In response to the demand for more MCWC programming all year round, we have put together a slate of incredible fall online seminars!
Each seminar will be two hours and will include a presentation, resources, and Q&A. Registration is $40 each. Seminars will be hosted through Zoom video. Seminars will also be recorded, so if you purchase a ticket and aren’t able to attend as it happens, you will be emailed a link to view the recording within 24 hours.
These seminars also constitute an important fundraiser for us to support our in-person summer conference, so please spread the word about this series. Every registration helps us continue creating meaningful, prestigious, and high-quality literary programming for our community. We appreciate your support!
Saturday, October 15 - 12pm - 2pm PT
The War Still Within: Poems of the Korean Diaspora with Tanya Ko Hong
Tanya Ko Hong (Hyonhye) 고현혜, a bilingual poet, considers her writing a product of two minds. Weaving together cultures, her poetry gives voice to multiple generations of Korean and Korean-American women. Her collection The War Still Within contains 36 poems, including a well-researched, vividly imagined sequence of six poems based on experiences of Korean “comfort women,” who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during WWII. Tanya will read “Comfort Woman” and we will discuss how history turns to poetry—how untold stories can be poetry and play. She will share tips for writing in both Korean and English, while exploring how translation affects the creative process. We will analyze her poem, “The Gap,” as an example of how different languages display different minds. Every writer in the seminar will leave with their own “gap” poem!
Saturday, October 22 - 12pm - 2pm PT
Write with Urgency: The Novel & The Memoir with Donna Freitas
We are all reluctant readers of a sort, and often the books we love most are the ones that grab us and won’t let us go. Just about any story can grab a reader this way if framed well. Whether writing a novel or a memoir, I believe that all of us need to find the urgency, the drive, the momentum in the story we want to tell, and in the storytelling itself. If we can locate the urgency in our characters’ lives, relationships, choices, if we can do this in our own story, then we can create a narrative that keeps readers turning pages. But part of locating that urgency involves digging deep inside ourselves, to discover the personal desires that are driving us to write. This seminar will focus on these elements of storytelling, the centrality of the personal when we decide on a new project. We'll also discuss how to set up the beginning of the novel or memoir to grab the reader and hold her there.
Saturday, October 29 - 12pm - 2pm PT
Building Out a Writer’s Life with Kate Folk
The act of writing is a solitary endeavor, but a writing life is built from a dialogue between the solitary act and engagement with a larger community of writers and readers. Publishing is an important piece of this dialogue for many writers, though it is by no means the only one. In my experience, each piece builds on the others in unexpected and exciting ways. This seminar will explore avenues of getting your work out in the world, growing your writing community, and applying for opportunities that can support your creative practice. We’ll go over tips and best practices for submitting to journals, and discuss other opportunities, like writing residencies, conferences, reading series, and fellowships. We’ll also discuss how to create a writing life that feels meaningful and sustainable over the long term, amid the inevitable setbacks and rejections all writers experience.
Saturday, November 5 - 12pm - 2pm PT
Silence and the Imagination with Claudia Castro Luna
Sir Isaac Newton rested under an apple when a falling fruit inspired him to formulate his theory of gravity. As writers, how do we sustain inspiration? Each of us may have a different response to this question but I'd argue that to seek silence is a good place to start. Silence is the blank page of the world. The song of trees, the music of things plays out in it. Silence nurtures the imagination, births theories, inventions, and metaphors. This is an exploration of how things come into our minds that later appear in our writing.
Saturday, November 12 - 12pm - 2pm PT
The Main Course: Poets Writing About Food Through With The Haibun with Anastacia-Renée
This is a fact.
If you get right
down to it the new
unprocessed peanut
butter is no damn
good & you should
buy it in a jar as
always in the
largest supermarket
you know.
-Eileen Miles
In this workshop we will examine our cultural, familial, spiritual and communal connections to food. We will read and discuss food poetry written by: Li-Young-Lee, Jane Wong, and Eileen Miles. Participants will create a poem using aspects around or rooted in food. We will “cook” together by writing responses to recipes, historical facts about spices, and sharing stories about food. Workshop participants will leave with one draft poem.
Catching Up with Interim Executive Director Georgina Marie Guardado
How did you get involved with MCWC?
I attended MCWC’s poetry workshop in 2020 as a recipient of the Anne G. Locascio scholarship. The following year, I became a scholarship judge for the conference, then a Board member, Chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee, and an editor for the Noyo Review team.
What do you do outside of MCWC?
Outside of MCWC, I am the Literacy Program Coordinator for the Lake County Library where volunteer tutors are matched with adult learners to improve their literacy skills. I am the Poet Laureate of Lake County for 2020-2024. I am also the Literary Editor for The Bloom, a news site in Lake County with a positive twist, a contributing writer for Antioch University’s Common Thread News, and President of WordSwell Nonprofit, a literary arts organization founded by Bay Area poets and writers brought together by Clive Matson, a Beat Generation poet and creative writing teacher who is looking to leave behind a haven for the literary and arts community. I also foster rescue dogs!
What are your goals for MCWC this year?
My goal is to continue expanding on the sense of inclusivity by welcoming faculty, participants, volunteers, and more, who are from all walks of life, including different racial and ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, ranges of physical capabilities, and different literary genres including writers who are in all different stages of being a writer. This is already what MCWC is built on, so I want to continue this while supporting the ideas and work of our current Board of Directors, sustaining members, faculty, and participants.
What are you reading right now?
Too many books at one time! I have as many TBR lists as I have To-Do lists. Right now I’m slowly reading The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon, because I don’t ever want it to end. I’m also reading Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth by Yusef Komunyakaa. Next will be books by all of our 2023 faculty!