Strikethrough Workshop
Strikethrough is a four-day (May 25-28, 2020) virtual creative writing workshop for new writers. An array of forms and genres will gather in an online community for learning, encouragement, critique, and inspiration. This conference is brought to you by Glass Mountain Magazine and is presented this year as an alternative to our usual face-to-face May conference, Boldface. Registration is currently closed.
Small workshops (up to 8 participants and a graduate student workshop leader from the renowned Creative Writing Program at University of Houston) will be conducted using Zoom, Vimeo, and Slack technologies, and will include standard workshops plus craft talks and manuscript consultations over four days, from May 25-28, 2020.
Fiction, nonfiction and poetry workshops (as well as mixed genre workshops) give valuable feedback on your creative work and provide you a chance to hone your critiquing skills. Each participant chooses from a menu of genres and subjects. During the conference, workshops meet twice daily on Zoom. In addition, each day a featured writer presents a recorded craft talk and does a live Q&A session on Zoom.
Schedule
The full schedule can be viewed here.
*The Featured Writer Craft Talks will be available on Vimeo at the start of the conference, for which you will be sent a password for viewing.
Featured Writers and Craft Talks
Dialogue Doesn’t Have to Hurt
It only has to be perfect. This is a rapid walkthrough of how to get in the general area of that, going through punctuation, different forms, best and worst practices, complete with examples and chock full of value statements presented as ironclad rules.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen and a half novels, six story collections, a couple of novellas, and a couple of one-shot comic books. Most recent are Mapping the Interior and My Hero. Next are The Only Good Indians (Saga) and Night of the Mannequins (Tor.com). Stephen lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado.
Queerer than Fiction: Writing with Humor and Heart
Samantha Allen is the author of Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States and Love & Estrogen. She is a GLAAD Award-winning journalist with bylines in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, CNN, and more.
“Stop! Who goes there?”: Questions and Commands in Poetry
This craft talk will focus on how questions and commands in poems can be essential tools for dynamically and efficiently conveying vital information, confronting power, and meditating upon the nature of truth. We’ll look at some compelling poetic examples of question and command usage as models, and conclude with a few exercises that will allow us to explore the elastic, curious nature of these devices.
Nicky Beer is the author of The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House, both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency from the MacDowell Colony. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she also edits poetry for the journal Copper Nickel.
Getting Your Sentences to Feel Like What They’re Describing
Sentence shares the same etymological roots as sentiment, as sentient, as sensual. From the Latin sentire—to “perceive, feel, know.” Physically and emotionally. A teacher told me that as a writer you have a choice to write a sentence that describes a drowning, or to write a sentence that feels like drowning. How do you get your writing to cling to readers’ nervous systems? Can you make a reader feel like they want to vomit by using these phonemes repeatedly: /g/ /k/ /t/? We’ll cover the basics of a few strategies that will help our sentences feel like what they’re describing.
Steven Dunn is the author of two novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press: Potted Meat (2016) and water & power (2018), and the chapbook Our Migrations. He was shortlisted for Granta Magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists, and a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. Dunn was born and raised in West Virginia, and after 10 years in the Navy, he earned a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver, and now teaches at Regis University’s Mile High MFA.Workshops
POETRY
Queer Poetics
In this workshop, participants will examine and contribute to the tradition of queer poetry. We will read poems—both canonical and contemporary—by a wide array of self-identifying LGBTQ+ poets; we will workshop poems using a nonhierarchical model; and we will look at the ways in which queer poetry sets itself apart from “traditional” or mainstream heterosexist poetic traditions, through form, content, and language itself.
Despy Boutris has writing published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Palette Poetry, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston and serves as an Assistant Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast.
Pop Culture and Persona: Poem as Narrative Artifact
This workshop will explore the persona poem as a means of preserving the voices of an era or generation. Participants will analyze selected works through a range of techniques and devices specific to the persona form, included but not limited to, point of view, tone, and narrative. Model texts will include persona poems depicting voices across history, including examples of persona in music and memes. Participants will be challenged to create several persona drafts based on various forms of media within popular culture. The workshop will also discuss the ethics of persona, particularly in terms of racial, sexual, and gender bias and appropriation.
Brittny Ray Crowell is a native of Texarkana, TX. She is a 2020 recipient of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and her work has been published in the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Creative Writing and Literature at UH.
The Filmmaker’s Eye / The Poet’s Eye: A Documentary Poetry Workshop
The documentary poem is the poetic equivalent of the documentary film. These poems often bring to the forefront social justice concerns and rely on legal documents, news articles, data, and other source texts integral to this particular poem-making process. Participants in this workshop will read poems by Muriel Rukeyser, Mark Nowak, Juliana Spahr, Susan Briante, and others; these poems will serve as models for participants as they create their own interior and exterior documentary poems.
Niki Herd is the author of The Language of Shedding Skin and co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. Her work has appeared in Obsidian, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.
The Power of Performance
Aris Kian is an inaugural member of Coogslam, 2019’s 4th in the nation collegiate poetry slam team. She is ranked #10 in the 2020 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She is an Emerging Writers Fellow for WITS and is pursuing her MFA at the University of Houston.
Writing and Art: A Self-Portrait (Poetry, Nonfiction) (Canceled)
How can we use visual art to spark new creative energy and enliven the details of our thoughts, feelings, and experiences? In this workshop, we’ll study hybrid works of poetry and creative nonfiction to explore how writing and visual art can work together to forge vivid, meaningful accounts of your unique perspective on the world. Drawing inspiration from writer-artists such as Maira Kalman, Richard McGuire, and Eleni Sikelianos, you’ll have the chance to create new works of art and writing, and to explore new ways of putting them together. All skill levels welcome!
*any visual medium can be used in this workshop (drawing, painting, etc); art supplies must be supplied by participants
Devereux Fortuna is a writer and artist. She is a candidate for a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University. She is a poetry editor for Gulf Coast Magazine and teaches creative workshops at UH and for Writers in the Schools. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming in Triangle House Review, Waxwing Magazine, American Chordata, Ahsahta Press, and Dreginald.
NONFICTION
Drawing Inspiration: Generating Graphic Narratives
“There was a time when drawing and writing were not separated for you,” Lynda Barry writes in Making Comics. “In fact, our ability to write could only come from our willingness and inclination to draw.” Based around the exercises and insights in Barry’s book, as well as other key texts, this course explores the generative link between the textual and the visual with the goal of allowing participants to enrich their own work and creative processes.
Sonia Hamer is an MFA candidate in fiction at UH, Online Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast, and the recipient of the 2020 Imprint Barthelme Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction’s True Story, Archipelago, Prometheus Dreaming, Not Very Quite, The Dollhouse, plain china, and elsewhere.
The Genre-Informed Personal Essay
“We tell ourselves stories to live,” writes Joan Didion – but why do we insist on using Realism to do so? In this generative and adventurous workshop, we’ll explore the fantastic insights that occur when we use Genre as our base reality. Through the lens of Sci Fi, Noir, Western, Telenovelas, and Found Forms, we will revolutionize how we see and explain our world in prose. Be prepared to be transformed. You may enter an everyday human, but you’ll leave a deep space explorer, a chiaroscuro detective, a sheriff on the edge of the world, a resilient heartthrob, all without sacrificing the true essence of your personal essay, your burgeoning memoir, and your life.
CAIT WEISS ORCUTT’s essays and poems have appeared in Boston Review, FIELD, The Academy of American Poets and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets and Best of the Net. The author of VALLEYSPEAK (2017), Cait has an MFA from the Ohio State University and is pursuing a PhD at UH.
FICTION
Speculative Fiction & Fairy Tale
Kate Bernheimer’s “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale” argues that writers of all genres and forms, from Donna Tartt to Ben Marcus, use techniques rooted in fairy tales. Taking Bernheimer’s essay as a starting point, we will break down the craft techniques of magical realism, fantasy, horror, scifi, and psychological short stories. Next, we will apply these techniques in generative exercises as we write and workshop our own fairy-tale inspired short stories.
Laura Biagi is Fiction Editor for Gulf Coast and an MFA graduate from the University of Houston. She will begin her PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University in the fall. Previously she worked as a Literary Agent in New York, where she sold New York Times bestselling titles.
POV in Fiction
In this class, we’ll talk about this unheralded but vital narrative element as it relates to not only what information is available to the reader, but also how that information becomes available. Through discussions, exercises, and readings, we’ll get into the familiar POVs, the strange and unfamiliar ones, the fun of unreliable narrators, and the power of postmodern fiction, which prides itself on calling attention to this narrative device.
Matthew Krajniak is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow at the University of Houston. He is an editor of Wendy Battin: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Unsung Master Series, 2020), and his interviews and fiction have most recently appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry Foundation, and The Avalon Literary Review.
Family Narratives in Fiction (Canceled)
Whether joyful or dysfunctional, traumatic, or loving, each of us is shaped by our family experiences. The same is true for the characters we write. In this workshop, excerpts and exercises will help us consider how best to convey the complicated nature of families in fictional narratives. Special attention will be directed to dialogue, conflict, and character interaction as we consider how to enhance and improve our own family-focused projects.
Colby Ornell is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She serves as a writer-in-residence for Writers in Schools and an assistant fiction editor for Gulf Coast. Her stories have appeared in several literary magazines.
The Shape of Stories
This workshop will pay particular attention to mapping the underlying structure of your story – that skeleton that holds everything in place – by drawing on Kurt Vonnegut’s lecture on “The Shape of Stories” among other insightful craft lessons, model stories and films. We’ll write new short stories and we’ll revisit old ones. We’ll write both in class and out of it. And by the end of these four days, we should be well down the path to crafting memorable and timeless stories.
Obi Umeozor received his MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. His work has appeared in the New Orleans Review, adda, Shift and others. He has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and is currently a PhD (Fiction) candidate at UH’s Creative Writing Program.
MULTIGENRE
Writing Practice in the time of COVID 19
For many writers, the recent pandemic has betrayed the fragility of our writing practices. In this highly generative multigenre workshop, we will discuss the writing process, what drives us, and what we need (emotionally, physically, spiritually, and materially) in order to be creative. By the end of the week, we will all have generated drafts of new work and, of equal importance, developed practices to help sustain our writing going forward.
Josh English’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Omniverse, Prelude, Sixth Finch, Third Coast and elsewhere. He is Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast and Co-founding Editor of the poetry outfit Oxidant|Engine.
Mauricio Patrón Rivera (México City, 1984) works with the text and its relationship with the community. The outputs of his work are short stories, essays, poems, curatorial projects, academic research, and collaborative processes. His writing explores the outsiders’ corporalities. He is currently studying a Ph.D. in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.Illness, Healing, and Wholeness
This narrative/lyrical health workshop is open to poets and prose writers interested in writing about illness: our challenging experience; the joy of remission and recovery; and the satisfaction and alienation in caring for others. The week will follow the conventional narrative medicine model: we will share literature and discuss new ideas. Generous time for composing, responding, and conferring will encourage writing beyond our week.
Martha Serpas’s poetry collections include Côte Blanche, The Dirty Side of the Storm, and The Diener. Double Effect is due in fall 2020 from LSU Press. She co-produced Veins in the Gulf, a documentary about southern Louisiana’s coastal erosion crisis. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and serves as a hospital trauma chaplain.
Trauma Writing, Bilingual Cross-Genre
Este taller bilingüe will focus on trauma writing con la meta of healing. Participantes explorarán cross-genre generative exercises sobre poesía, flash fiction/microrrelatos, drama y creative nonfiction/crónica. La escritura será workshopped con énfasis en sanación as well as aesthetics by prioritizing emoción. Participants will be encouraged to speak and write en el idioma de su preferencia, sea English, español or both.
Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal es una escritora mexicana de identidad chicana; traductora y maestra de inglés. Her work has been published in the Rio Grande Review, Texas Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The Acentos Review. Ha publicado traducciones de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Minerva Reynosa y Maricela Guerrero.
Craft talk details and other featured writers will be announced as soon as information becomes available!
Scholarships
DEADLINES EXTENDED! Scholarships for Strikethrough are listed below and are full tuition:
1) The Nelson Scholarships are available to all UH English Dept. student veterans. There are five scholarships available. The application has been extended to May 16th! The application includes:
- Short cover letter re: interest in conference and goals for writing (include name, address, student ID number, email, phone number)
- Writing sample (up to 5 pages of poetry or up to 10 pages of prose)
Please submit your application to strikethrough@gmail.com by midnight CST on May 16th as an attached document. The applicants will be notified by May 17th.
2) The Rowan Out-of-Town Scholarships are open to any registered undergraduate outside of the Houston area.Tell your friends!! The application for this scholarship includes:
- Cover letter explaining how the conference will influence your writing (no more than 500 words)
- University/college-level enrollment verification for Spring, Summer, or Fall 2020 (your registration page from your college or university)
- 5-page writing sample in your intended genre
The deadline has now been extended! Please submit your application to rowanuhcwp@gmail.com by midnight May 19th.
3) Lauren Berry Poetry Scholarships are open to any poet. There are two scholarships available. Lauren Berry is a University of Houston Creative Writing Program alumna (MFA Poetry) whose support and generosity supports this scholarship. During her time at UH, Lauren won the Inprint Verlaine Prize and served as poetry editor for Gulf Coast. From 2009 to 2010, she held the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute. Her first collection of poems, The Lifting Dress (2011), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Terrance Hayes. The application for a Berry scholarship includes:
- Cover page (name, address, email, phone number)
- One-paragraph statement on why you should receive this scholarship
- Writing sample (up to five pages of poetry)
Please submit your application by midnight May 17th to strikethroughworkshop@
4) Rivera/Nepantlera Bilingual Scholarships are open towriters of any genre who write in Spanish and English and are interested in one of Strikethrough’s bilingual, multi-genre workshops. For more information on these workshops visit http://glassmountainmag.
- Cover page (name, address, email, phone number)
- One-paragraph statement on why this opportunity enhances your writing project
- Writing sample of bilingual work in your chosen genre (up to five pages)
Please submit your applications to strikethroughworkshops@
Questions? contact strikethroughworkshop@gmail.
We hope to see you there!
