencies to Edenfred in Madison, Wisconsin. Susan currently serves on the Council for Wisconsin Writers Board and the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. She works as a Webmaster in Madison, Wisconsin.

THE STRANGER AND THE TOWN: Using Fables and Tales in Short Narratives
With Martha Bergland

Revisiting some of the oldest forms of storytelling can revitalize our short stories, novel chapters, and narrative poems. In this workshop we will read and write fables and tales. Most writers find that these forms and the exercises we use will easily set us forth into new imagined territories. This is also a good introduction to the elements of fiction for those who have always wanted to try to write imagined stories.

MARTHA BERGLAND’S first novel, A Farm Under A Lake, was published 1989 by Graywolf Press, and by Vintage Books, Bloomsbury in England, Bonniers in Sweden, and Krueger in Germany. Graywolf published her novel Idle Curiosity in 1997. Bergland’s essays, poems, and short stories are widely published in literary journals. Her short story—“An Embarrassment of Ordinary Riches”—was awarded a Pushcart Prize and was included in Pushcart’s anthology, Love Stories for the Rest of Us. Essays, including “Girl Soldier,” have appeared recently in Milwaukee Magazine. Bergland taught English for twenty years at Milwaukee Area Technical College and currently teaches fiction writing workshops for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Spring Writers Festival, the Jewish Community Center, and others