2023 Conference Speakers
Keynote Speaker
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2023 Keynote Topic
Breathing Life and Lives into Fiction Reading is an intellectual and emotional activity, one that necessitates a physical experience. Our bodies both trigger and are triggered by sensory memory. We may not remember a conversation with a loved one, but we remember the coldness of their touch, how heavy the words felt in our ears, or the smell of their skin. By employing our own bodies in the craft of writing to create new worlds, new experiences, and new energy, we empower our stories to invoke a corporeal experience. Clapsaddle will explore methods for infusing physical sensation into your writing through practice, observation, and structure. |
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Workshop Intensive
Writing Through Change Over the past few years, we’ve all learned to adapt to the way we live in a changing world. With some of us, this time of change has resulted in an outpouring of writing which may not be as focused as we need it to be. Others of us have felt our creative life become as cautious and isolated as society has too often seemed. We all need to make sure our writing process has adapted to who we are now, and to what the reading public most needs at this time. Bring excerpts of your works-in-progress and through a mix of discussion, prompts and critique, we’ll explore how our writing can be made more useful to ourselves and to the world. 
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Dana Wildsmith’s writing has its roots in literal soil: the earth of the old farm she works to keep alive, as documented in her collection of poems, One Good Hand, and through her environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal, or along the desert sands of our southern border, as told in her novel, Jumping, a story which grew from Wildsmith’s work as a teacher of English Literacy to non-native speakers.
Her most recent collection, One Light, follows the journey of her mother, Grace, down dementia’s rocky road. Wildsmith has a new book forthcoming from Madville Publishing which took root as the pandemic flourished and we all searched for tools to help us cope with this unprecedented epic. With Access to Tools explores the role of tools in our lives: traditional farm tools, tools of the digital age, and cerebral tools such as patience and memory. Wildsmith is a highly sought-after teacher of creative writing and has garnered residencies at the Hambidge Center, the Lillian E Smith Center, Grand Canyon National Park and Everglades National Park. Her web site, www.danawildsmith.com, is the home of a widely read blog mostly centered on teaching and writing. |
Session Topics
Translating the World: Imagery in Poetry This workshop will focus on voice and imagery in poetry. Struggling to find our voice in writing, we want to produce poetry a reader will listen to and read. We will explore subject matter, diction, point of view, syntax and grammar, and imagery to allow the voice of our poetry to distinguish itself from others’. Images can be literal or figurative, translating the world through our five (or six) senses so they produce insights for a reader. In addition to looking at published poets, we will also discuss drafts and revisions, so please come prepared to write and bring along some work you’ve already begun. Poetry Writing Jumpstarts
So much of our writing is based on personal experience through the lens of self. This workshop will focus on developing writing skills based on external prompts and stimuli. As we learn to look outward, we develop a whole new set of experiences from which to write and acquire a brand new “reference library.” Bring pen and paper, partial poems, complete poems, and even the “failed” poems you just can’t give up. Be ready to write, write, and write! |
KB Ballentine resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and teaches creative writing, theatre arts, and literature to high school and college students. She has an M.A. in Writing and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and publications, including Atlanta Review, Linnet’s Wings, Crab Orchard Review, Alehouse, Tidal Basin Review, Haight–Ashbury Literary Journal, The Sigh Press, and MO: Writings from the River.
Ballentine’s seventh collection Edge of the Echo was published by Iris Press in May 2021. The Light Tears Loose appeared the summer of 2019 from Blue Light Press. 2017 showcased Ballentine's fifth poetry collection Almost Everything, Almost Nothing, published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio. In 2016, The Perfume of Leaving received the Blue Light Press Book Award. Her work also appears in several anthologies: I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2022), The Strategic Poet (2021), Women Speak: Vol 7 (2021), Pandemic Puzzle Poems (2021), The Mountain (2021), Pandemic Evolution (2021), In Plein Air (2017), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017), In God's Hands (2017), River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-first Century (2015), Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee (2013) and Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets (2011). She was selected as a finalist for the Southern Alliance of Literature Outstanding Writer for 2021; she was awarded the Libba Moore Gray Poetry Prize in 2016, in 2014 she was a finalist in the Ron Rash Poetry Awards, and in 2006 a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award. She was a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and in 2007. |
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Looking Back, Moving Forward:
Writing About Grief, Loss, and Trauma Robert Frost wrote, “no tears for the writer, no tears for the reader,” but how do we create effective story from emotionally difficult material? Writing well about loss requires more than capturing slippery memory on the page - reflection must advance the narrative. In this workshop, we will examine elements of renowned trauma memoirs and engage in writing prompts that will help us examine how conflict and joy are put to work in powerful prose. Participants will explore strategies for writing about loss and trauma in pursuit of insight, wholeness, and connection to readers. We will end our time together with a new understanding of the little-known continuation of Frost’s quote: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Writing History: Yours and Others How do writers of fiction and nonfiction prose present vibrant history on the page? How does a writer convey a place and time, and make historical characters’ worlds resonate with contemporary readers? Through writing prompts and discussion of professional examples, we'll examine the author's craft of bringing history to life. This workshop is suitable for writers of historical fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction, and is open to writers with all levels of experience. Participants will gain tips and insight into techniques applicable to their own work. |
Jessica Handler is the author of The Magnetic Girl, an Indie Next selection, Wall Street Journal Spring 19 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 19 pick, and SIBA Okra pick. She is the author of the nonfiction books Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Invisible Sisters: A Memoir, which was named one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read” and Atlanta Magazine’s “Best Memoir of 2009.”
Handler writes essays and nonfiction features that have appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Full Grown People, Brevity, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Handler is a lecturer in English at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing craft. |
Session Topics
Text and Subtext Part 1 What are you trying to convey to the reader in your writing? How can the reader “hear” the story you want to tell? This workshop will explore your fiction’s reality and how to weave your message into the prose. Text and Subtext Part 2 A continued exploration of communicating deeper ideas within the plot of your novel. |
Soniah Kamal is an award-winning novelist, essayist and public speaker. Her most recent novel, Unmarriageable: Pride & Prejudice in Pakistan, is a Financial Times Readers’ Best Book of 2019, a 2019 ‘Books All Georgians Should Read,’ a 2020 Georgia Author of the Year for Literary Fiction nominee, is shortlisted for the 2020 Townsend Award for Fiction, is a New York Public Library, an NPR Code Switch 2019 Summer Read Pick and People’s Magazine pick and more.
Kamal’s TEDx talk is about second chances and she has delivered numerous keynotes at Writers Conferences, as well as ‘We are the Ink’, at a U.S. Citizenship Oath Ceremony about real American Dreams. Her work has appeared in critically acclaimed anthologies and publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Georgia Review, The Bitter Southerner, Catapult, The Normal School, and more. She has taught creative writing at Emory University, Oglethorpe University and teaches at the MFA program at Reinhardt University. For more information on Sonia and her works, visit www.soniahkamal.com |
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Session Topics
Thievery, Loss and Scars: A Fiction Workshop Books on creative writing sometimes encourage you to interview your characters to get to know them, but does discovering that your character’s favorite color is blue and her favorite food is beef stroganoff really make your fiction better? In this generative workshop we’ll dig deep into your characters’ minds, memories and emotions, to force them to tell us the good stuff. Come prepared to write and share your work with others. The Use of Sound in Prose Of all the sensory details used in fiction and nonfiction, sound may get the least attention. Yet sound can be key to depicting character, setting and tone. How can you describe sound in a way that is both original and instantly familiar to the reader? How can you avoid clichés (screen doors banging, hearts pounding like drums)? In this class we’ll look at examples of sound well rendered on the page, and do in-class exercises including aural prompts to get you thinking more deeply about how to give sound its due. Come prepared to write. |
Heather Newton’s novel The Puppeteer’s Daughters (Turner Publishing 2022) has been optioned for television. Her short story collection McMullen Circle (Regal House 2022) was the finalist for the W.S. Porter prize. Newton’s novel Under The Mercy Trees (HarperCollins 2011) won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as a Great Group Reads Selection and named an “Okra Pick” by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance.
A practicing attorney, Newton teaches creative writing for UNC-Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program and is co-founder and Program Manager for the Flatiron Writers Room writers’ center in Asheville. |
Speaker Panel Moderator
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Michelle MoranGrowing up on the shores of Long Island Sound, Michelle Moran always knew she wanted to write. She spent most of her days imagining up plays or scripting a new backyard musical, or people-watching. After graduating from Boston’s Northeastern University School of Journalism, she embarked on a 25-year career writing for consumer and trade publications on covering everything from a crime beat in Lynn, Massachusetts to importing gourmet foods to America.
Now, after 14 years running and marketing the family restaurant business she and her husband started in 2008, Michelle is getting back to her roots working on her food/travel blog, the finishing touches of a cookbook with Mellman and closing in on the compilation of her first novel. She spends her time between Blue Ridge, Georgia and Ambergris Caye, Belize mentoring young entrepreneurs, coaching women, and promoting charitable causes, including Little Pink Houses of Hope in Belize and Hope Haven Women & Children’s Center in Belize. |