SCHOLARSHIP WINNERS ANNOUNCED!

21 participants have been selected to join us in Mendocino for the 2023 conference. Thanks to our generous donors, our scholarship winners have been granted full tuition for the conference as well as a stipend to support their travel and housing accommodations. Below is a list of winners:

  • Teresa Connelly First Taste Scholarship - JR Fenn

  • Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction - Tian Yi

  • Nella Larsen Memorial Scholarship - antmen pimentel mendoza

  • Marion Deeds Scholarship - Michael Fischer

  • Ginny Rorby - Rachel Delaney Craft

  • Norma Watkins Scholarship - Damieka Thomas

  • Doug Fortier Scholarship - K.X. Song

  • Anne G. Locascio Memorial Scholarship - Virgie Tovar 

  • Margaret Speaker Yuan Memorial Scholarship - Alexia Nader

  • Margaret Speaker Yuan Memorial Scholarship - Arina Sarwari-Stadnyk 

  • Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Meghana Mysore

  • Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Laura Schmitt

  • Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Kira Witkin

  • Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Kaitlin Hsu

  • Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Evan J.

  • Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Yibing Du

  • Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Ivan Zhao

  • Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Rashaan Alexis Meneses

  • Mendocino County High School Student Scholarship - Phannarai Inkun

  • Mendocino County High School Student Scholarship - Natalie Gutierrez Moreno

  • Mendocino County High School Student Scholarship - Frej Barty

Row 1 (left to right): antmen pimentel mendoza, Arina Sarwari-Stadnyk, JR Fenn

Row 2 (left to right): Michael Fischer, Kaitlin Hsu, Evan J, Meghana Mysore

Row 1 (left to right): Alexia Nader, Tian Yi, Kira Witkin

Row 2 (left to right): Virgie Tovar, Natalie Gutierrez Moreno, K.X. Song, Frej Barty

Row 1 (left to right): Damieka Thomas, Laura Schmitt, Phannarai Inkun

Row 2 (left to right): Rashaan Alexis Meneses, Rachel Delaney Craft, Ivan Zhao, Yibing Du

The passing of longtime MCWC participant Margaret Speaker Yuan led several generous donors to establish a scholarship in her honor. MCWC gratefully acknowledges Marion Deeds, Mark Shynert, Salinda Tyson and Monya Baker for honoring Margaret’s life and legacy by enabling us to invite these deserving writers to our conference.

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN - SECURE YOUR SPOT!

General Registration is open to the public and spots are filling up fast. To secure your spot to the morning workshop of your choice, use the link below to register today!

Photo by Mimi Carroll

MCWC CONTEST 

All conference registrants are encouraged to submit to our writing contest which will be open for submissions from March 15, 2023 until June 30, 2023. There is no entry fee. However, the contest is only open to registered participants of the full three-day conference. Winners will have the opportunity to read their work at the conference, receive credit to the conference bookstore, and winning entries are considered for publication in The Noyo Review. 

JOIN US ONLINE FOR OUR FINAL TWO SPRING SEMINARS

These seminars were developed in response to the demand for more MCWC programming all year round. They 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, April 22

12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. PT

Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry with Ben Gucciardi

How do you know when a poem is finished? What makes a poem successful? Astonishing? Timeless? Using Gregory Orr’s landmark essay “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry” as a guiding text, this workshop will offer participants new strategies for editing of their own work, and moving poems towards greater balance, complexity and ultimately, completion.

Temperament comes from the Latin temperamentum ‘correct mixture,’ from temperare ‘mingle.’ Together, we will do a close of reading of poems from Vievee Francis, David Baker and Octavio Paz, looking at the temperaments and techniques the poets are mixing together. Participants will also analyze some of their own poems and the work of a peer in the class to identify which of the temperaments--story, structure, music and imagination-- are most prominently at play, and which could be introduced to strengthen the poem.

Participants will leave with a new framework for looking at their own work, developing new tools for revision while becoming more nuanced readers.

Saturday, April 29

12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. PT

Archeology of Memory: Discovering the Bones of Your Story with Nicole Gulotta

Writers of memoir and personal narrative are tasked with going back in time, digging up the bones of their memories, and excavating the past. While you’ll eventually need to erect the scaffolding of structure and shape a cohesive narrative, memoir begins in the mess. In this practical workshop, we’ll focus on everything that comes first—namely, getting closer to the core of your story, brainstorming the scenes that will light your way, and tapping into rich sensory details that will bring these moments to life on the page for your readers. Whether you’re just inching towards a memoir project or have already begun, these practices will support you on the long journey ahead.

KEY DATES

Q&A WITH MCWC 2023 FACULTY, MURIEL LEUNG

We caught up with Muriel Leung, who will be leading the 2023 Emerging Writers Workshop. You can find more about her work via her website and follow her @murmurshewrote on Instagram and Twitter. 

Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2022 Four Quartets Prize, in addition to Bone Confetti (Noemi Press) and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. A Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal and also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour Podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau. Muriel received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World fellow. She is from Queens, NY.

What drew you to begin writing in your genre?

As a hybrid genre writer, I have always thought of myself as a poet at my core, which I think began with a love of language, musicality, and the constant failure of words to capture any precise feeling in time. Growing up as a non-English speaker, I felt like meaning always fell between the gaps and in the attempt to become good at this language, I was always fumbling or navigating silences. There is a profound sense of possibility in this space, learned through humility and persistence, the recognition of language’s immense power and this ability to remake it over time.

What patterns, rituals or routines are crucial to your writing practice?

I am not a daily writer, and I think relinquishing this pressure has freed me to embrace the kind of writer I actually am—chaotic, intuitive, and navigating through the murk to find precision somewhere. I am project-driven, which means that I don’t write until there is a pressing topic that propels me to investigate it deeper. I make reading lists and give myself goals for how much to read and by when. I think of writing as a perpetual act of being an interlocutor, so you must know who else is writing in conversation with you throughout history and in the present, and so that your work might be an additive voice to the mix. At the end of a writing day, I may leave a note for my future self, questions that have come up in the day’s writing, ideas that remain unresolved and which my future self might know more of. I trust that my future self would find the solution somehow.

Who/what are your key influences and sources of inspiration?

I love experimental or hybrid genre writers, multihyphenate artists who defy traditional categorizations of genre, media, and form, and whose social and political imperatives in their work match the spirit of this defiance. I love the work of Truong Tran, Saretta Morgan, Renee Gladman, Brandon Shimoda, Lara Mimosa Montes, Yanyi Luo, Joey De Jesus, Vanessa Angelica Villarreal, to name a few. Other sources of inspiration: trees, flowers, eating two different flavors at the same time (sour and salt), nursing a dying plant to life, palm reading, tarot, meditation, long walks through an uncharted hiking path, getting lost.

What do you love most about teaching writing?

There’s a beautiful vicarious sense of wonder that happens when you have the opportunity to facilitate a unique experience for a group of writers who very much want to see their work taken care of and treated with respect. Teaching is a way of enacting our core values to our writing practice, which for me means integrity, compassion, and persistence in questioning. I know I have succeeded when the writers I teach come away with an insatiable curiosity to learn more on their own, who feel like they can independently carve their own path forward, and who are asking the important questions about the world and our place within it. 

What are you hoping participants of your MCWC workshop will get out of the time they spend with you?

I am teaching a workshop on revision, which is a notoriously difficult and underdiscussed topic in creative writing! I am excited about what this might crack open for writers who are coming into the workshop with writing they may have given up on. I am of the belief that nothing has to be wasted, and to guide each writer towards seeing the possibility in their old or stuck work is a challenge I am very much looking forward to.

Get to Know Our Scholarship Winners

Teresa Connelly First Taste Scholarship - JR Fenn

JR Fenn's writing has appeared in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Versal, and Gulf Coast, among other places. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University, where she won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in Fiction. JR lives in western New York with her family and is currently at work on a first novel. Her writing can be found at www.jrfenn.com.

Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction - Tian Yi

Tian Yi lives in London. Her writing has appeared in CRAFT, The Daily Drunk, Fractured Lit, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She received an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London, where she was also awarded a Sophie Warne Fellowship. She currently co-hosts ESEA Archives, an online book club run in partnership with Hackney Chinese Community Services, celebrating the work of East and Southeast Asian authors. You can find Tian on Twitter (@tianyiwriting) and ESEA Archives on Instagram (@esea.archives).

Tian is working on a short story collection about families and hauntings. She is excited to learn from and generate new ideas with fellow speculative fiction enthusiasts at MCWC.

Nella Larsen Memorial Scholarship - antmen pimentel mendoza

antmen pimentel mendoza (she, he) is the author of the chapbook My Boyfriend Apocalypse (Nomadic Press, 2023). antmen is a student at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and rides his bike and goes on walks in Oakland.

antmen is excited to connect with fellow writers in shared learning and to explore community as craft. antmen is at work on a full-length manuscript of poetry.

website: antmenpm.com

Marion Deeds Scholarship - Michael Fischer

Michael Fischer is a Moth Mainstage storyteller and humanities instructor in the Odyssey Project, a free college credit program for income-eligible adults in Chicago. He's a Luminarts Cultural Foundation fellow, Right of Return USA fellow, and Illinois Humanities Envisioning Justice commissioned humanist. His nonfiction appears in The New York Times, Salon, The Sun, Lit Hub, Guernica, Orion, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Michael writes, “I plan to spend the conference working on my current project, which blends personal essay and narrative journalism to situate mass incarceration within a conversation about mental health and climate change, in order to provide a holistic view of the many interdependent concerns at issue in the carceral state.”

Ginny Rorby - Rachel Delaney Craft

Rachel Delaney Craft writes speculative fiction for children and teens. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as Cricket, Ember, Voyage, and Cast of Wonders, and she edited the anthology Wild: Uncivilized Tales from Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers. She lives and writes in Colorado with her partner, two dogs, and a succulent collection that is slowly taking over her house. Find her on Twitter @RDCwrites or at racheldelaneycraft.com. 

Rachel writes, “I’m currently revising a YA speculative novel called Every Color of My Blood, a sister story set in a world where emotions are bought and sold like drugs. I’m excited to work on this at the beautiful Mendocino Coast and meet the MCWC community!”

Norma Watkins Scholarship - Damieka Thomas

Damieka Thomas is an MFA student at University of California, Davis. She is a mixed-race writer and poet. She holds a degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and a minor in Education from UC Davis. She was born in Clear Lake and bounced around various places, including New York, Arizona, and Kentucky, but she mostly has family in Mendocino and Sutter county. She has been published in Poets.org, Rejected Lit Magazine, Third Iris Zine, Open Ceilings Magazine, and Bloom Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2021 Celeste Turner Wright Prize for Poetry and the 2021 Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction. 

Damieka writes, “I’m working on a memoir for my second-year thesis in the MFA program, which I hope to be a blend of memoir and poetry. At the conference, I’m excited to learn more about memoir writing from Sarah McColl and Ariel Gore. I’m excited to join the MCWC community this summer, and I hope to learn a lot from everyone!” 

Doug Fortier Scholarship - K.X. Song

K. X. Song is a diaspora writer with roots in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Her debut young adult novel, An Echo in the City, is forthcoming with Little, Brown on June 20th, 2023. Visit her online at kxsong.com. 

Her current work in progress is a contemporary novel with speculative horror elements, set against the backdrop of the 19th century Opium Wars and the contemporary opioid epidemic. The novel follows a Chinese expat who returns to rural Guangdong for a long-postponed family reunion, only to find her ancestors’ history and inheritance are not as black and white as she once believed.

Anne G. Locascio Memorial Scholarship - Virgie Tovar 

Virgie Tovar's books have included You Have The Right To Remain Fat (Feminist Press 2018), The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color (New Harbinger 2020), and The Body Positive Journal (2018). Tovar hosts the Webby-nominated food-positive and body-positive podcast Rebel Eaters Club and is a contributor for Forbes.com, where she covers how the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work. She has received Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism and was named one of 50 most influential feminists by Bitch Magazine. She lives in San Francisco. Read more at www.virgietovar.com. 

Virgie writes, “My current project is a memoir about going no-contact with my family. The work focuses on intergenerational trauma, forgiveness as something corporeal (not intellectual), and the implications of leaving for a woman of color and daughter of Mexican immigrant parents.” 

Margaret Speaker Yuan Memorial Scholarship - Alexia Nader

Alexia Nader is a writer based in San Francisco. Her fiction has been published in Your Impossible Voice, her poetry in Obsidian, and her criticism in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, and Guernica, among other outlets. She has a MA from New York University in Journalism and a MFA from the University of San Francisco in Fiction. 

Alexia writes, “I'm currently at work on a novel that unfolds from the perspectives of three narrators from different generations of a single family. Two narrators are visual artists; one is an art dealer. As their conflicts intersect in a present-day storyline set in Miami, the narrators piece together their stories of migration away from the country or city of their childhood, and their search for belonging to their respective art communities. Through narrating their stories, which travel from Lebanon, to Haiti, to the United States, they examine the values and choices—around gender expectations, femininity, motherhood, and the processes of making or selling art—that have shaped their lives. I'm looking forward to workshopping a chapter from this novel at the conference.” 

Margaret Speaker Yuan Memorial Scholarship - Arina SARWARI-Stadnyk 

Arina Sarwari-Stadnyk (she/they) is a queer Afghan-Ukrainian writer and printmaker on occupied Ohlone Lisjan land. She aspires to create work that reaches through the fabric of history to document the ways in which bodies and landscapes continue to reciprocally haunt one another. Her drawings, linocut prints, poems, and lyrical essays are concerned with the symbiosis of diasporic memory and intergenerational silence. In her free time, Arina enjoys skateboarding, dancing Attan, organizing sapphic poetry circles, and generally wreaking havoc. You can find more of her art and writing on instagram at @absurdistan__.

Arina writes, “In terms of my project, I plan to workshop a work in progress that I recently started. It is a personal essay in the form of a chronological sequence of memories that examines the significance of hair in relationship to the intersection and symbiosis of queer, mixed-race, and immigrant identities.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Meghana Mysore

Meghana Mysore, from Portland, Oregon, is a 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing. She holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from Yale, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Hollins University where she was the recipient of several awards for her fiction and creative nonfiction. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Pleiades, Indiana Review, The Yale Review, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Passages North, The Rumpus, wildness, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Soft Punk, and the anthology A World Out of Reach (Yale University Press). A 2021 Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction, she has also received support from the Tin House Winter Workshop and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, where she won the second-place prize in prose in their annual contest. 

Meghana writes, “At the conference, I will work on my novel-in-stories, tentatively titled A Canopy of Branches, which follows three generations of an Indian American family based in the Pacific Northwest, and considers inheritance, loss, and memory. I am excited to be inspired by the community of writers at the conference working in different styles and genres, and by the beautiful scenery of the Mendocino Coast!” 

Website: www.meghanamysore.com

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Laura Schmitt

Laura Schmitt is a fiction writer from Green Bay, Wisconsin. She received a B.A. in journalism and English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.F.A in Creative Writing from Hollins University. The winner of the 2022 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Nimrod, Grist Journal, The Boiler, and Electric Literature. She currently works as an Editorial intern at Tin House and indie bookseller in East Nashville. Find her at lauramschmitt.com or on Twitter @LauraSchmitt_

Laura writes, “I'm currently at work on a collection of short stories set in the small towns and cities of Wisconsin and primarily following young girls and women who struggle to grow beyond the bounds of their limitations, both internal and external. The collection explores themes of family, friendship, loss, anxiety, ambition, and class. At Mendocino, I look forward to participating in Margaret Malone’s short fiction workshop and meeting folks in the larger literary community!”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Kira Witkin

Kira Witkin is an essayist and journalist published by NPR, The Missouri Review, the Dallas Morning News, and other publications. She is writing a book about UFO culture and the politics of belief, focusing on reports of alien “abductions” and her upbringing with a UFO-chasing father. 

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Kaitlin Hsu

Kaitlin Hsu (she/her) is a Taiwanese poet by way of the Bay Area. She studied English and Creative Writing at Stanford University, where she also did a Levinthal Tutorial with Paul Tran. Her work is published or forthcoming in Peach Mag, the lickety~split, and Naugatuck River Review. Currently, she is a poetry reader at The Adroit Journal. Last summer, she interned at the Los Angeles Review of Books, organizing their Publishing Workshop.

Kaitlin writes, “I am currently working on a series of poems that examines the relationship between who we love and who we are through narrating my experiences as a queer Asian femme in relation to externally imposed versions of womanhood.”

Website: https://myrefoli.github.io/

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Evan J.

Evan J (he/they) is the programming coordinator for the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, the Fiction Editor for Cloud Lake Literary journal, and a writing workshop facilitator with the Poetry for Our Future! program in Canada. Evan is also a previous winner of the Vallum Award for Poetry, and their debut poetry book, Ripping down half the trees, was published in 2021. For the past five years, Evan lived in northern Canada while teaching poetry and 3D printing to remote Indigenous communities. Now living in Winnipeg, Evan writes short stories.

Evan writes, “My short story characters, predominately of gender-diverse identities, often encounter turbulent scenarios where gender-diverse people have historically been disregarded (hunting trips, wilderness survival, gendered private-schools, Dostoyevskian fan fiction plots). At the conference, I'll be refining these characters, squeezing their narratives in (and out) of various short story formalist constraints.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Yibing Du

Yibing Du is a Chinese writer/poet in the SF Bay Area. Her poems and stories explore the coming-of-age experience and in-betweenness by weaving together the misremembered and the reimagined. She is intrigued by language models, history archives, and her own fears.

Yibing writes, “I hope to revisit novel writing with poetry on my mind and explore alternative story structure with writers of all genres.” 

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Ivan Zhao

Ivan (he/him) is a creative technologist living in San Francisco, CA.  Originally from Seattle, WA, his work can be found in Kernel, Providence Public Library, Silver Sprocket, and is forthcoming in Taper and thehtml.review. His work has been supported by Kundiman and Kearny Street Workshop. 

Ivan writes, “I’m currently working on a hybrid collection of poetry, essays, and collage, centering around digital fragmentation of identity, the queer Chinese american experience, and the role of food in centering and grounding family. I’m excited to hang around other talented writers and the Mendocino coast!”

Website: https://ivanzhao.me 

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship - Rashaan ALEXIS Meneses

Rashaan Alexis Meneses recently earned a Parent-Writer Residency at Mineral School Arts sponsored by Tahoma Literary Review and served as a Bainbridge Resident for Seventh Wave Magazine. She’s received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, The International Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle, UK, the Jacob K. Javits Program, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing along with an Ancinas scholarship from the Community of Writers. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in LitHub, Kartika Review, Puerto Del Sol, New Letters, and The Coachella Review.

She is currently working on a collection of linked essays exploring ways to decolonize her understanding of her mixed race origins as well as re-examine her relationship to nature, place, womanhood, and motherhood. Honored to be a part of the MCWC community, she is eager and hungry to re-engage with those who care about stories and the written word. 

Mendocino County High School Student Scholarship - Phannarai Inkun

Phannarai Inkun is currently a sophomore at the Mendocino High School where they are taking Creative Writing and frequenting the Writer's Club. Originally born in Thailand, they incorporate their experiences as a queer immigrant into their writing whether that be in the form of a short story or a poem. 

Phannarai writes, “I am working on a short story inspired by my dreams for the future and the family I hope to one day have. During the conference, I plan on workshopping this short story to make sure readers get the feeling of home and comfort that I want to achieve.”

Mendocino County High School Student Scholarship - Natalie Gutierrez Moreno

Natalie Gutierrez Moreno was born and raised in Mendocino county and is currently a senior enrolled in Fort Bragg High School. She is first-generation in a hispanic household and the first family member to go to college. She has a huge interest in art, writing/reading poetry, music, and designing. She plans to study Apparel Design and Merchandising at San Francisco State University.

Mendocino County High School Student Scholarship - Frej Barty

Frej Barty is a Mendocino/Fort Bragg local aspiring filmmaker and cinematographer. Always looking for new opportunities to learn filmmaking, he plans on making movies that inspire. He recently finished filming a segment for Felicia Rice’s Heavy Lifting, an art book release film. He is also a roller skating champ, Dungeons and Dragons lover, and nerd.

Frej writes, “For this conference I plan on working on the script for a short film I will produce later in the year. Scriptwriting is nearly the hardest part of filmmaking, but is also where meaning gets made. I hope this conference provides the opportunity to learn about how to finish a project, something I have been struggling with. I also hope to gain insight into techniques, structures, and how to imagine what a film will be like based only on words on a page.”

Link to YouTube account: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy16Dd01FdvnQFJinxsRPfw