Happy New Year! We hope your year is off to a good start. We are thrilled to announce our full schedule of faculty, as well as the morning workshops and afternoon seminars for our 2023 conference taking place August 3-5, 2023. Conference registration begins March 15, 2023 and will be open until June 30, 2023.
CALLING ALL WRITERS
Scholarship and Master Class applications are NOW OPEN! The deadline to apply for scholarships and for the juried Master Class is 11:59 p.m. PT on February 15, 2023.
KEY DATES
February 15: Deadline for Scholarship and Master Class applications
March 15: Conference registration and contest submissions open
March 25: Online seminar, Writing Disability from the Inside Out with Allegra Pescatore
April 1: Online seminar, Beginnings, Middles and Endings in the Short Story with Leon Craig
April 8: Online seminar, The Joy of Creation with Tanya Ko Hong
April 22: Online seminar, Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry with Benjamin Gucciardi
April 29: Online seminar, Archeology of Memory: Discovering the Bones of Your Story with Nicole Gulotta
June 30: Deadline for conference registration and contest submissions
August 3-5: In-person conference
FUNDRAISING UPDATE
Thanks to all of our donors, we are 91% of the way to our fundraising goal! We’re so grateful to the following people for their support:
We’re working hard to put together our in-person conference as well as regular online events. Every gift matters, no matter the size. If you are able to support our work with a donation, click on the link below.
Q&A WITH MCWC EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LISA LOCASCIO NIGHTHAWK
MCWC Executive Director Lisa Locascio Nighthawk has returned from parental leave and is excited to resume her duties at the helm of the Conference. We sat down with Lisa and asked her a few questions.
What do you do outside of MCWC?
I am a writer, currently at work on my second novel, a significant portion of which is set in a place a lot like the Mendocino Coast. I also write a newsletter called Not Knowing How. In addition to my work with MCWC, I am the program chair of the low-residency Antioch MFA in Creative Writing, the only MFA program in the United States with a social justice mandate. And I recently became a parent, which is a joy and a mindboggling journey all its own!
How did you get involved with MCWC?
In 2010, while waiting for my then-fiancé (and now-ex-husband) to have his green card interview to come to the United States and marry me, I suffered a recurrence of my lifelong struggle with insomnia, which I treated by reading a Lonely Planet guide to coastal California when I woke up in the middle of the night. Our honeymoon was a road trip up Highway One from Los Angeles to Eureka. The day we drove along the Mendocino Coast made a huge impression on me, and I sought out a way to return to the area that had captivated me, which led me to find MCWC on the Poets and Writers website. I applied for a scholarship and won it, as well as the short fiction contest, at MCWC 2012. Three years later, then-MCWC Executive Director Karen Lewis invited me back as faculty for MCWC 2015. I returned to teach in 2017, and in 2018 I was invited to become executive director of the Conference. MCWC has changed my life in so many ways—I met my partner at the 2015 Conference—and it is the great pleasure and honor of my life to be its leader.
What is your favorite thing about MCWC?
I love MCWC’s equitable, diverse, and accessible community, which is distinguished by its friendliness and the Conference's handmade vibe.
What are your goals for MCWC this year?
In the past few years, our Conference community has come so far and weathered so many challenges. I’m looking forward to celebrating those wins and deepening our commitment to serving our local community while we continue to build connections with writers near and far, from all walks of life.
Where do you find inspiration as a writer?
I am inspired by the grandeur and mystery of nature, the perplexing singularity of memory, the challenge and gift of relationships, and by the writing I encounter in the world.
What are you reading?
I recently finished Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin, an unsettling novel about motherhood, loss, and home that moved me deeply. Right now I’m enjoying Age of Cage by Keith Phipps, a delightful history of the last several decades of Hollywood through the prism of Nicolas Cage’s career, The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey, which my sister gave me for Christmas, and City of Quartz by the late great Mike Davis, the brilliant Marxist history of Los Angeles I've lied about having read for years. It’s even better than everyone in my PhD program said it was!
Q&A WITH MCWC 2023 NONFICTION FACULTY, CARVELL WALLACE
Carvell Wallace is a New York Times bestselling author, writer, and podcaster. He is a regular contributor to Pitchfork, MTV News, the Huffington Post, and Slate, and has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ, The Toast, The Guardian, The New Yorker, Esquire, Quartz, ESPN, and other publications. He is the creator and host of Finding Fred, an iHeart Media documentary podcast about the life of Fred Rogers; host of Closer Than They Appear, an Al Jazeera podcast about race and identity in America, and co-host of the Slate parenting podcast Mom & Dad Are Fighting. He is co-writer of the Slate parenting advice column, Care & Feeding. In 2019, he helped create the Sundance Institute exhibition Still Here, an immersive multimedia installation about mass incarceration, erasure, and gentrification in Harlem, New York. His memoir about trauma and recovery is due out on FSG in 2023.
We sat down with Carvell Wallace, who will be leading the 2023 Nonfiction Workshop and asked him a few questions.
What drew you to begin writing in your genre?
I don't remember anything drawing me to write in this genre! I've just done it for as long as I can remember! I've also written fiction, poetry, and done some dramatic writing, but perhaps the thing that keeps me in creative nonfiction is that it's what they most reliably pay me for. I also think creative nonfiction is such a beautiful way of providing testimony of our human experience, which is how we relate to one another and validate our own being. And I think that including elements of poetry, fiction, and dramatic writing into creative non-fic allows the reader to vibrate more deeply with our work and storytelling, much in the same way that putting a good beat under a message makes it easier to sing along to!
What patterns, rituals or routines are crucial to your writing practice?
My primary ritual is procrastination. Cleaning, answering emails, dusting, hanging out with friends, cooking elaborate dishes, watching movies, fiddling with my vacuum, driving to far away locations to buy random things I saw on the internet once and don't really need. This is important processing and preparation time, time in which I think about the piece, turn the ideas over, get inspiration from movies, music, radio and podcasts. It's also the time in which the discomfort of not writing builds up so intensely that I have no choice but to finally begin writing! It's not pretty, but I guess it works!
Who/what are your key influences and sources of inspiration?
I like visual art. I always see paintings, sculptures, and installations and think I'd like to write like that. I watch random films, noir from the 50's or indie films from the 90's and think I'd like to do what that work just did. I love my Black woman authors from the 80's and 90's: bell hooks, Edwidge Danticat, Kathleen Collins, Jamaica Kinkaid. Toni Morrison. Ntzoke Shange. Alice Walker. June Jordan was a huge personal influence on me as she let me sneak into her final class at UC Berkeley, even though I wasn't in college, I was just some rando who kept showing up, and eventually she started reading my work and dropping encouragement my way. But more important for me is her manifesto for Poetry of the New World where she talks about a deliberate balance of perception with vision; a balancing of sensory report with moral exhortation. I keep that one printed out above my desk. I also love the Roberta Flack version of The First Time (Ever I Saw Your Face.) Talk about paying attention! That song is love on a granular and cosmic level. I also keep a photo of her performing that song in my workspace.
What do you love most about teaching writing?
I like seeing people realize that they have power. Like once they know how it works -- how language and storytelling and observation and insight work -- they start creating work at the next level you can see them start to look at their hands in amazement as if fire just shot out of there. It's just cool!
What are you hoping participants of your MCWC workshop will get out of the time they spend with you?
Oh I just want everyone to have the ability to make work that they are proud of. Because that is an extremely enlivening feeling.
COMMUNITY NEWS
Former MCWC faculty member Reyna Grande will be honored by Poets & Writers and will receive the 2023 Writers for Writers Award.
Brew in Santa Rosa will host their weekly open mic on Tuesday, January 17. A group of 2022 MCWC participants will be attending to share their work! Open to the public.
Location:
555 Healdsburg Avenue
Santa Rosa, CA
Timeline:
5:30 p.m.: Sign-ups
6:00 p.m.: Event start time
Runs until ~8:45 p.m.
GOT NEWS?
Send it to us at: news@mcwc.org. Until next time, happy writing!
- The MCWC Team