A photo of Matt Bell. Description: He is white, with short salt-and-pepper hair. He's wearing a plaid button-up.

ASU Worldbuilding Initiative Workshop with Matt Bell: Imagining New Ways of Making Community


On Monday, March 27, at 4:00 PM AZ time, Matt Bell will be leading a worldbuilding workshop that examines “democracy, consensus, and communal problem solving” in imagined worlds. These workshops invite audience members to “engage in worldbuilding… inventing new ways of imagining and interacting with the world around us.”

The ASU Worldbuilding Initiative is hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics.

Matt Bell is the author of numerous books, the two most recent being Appleseed (a New York Times notable book) and Refuse to Be Done, a craft guide on writing, rewriting, and revision. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. Read more about him on his website.

This event will take place online. It’s free and open to the public, although it does require registration. Go here to learn more.

Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference

Early registration extended through to February!

Join the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing in their annual Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference! Here is their message about the event:

“The past year has been difficult, to say the least. As a center, we want to make it as easy and accessible as possible for you to be creative while continuing to stay healthy and safe. And thanks to the generosity of the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, it’s our pleasure to announce that we’re extending the early registration rate for this year’s Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference through February.”

” The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference is February 18 – 20, 2021 on Zoom. Advance your craft, meet other writers, and produce new work with your choice of over 60 sessions in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, memoir, fantasy, romance, science fiction, screenwriting, publishing, and more. Writers of all experience levels and backgrounds are welcome. Advanced workshops and pitch sessions with agents and editors are available, too. This year’s keynotes are Linda Hogan and Beverly Jenkins. Other faculty include Mahogany L. Browne, Matt Bell, Alan Dean Foster, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Cynthia Pelayo, Evan Winter, and Erika T. Wurth. Early registration is only $225. Meet our faculty, view the schedule, and learn more today here.

If the conference still feels like it’s beyond your reach or you just don’t feel like it’s the right time for you, we’ve got additional discounts for senior citizens, students, veterans, ASU affiliates, and anyone experiencing a financial hardship, plus free keynotes, public workshops, single-day passes, and other ways to engage outside of the full registration (not to mention smaller classes and workshops with the Piper Writers Studio). There are always plenty of free talks and readings, too.”

To learn more about the Virgina G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, click here.

Early Registration for The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference

Early Registration Ends December 31st!

Join the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing in their annual Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference! Here is their message about the event:

“With COVID cases rising across the country, we’re moving this year’s conference from our house to yours. The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference is February 18 – 20, 2021 on Zoom. Advance your craft, meet other writers, and produce new work with your choice of over 60 sessions in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, memoir, fantasy, romance, science fiction, screenwriting, publishing, and more. Writers of all experience levels and backgrounds are welcome. Advanced workshops and pitch sessions with agents and editors are available, too. This year’s keynotes are Linda Hogan and Beverly Jenkins. Other faculty include Mahogany L. Browne, Matt Bell, Alan Dean Foster, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Cynthia Pelayo, Evan Winter, and Erika T. Wurth. Early registration is only $225 before December 31. Meet our faculty, view the schedule, and learn more today here.”

To learn more about the Virgina G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, click here.

#ArtLitPhx: Engagement in Poetry

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2019 – 6:00PM TO 8:00PM

What keeps us engaged? What drives us down the page to the end of the poem? We will explore “speed” or “momentum,” by analyzing poems that keep our attention. But also, we will explore how as writers, we can be engaged with our surrounding world, to the point that we must do something about it. We will look at poems that have been a “call to arms” of sorts. To inspire our creativity, we will look at the current headlines to draw poetry from the media. This workshop will be half generative and half revision.

COST: 

$60

PEOPLE: 

Javier Zamora

Location:

University of Arizona: Poetry Center, Room 205, 1508 E. Helen St., Tucson

For more information, click here.

Contributor Update, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo: ‘When We Were Seeds’

Join us in congratulating SR poetry interview contributor Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. Xochitl was invited as a guest instructor to teach a class on poetry for current times at Writing Workshops Los Angeles. The course takes place from July 22 to September 16 and allows students to read, analyze and discuss contemporary poetry from women, people of color, and queer poets “cultivating their own poems of resistance, persistence, and celebration.”

To read more about Xochitl and her upcoming workshop, click here. You can find her interview from Issue 19 here.

Congratulations, Xochitl!

Guest Post, Neema Avashia: Finding the Right Angle

I wrote about my cousin’s death in at least six different essays before I came to write “Finding the Holy in an Unholy Coconut.” I started writing very shortly after his death, in the days I spent with my aunt and uncle trying to help them sort through all of the logistical complexities that accompany unexpected death. It’s not enough to grieve, in America. We also need you to contact Social Security, close out credit cards, and notify banks as quickly as possible. 

My first writing was accounting—asking questions about who knew what and when. It was very much the “bleeding into the typewriter” that T Kira Madden critiques in “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy” and that Penny Zang referenced in her post on the SR Blog last month. 

From extremely raw accounting, I moved to narrating, and trying to patch together a complete story even though so many of the details were missing. And, once again, it took very little time to realize that this stage of writing was strictly for me. 

The only person who read these early essays was my mentor, Jane McCafferty, whose gentle response, effectively, was to say, “I love you. And no one else should read this.” Jane’s point at the time was that there is a difference between writing as a way of grieving and writing about grief for an audience. I would find my way to the second eventually, but it was going to take time. Still, she urged me to keep writing the story as many times as I needed to.

It took three years to move from accounting, to narrating, to actually crafting. In Geeta Kothari’s creative non-fiction workshop at the Kenyon Review last summer, she asked us to use description of a concrete object to enter into an essay. I had brought a tiny silver bell with me that usually sits on the altar in my pantry, and this bell somehow allowed me to write about my cousin’s death, and my grieving, through the lens of faith and ritual. The next day, she asked us to visit the art gallery on campus at Kenyon, to choose a piece of art that resonated for us, and to use that piece of art to enter the story a second way. And again, I found the themes in my story shifting.

By entering the story from these different angles, I found myself able to move further and further from the specific details surrounding my cousin’s death, and closer to a story about how faith and ritual can both be essential to mourning—and also fall completely short. 

After Kenyon, I went to Los Angeles as part of a West Coast road trip. I attempted to submerge my unholy coconut. And last fall in a writing class at Grub Street, a writing organization here in Boston, I found my way into the essay published at Superstition Review this spring, a full four years after my cousin died. The coconut allowed me to enter our story from a different angle, one that enabled me to write an essay that was no longer just for me.

Ultimately, the coconut at the center of this story serves three functions in the piece: It serves as the concrete vessel for the character Neema’s grief. For the writer, Neema, it serves as a symbol that makes the abstractions of grief less abstract—something that can be described, can be held, and can eventually be cast away. And, for the readers, the coconut is the central image that they can carry with them through the entire piece. It gets introduced in the first paragraph, appears even when the story shifts in place and time, and is still sitting on the shoreline at the very end of the story. 

It took four years, six vastly different versions of the story in structure, content, and style, and four different entry points to arrive at this published essay. I try to remind myself of these facts when I am stuck in the middle of a draft and can’t seem to find a way forward. If the story is worth telling, I say to myself, then my task is to find the right angle from which to tell it. 

Most importantly, I tell myself to be patient. I may have not yet lived, or seen, the angle from which the story is best told. 

#ArtLitPhx: Writing Workshop with Stella Pope Duarte

Workshop Title: Three Easy Steps to Writing a Dynamic Short Story

The American Book Award-winning author of If I Die in Juárez hosts a two-part writing workshop for writers of all levels. 

From the host: “Once upon a time, deep in a great dark forest, lived three bears. The beginning of one of the most beloved fairy tales on earth is about three bears and a little girl named Goldilocks. Stories that become part of our universal experience reveal the human heart. This workshop will zero in on what it means to write a dynamic short story.”

WORKSHOP DETAILS

  • Cost: $40, for two sessions: July 16 and 23.
  • Register below or directly on Eventbrite.
  • Refunds will not be issued within one day of the event.

PARKING / LIGHT RAIL

  • Don’t want to drive? Take the Light Rail! It lets off at the Central Avenue/Camelback Park-and-Ride, which has hundreds of free parking spaces across the street from Changing Hands.

ABOUT THE HOST
Stella Pope Duarte is described by Jacquelyn Mitchard as a “magical weaver with a sure hand and a pure heart,” and praised by Ursula K. Leguin as an author who “will enlarge humanity.” Her works explore the human heart, revealing both dark and light. Duarte has won honors and awards nationwide, including a 2009 American Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize nomination, the Southwest Book of the Year Award, and a nomination to Oprah’s Book Sense list. She is a descendant of Irish and Mexican American parents, and was born and raised in the Sonorita Barrio in South Phoenix. Inspired to write by a prophetic dream of her father, she believes that writing, like love, begins within, or it doesn’t start at all.

EVENT INFORMATION

Location: Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W. Camelback Rd., Phoenix 

Date: Tuesdays, July 16 and 23

Time: 6–8:30 p.m.

Cost: $40

For more information about the event, click here.

#ArtLitPhx: Writing the Contemporary Mystery or Thriller

Attend a workshop from current Writer in Residence mystery author Betty Webb to learn new skills in the craft of writing and publishing at the Tempe Public Library.

Library Writer-in-Residence

The Writers-in-Residence program promotes writing in communities by connecting local, professional authors to serve as Writers-in-Residence at local libraries. Writers-in-Residence spend time at the library during their residency composing new works and providing education for community members. 

Get expert advice on your writing by registering for a one-on-one consultation, or attend a writing workshop to learn new skills in the craft of writing and publishing. All experience levels are welcome.

2019 Writer-in-Residence: Betty Webb, May – July 2019

Betty Webb is the author of the nationally best-selling Lena Jones mystery series (Desert Vengeance, Desert Rage, Desert Wives, Desert Noir, Desert Wind, etc.) and the humorous Gunn Zoo mysteries (The Otter of Death, The Llama of Death, The Puffin of Death, etc.). Before beginning to write full time, Betty worked as a journalist, interviewing everyone from U.S. presidents, astronauts who walked on the moon, Nobel Prize-winners, and polygamy runaways. She has taught creative writing classes and workshops at Arizona State University and Phoenix College, has been a nationally-syndicated literary critic for 30 years, and is currently reviewing for Mystery Scene Magazine. In addition to other organizations, Betty is a member of the National Federation of Press Women, Mystery Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime.

Event Information

Location: Tempe Public Library, 3500 S. Rural Rd.

Date: June 29

Time: 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.

For more information, click here.

#ArtLitPhx: Katrina Shawver Writing Workshop

Author Katrina Shawver (Henry: A Polish Swimmer’s True Story of Friendship from Auschwitz to America) leads a workshop that covers tools and techniques that apply to all genres to help make your writing easier, polished, and tight.

Take home lists of key resources every writer should have and know. Practice new ideas for faster writing and using active versus passive tense and specificity to “show not tell.” Come prepared to write!

Bring pen/pencil and a notebook for Shawver’s “Expand Your Writer’s Toolbox” presentation.

WORKSHOP DETAILS

  • Cost: $25 per person.
  • Register below.

ABOUT THE HOST
KATRINA SHAWVER is an experienced writer, blogger, speaker, and author of the award-winning biography HENRY: A Polish Swimmer’s True Story of Friendship from Auschwitz to America. She holds a BA from the University of Arizona in English/Political Science and began her writing career by penning columns for the Arizona Republic for more than eleven years. She spent fifteen years researching WWII, Poland, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust to write the story of Henry Zguda, someone she met strictly by chance while writing for the newspaper. HENRY has earned high praise and won awards in the US, UK, and Italy, including the 2018 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award – Silver for Biography.

EVENT INFORMATION

Location: Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W. Camelback Rd., Phoenix 

Date: Monday, June 24

Time: 6:30–8:30 p.m.

For more information about the event, click here.