A Valentine’s Day MCWC Scholarship Story

This Valentine's Day, we’re excited to share the final installment in our MCWC Scholarship Stories series—with a twist! In honor of Valentine’s Day and the February 15 deadline to apply for a scholarship to MCWC 2021, today we bring you one story in two writers’ voices: MCWC scholarship donor Marion Deeds and MCWC 2020 scholarship recipient Kat Lewis. We hope that Marion and Kat’s stories might inspire you to donate to make MCWC accessible to more writers. Remember, every dollar counts because every dollar changes a writer’s life. Enjoy!

I’m a writer, and I love writing.

Having said that, I’ll be the first to admit that writing is difficult. Having your work respected is even more difficult. The occupation of writing is generally not taken seriously unless you’re one of the handful who routinely have bestsellers and get huge advances. Most of us will never support ourselves solely by doing the thing we love. More basically, for many of us, carving out time to write drafts, mull over ideas, revise, and reflect is a big challenge, since most nonwriters have no idea what the process is. If you’re standing at the window, staring out, they assume, at just the wrong moment, that you’re obviously not busy—since you’re not, you know, writing—so they come up and talk to you, and that glimmer of an idea implodes.

It was always hard for me, and I’m a white woman who is comfortable financially. I had resources. I could usually make time to write on the weekends if I wanted, or use vacation time to begin a revision of a large work.

How much harder is that if you have to work two jobs? Or work and attend classes? And how much harder is it, if you belong to a group that has been systematically diminished, erased, downplayed, and silenced, when you yourself face discrimination every single day?

For me, the Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference was always an oasis, a haven, a retreat. The conference is a treasure trove of resources, and not only the one-on-one sessions, the morning workshops and the afternoon presentations. The connections you make, the friends, people who understand what writing is like, will stay with you forever, and you all provide each other the valuable support writers need. The conference creates the sacred space we each need to welcome and nurture the sparks that flicker in our minds, asking leave to grow.

How do you share something of that much value with those aspiring writers who are brave enough to raise their voices and speak their truths, especially at this time in history? One way is with a scholarship.

I’m honored to be able to provide scholarships to the Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference. I hope the people who get them find the same level of value and inspiration that I always have; that they connect with others, carve out the space they need, and nurture those essential sparks of truth.

Marion Deeds’s gift funds the Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction and the Voices of Diversity Scholarship. She is the author of the novels Copper Road and Aluminum Leaves, both published by Falstaff Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Podcastle, Flash Fiction Online and the Noyo River Review. Check out her Amazon Author page for anthologized works. Find her on Facebook and on Twitter @mariond_d, and read her reviews and column at Fantasy Literature.

Hear Kat Lewis, recipient of Marion Deeds's scholarship, share her story

My name is Kat Lewis.

I am a twenty-six year old Black writer, and I live in Tampa, FL. I am an MFA student at the University of South Florida, where I teach Composition to college freshmen.

I applied for a scholarship to the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference because Julie Buntin is one of my favorite writers. Her book, Marlena, had a great influence on my work, and I am thrilled that I got the opportunity to work with her.

In my workshop, I submitted the opening of my thesis novel. Julie and the rest of the class helped me resolve issues and made me excited to work on this book again. I am now entering the last year of my MFA program, and this experience has given me the confidence to revise and submit a thesis novel that I am proud of.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to work with one of my favorite writers!

Kat Lewis is the author of the short story collection In and of Blood (Weasel Press). Lewis graduated from Johns Hopkins University where she held the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellowship. In 2018, she received a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea. She is currently a MFA student at the University of South Florida.

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Groundbreaking MG/YA with Alex Sanchez

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

With scholarship applications rolling in, we are thrilled to see MCWC 2021 off to a positive start. Scholarship applications are open till February 15th and we encourage all interested writers to apply. Visit mcwc.org/scholarships for more information. MCWC will be hosted online again this year.

We’re kicking off this year’s series of faculty interviews with MCWC 2021 Middle Grade/Young Adult (MG/YA) workshop instructor Alex Sanchez. Alex has published ten MG/YA novels over his twenty years as a writer, including the American Library Association “Best Book for Young Adults” Rainbow Boys, the Lambda Award-winning So Hard to Say, and Bait, which won the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Book Award. His latest novel, The Greatest Superpower, releases this month. Alex shared with us some insight into the success of his writing career.

Your first book, Rainbow Boys, published in 2001, was selected as an American Library Association “Best Book for Young Adults” and led to a three-book series in which all three books were Lambda Literary Award Finalists. What was it like for you writing YA fiction about LGBTQ characters twenty years ago?

Scary. Lonely. I didn’t think anybody would want to read what I wrote. And if anyone did read it, I thought they’d get mad at me. At the same time, I felt I had to write the story that was in my heart even if nobody read it. Because I didn’t imagine I’d be published, I didn’t think of myself as writing YA. At the time, LGBTQ characters in YA fiction barely existed. In the very rare case when a gay character appeared, they usually died tragically or committed suicide. Since no one died in my story, I doubted it would ever be published. But times were changing, and my manuscript found a home with the right publisher at the right time.

Middle Grade/Young Adult is a genre that has exploded into one of the largest publishing markets. What do you like about writing MG/YA and what do you hope to see for the genre’s future?

I write MG/YA because that’s where my “voice” speaks the loudest. Growing up can be challenging for a lot of people, and it definitely was for me. I didn’t have the words to put to my feelings back then. Now, I do, and my “inner teenager” voices all the things I couldn’t express when I was growing up.

You’ve published ten novels, including your newest book, The Greatest Superpower, which releases this month. What would you say is the key to your career’s success and longevity?

Some of it was due to things I had no control over: Having a writing instructor who recommended me to an awesome agent. A publisher and editors who believed in my stories. A publicist who did everything he could to make my debut a success. The things I did have control over included: Finding supportive people who believed in me. Sticking to a daily writing habit. Always striving to improve my writing. Taking writing workshops like those at MCWC!

You have a master’s degree in guidance and counseling and worked as a youth and family counselor. What advice do you have for writers juggling a career with their writing?

Make writing a priority. Write every day, even if it’s only for fifteen minutes. Make yourself close the door, sit down, shift all your devices to airplane mode, set a timer, and don’t let yourself do anything else except write for those fifteen minutes. Eventually writing will become a habit. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish in as little as fifteen minutes a day.

Last year you published a graphic novel, You Brought Me the Ocean. What interested you about this project and was the writing process different than your other novels?

I love creative challenges and trying new things. I’ve always been a visual thinker. My mind sees images. So, the idea of writing a graphic novel excited me. The process turned out far more collaborative than I ever imagined—not only collaborating with the artist but also with the editor, constantly going back and forth as I wrote the script. I loved that creative synergy. I learned a lot that I look forward to sharing in my MCWC seminar!

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To find out more about Alex Sanchez, visit his website at www.alexsanchez.com.

We are now accepting scholarship applications for MCWC 2021. The deadline to apply is February 15. General registration will open March 1, and you will be able to register for the morning workshop of your choice after that date; there is no application required to attend MCWC. We recommend you register as soon as you can after March 1 to secure a spot in the workshop of your choice. Workshops are limited to ten participants this year and all spots are first come, first served.

Join us ONLINE for MCWC 2021

After the success of our virtual MCWC 2020, we’re holding MCWC 2021 online as well. All events will be hosted over Zoom, so you can take advantage of all that MCWC has to offer from the comfort and safety of your home.

Each workshop meets all three mornings of the conference and features three hours of instruction, exercises, and manuscript discussion led by our expert faculty, listed below. Limited to just ten participants, these intimate workshops provide a personalized learning experience focused on the art and craft of writing.

Afternoon events include open mics and seminars on a variety of topics. Our Paths to Publishing panelists will share their wide range of publishing success stories, and our Blind Critique panelists are ready to give you feedback (anonymously) on your opening lines. You may even get a chance to pitch your book to agents in our Pitch Panel.

Scholarship applications open January 1 and close February 15. For full application details, visit mcwc.org/scholarships. General registration opens on March 1, and all workshops are first-come, first-served, so don’t wait to grab your spot once registration opens!

Wendy C. Ortiz

Alaya Dawn Johnson

Chris Dennis

Keynote Speaker: Wendy C. Ortiz

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of three books: the critically acclaimed Excavation: A Memoir (2014); Hollywood Notebook (2015); and the genre-breaking dreamoir Bruja (2016). In 2016 Bustle named her one of “9 Women Writers Who Are Breaking New Nonfiction Territory.” Wendy’s work has been profiled or featured in the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the National Book Critics Circle Small Press Spotlight blog.

Speculative Fiction: Alaya Dawn Johnson

Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of seven novels for adults and young adults. Her most recent novel for adults, Trouble the Saints, was released in July 2020 from Tor books. A short story collection, Reconstruction, is forthcoming in January 2021 from Small Beer Press. Her young adult novel The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, while her novel Love Is the Drug won the Andre Norton/Nebula Award for Middle Grade/Young Adult fiction.

Short Fiction: Chris Dennis

Chris Dennis is the author of the story collection Here is What You Do (Soho Press, 2019). His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Playgirl, McSweeney’s, Granta, Lit Hub, and Guernica. He holds a master’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis, where he also received a postgraduate fellowship. He lives in Southern Illinois.

Sam Krowchenko

Lillian Li

Krys Malcom Belc

Emerging Writers: Sam Krowchenko

Sam Krowchenko’s work has appeared in Salon, Full Stop, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He received an MFA in Fiction from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. He works as an inventory manager and bookseller at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and hosts the store's official podcast Shelf Talking.

Novel: Lillian Li

Lillian Li is the author of the novel Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was an NPR Best Book of 2018, and a finalist for the Women’s Prize. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Granta, One Story, Bon Appetit, and Travel & Leisure. Originally from the D.C. metro area, she lives in Ann Arbor.

Memoir: Krys Malcolm Belc

Krys Malcolm Belc is the author of the forthcoming memoir The Natural Mother of the Child (Counterpoint) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet). His essays have been featured in Granta, The Rumpus, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere, and his work has been anthologized in Best of the Net 2018, Wigleaf Top 50, and in The Best of Brevity: Twenty Years of Groundbreaking Flash Nonfiction. Krys is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner and their three young children.

Saretta Morgan

Suzanne Rivecca

Alex Sanchez

Poetry: Saretta Morgan

Saretta Morgan uses text, etching, sculpture, and video to engage relationships between ecology and migration. She is based between Phoenix and Mohave Valley, Arizona where she teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and is an active member of the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix, which supports the safe passage of migrants in the U.S. Mexico borderlands. Saretta is author of the chapbooks, Feeling Upon Arrival and room for a counter interior. Recent work can be found at Triple Canopy, The Volta, The Colorado Review, and Academy of American Poets.

Nonfiction: Suzanne Rivecca

Suzanne Rivecca is a former Wallace Stegner fellow and the author of a story collection, Death is Not an Option (WW Norton, 2010), which won the Rome Prize in Literature and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Story Prize, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and her work has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes and has been included in Best American Short Stories.

MG/YA: Alex Sanchez

Alex Sanchez has published ten novels, including the American Library Association “Best Book for Young Adults” Rainbow Boys, the Lambda Award-winning So Hard to Say, and Bait, which won the Tomás Rivera Mexican American Book Award. His full-length graphic novel for DC Comics titled You Brought Me the Ocean came out in 2020.

Elise Capron

Tricia Skinner

Elise Capron, Agent

Elise Capron is an agent at the California-based Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, established over 40 years ago, which is known for guiding the careers of many best-selling fiction and non-fiction authors, including Amy Tan, Lisa See, Maxine Hong Kingston, Eric Foner, and many more. Elise has been with SDLA for 18 years. On the fiction side, Elise is interested in character-driven literary fiction for the adult market. She aims to work with writers who are getting their work published regularly in magazines and who have a realistic sense of the market and their audience. On the non-fiction front, Elise is looking primarily for well-written narrative non-fiction in the areas of cultural studies, science, medicine, and the environment. She is particularly keen to work with journalists and historians.

Tricia Skinner, Agent

Tri­cia Skin­ner was raised in Detroit, Michigan. She obtained her undergraduate degree from the nationally acclaimed Journalism Institute for Media Diversity at Wayne State University and earned her graduate degree from Southern Methodist University. Professionally, she began her writing career as a newspaper reporter and wrote for The Detroit News, Investor’s Business Daily, MSN, and The Houston Chronicle. Tricia has 20 years of experience working with the video game industry in various roles, including public relations, industry relations, and writing/editing. She is also a fantasy author (represented by Fuse co-founder Laurie McLean). Inclusiveness in genre fiction is dear to Tricia’s heart. She specializes in Adult fiction and very select Young Adult and Middle Grade fiction.

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New Opportunities for MCWC

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

MCWC Executive Director Lisa Locascio and this year’s Paths to Publishing Panel, including Ginny Rorby, Cameron Lund, and Tomas Moniz (Photo credit: MCWC Social Media Manager Adriane Tharp)

MCWC 2020, our first-ever online conference, was a resounding success! Throughout the four day virtual gathering, many participants expressed how grateful they felt for the opportunity to focus on writing with the MCWC community in the midst of this year’s turmoil. Though our Mendocino-themed virtual backgrounds (featuring photography by Mimi Carroll) couldn’t fully replicate the magic of gathering on the Coast, we were still able to provide the intensive craft instruction, high quality faculty, and community connections that make up the heart of MCWC. As we head into a new conference year, we are making the most of the opportunities available in our virtual state.

Due to the virtual format, we were able to connect with writers all over the United States this year. We even had international writers joining us from the UK, France, Canada, and Taiwan. MCWC 2020 scholarship recipient Kailyn McCord created two maps of all the participants’ locations (for those that opted-in to be included): one conventional Google map, and one beautiful hand-drawn map showing on which indigenous lands each MCWC 2020 participant was located. Cclick on the images below to see them larger. We are so thrilled to have connected with people from all over the world this year, including writers who joined us from Paris, France, Taipei, Taiwan, and Alberta, Canada!

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MCWC 2020 was also such a unique conference because of the generous donors who went above and beyond to support the MCWC community during the COVID crisis. We cannot thank our donors enough. Because of their generosity, we were able to offer an unprecedented amount of scholarships this year—roughly 40 participants received financial support to attend MCWC 2020!

We are looking forward to MCWC 2021 and are taking what we learned during MCWC 2020 to start planning next year’s conference. We are monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic as we begin to create MCWC 2021. The safety of the Mendocino community and our participants, faculty, and volunteers is our utmost priority.

MCWC 2020 Co-President Ginny Rorby

MCWC 2020 Co-President Nona Smith

MCWC 2020 NRR Editor Susan Bono

MCWC 2020 marked the end of an era for the conference leadership, as long-time board members Ginny Rorby, Nona Smith, and Susan Bono stepped down from their roles at MCWC. We are sad to see them go, but wish them all the best and are so grateful they will still be a part of the MCWC community. Ginny and Nona will be joining our Sustaining Members (a superpowered team of former MCWC Board members and other cherished community members), while Susan will stay with us till the end of the year to help support the transition of the Noyo River Review to its new editorial team.

MCWC 2021 President Kara Vernor

We are delighted to announce that MCWC board member Kara Vernor is stepping up to be the new MCWC President. Kara has years of non-profit experience and will bring her management expertise to her new role as President. Laura Welter will continue to be our Vice President and Kate Erickson will continue as our Treasurer, and Anna Levy will join the Executive Committee as Secretary. MCWC is so lucky to have this incredible team leading the way into what is sure to be another successful year!

Announcing
MCWC Winter Virtual Publishing Series

At MCWC 2020, many of you asked for more instruction about different types of publishing opportunities. We’re happy to announce a series of Saturday lunchtime seminars throughout the year, each one focused on a specific publishing topic, taught by the high-quality faculty you’ve come to expect from MCWC.

Our first seminar, Save The…Novel? will held via Zoom at 12 PM PST on December 6th and taught by Francesca Lia Block. Save the Cat by Blake Snyder is considered either a bible for screenwriters or a superficial and formulaic shortcut. However, more and more, novelists as well as screenwriters are applying Snyder’s beats to their work. In this seminar, we will go over Snyder’s beats, give examples of how to apply them to individual student novels and then, as a class, create a sample outline. We will raise the question: are methods of this type an improvement, or do they signal the demise of the novel? And if so, what intuitive modes of storytelling can be used as an alternative?

Future seminars will include Submitting to Literary Magazines with Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo in January and Publishing with Small Presses in February with Diana Arterian.

Tickets for seminar will be $20, or pay $50 and attend all three! This seminar series is an important fundraiser for us, but if the ticket price is prohibitory for you, please email MCWC Executive Director Lisa Locascio at director@mcwc.org. Full details and registration information will be available on our website, mcwc.org, in the coming weeks.

Zooming into the Future of MCWC

by Isabel Beeman, MCWC 2020 Conference Assistant

MCWC is arriving at a milestone in its history as a writers’ conference: for the first time ever, the 2020 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference will be held entirely online. Although many of us will miss the breathtaking scenery of the Mendocino Coast, the virtual nature of this year’s conference has already had a positive impact on our community. 

The pivot to online opened the door for better inclusion and accessibility within MCWC. Thanks to the generosity of our donors, our 2020 conference will be host to more scholarship recipients than ever before. This tremendous support combined with the online programming has significantly shifted the demographics of the conference. 

In comparison to MCWC 2019, the number of participants aged 14-34 has more than doubled this year. There has also been a significant shift in the racial identifications of conference participants. BIPOC (black, Indigenous, and people of color) writers account for nearly 40% of 2020 participants. The MCWC board has gone to great lengths to create a conference experience that will be welcoming, enjoyable, and safe for all participants, with a new Code of Conduct in place that highlights MCWC’s commitment to social justice. We are particularly grateful to our 2019 faculty, especially Myriam Gurba, for their insights and reflection on the MCWC experience, which led to the creation of our Code of Conduct.

This month, I spoke to Executive Director Lisa Locascio to get a better idea of what made these big changes possible, and to hear what she’s most excited about at this year’s extraordinary conference. 

MCWC Executive Director welcoming participants to MCWC 2019

What do you believe made the amount of diversity at this year’s conference possible? 

Since joining MCWC as as Executive Director in 2018, my priority has been to make the conference more diverse, prestigious, and accessible. We saw some of the fruits of that strategy with our 2019 conference, which brought many new writers into our community. In 2020, we had a number of intersecting circumstances that coalesced to make the conference more diverse than ever before. 

First, I’d like to qualify what I mean by diverse, which is a group of people (faculty and participants alike) that not only reflects the diversity of our nation and world but which specifically holds space for people whom structural inequality and oppression have conspired to bar from literary spaces. My goal has been to specifically recruit and serve BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers. We have historically been pretty successful at creating a welcoming place for writers over 65 years old, which is a strength we want to maintain and build on. 

So, what prevents BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers from attending literary conferences? Money. The aforementioned group of people are far more likely to have been subject to centuries of purposeful exclusion, and worse, designed to uphold white supremacy in our society. Whether they are offered through MFA programs, literary organizations like MCWC, or other institutions, workshops and seminars cost money. Of course I’d love it if MCWC had some deep-pocketed patron that enabled us to make our offerings free to all. But one of the great things about MCWC is that we are small and nimble, which allows us to be flexible and adaptable in the face of challenges. 

We had the goal of serving more BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers. Then we were lucky to have two unusually generous scholarship funds established in late 2019 and early 2020. One of these funds is the Anne G. Locascio Memorial Scholarship, which was created in honor of my mother’s memory after she passed away in early February. The other, which we are formally announcing here for the first time, is the Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship Fund, which was created by a donor who wishes to remain anonymous. The Tholakele Dube Fund is named in honor of a young South African nurse and funds conference tuition for writers under 30 years old.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. So now we had our intersecting circumstances: our desire to bring more BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers to MCWC, the wonderful generosity of donors who contributed to the Locascio and Tholakele Dube funds, and a once-in-a-lifetime worldwide event remaking society in real time. Our enrollment pretty much screeched to a halt in early March. We worked to pivot MCWC 2020 to online, but we didn’t see another registration until mid-May. So I was looking at our scholarship funds,and thinking about all of the great writers who might want to attend a literary conference, but due to the pandemic and its economic impacts, would find registration that much more inaccessible. I decided to target and recruit the kinds of writers I had been wanting to bring to MCWC. 

We announced two scholarships for Black writers and received so many amazing applications that we ended up inviting five Black writers to join us as scholarship recipients. I also went back through our scholarship applications and extended offers to several writers whom we had not originally been able to fund. Ultimately, we ended up with many more BIPOC, queer, disabled, and poor writers than we would have had otherwise. I am very grateful to them for joining our community, and we have been working hard to make sure they have the best possible MCWC experience.

What do you see as some potential benefits of a virtual conference? What are you most excited about? 

Coming to Mendocino for MCWC is a special joy. I think that in addition to the events of the conference itself, everyone looks forward to taking the winding drive up the coast, staying by the sea, walking on the headlands, and visiting the beautiful towns of Mendocino and Fort Bragg. Due to the pandemic, however, we all need to stay safe at home, especially because infrastructure in remote areas like the Mendocino Coast are extremely vulnerable to potential outbreaks. 

Although we have designed our online schedule to offer some opportunities for socializing, MCWC 2020 is more of a working conference than a social conference. Because of this change, I think MCWC 2020 participants are joining us this year first and foremost because they want to work with our incredible faculty. We are honored to be able to provide a space for creativity, meaningful critique, and artistic exchange. 

The online format enables us to record our afternoon seminars. These recordings will be available online for two weeks following the conference, so for the first time ever a participant so inclined could in fact attend every single seminar. There’s a term from sales, a “bluebird,” which means an unexpected positive consequence, and the way that Zoom allows us to record and save these seminars is definitely a bluebird, as is the fact that our public faculty readings will now be open to everyone all around the world. Anyone can click on the link to one of these readings and tune in. 

Join us on Thursday, July 30, at 5:30 PM PST for reading by MCWC faculty

My dream has always been to bring the world to Mendocino, but the reality is that travel to Mendocino County is a significant expense for almost everyone. But this year, the cost of that travel is not required to participate in MCWC. That might be the biggest bluebird of all.  

We are also learning from this first online experience, which is more accessible for some but not all. Internet access infrastructure is not equally distributed across the country, and particularly not within Mendocino County itself. It shouldn’t be this way, but unfortunately someone without a stable internet connection cannot attend MCWC online. And we are learning and thinking about ways we can make our next conference, whether online or in person, more accessible to disabled writers. People with hearing loss, particularly, struggle with Zoom, and unfortunately the cost of closed captioning the conference is not currently within our reach. So that’s another way we’re thinking about accessibility, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to continue trying to make the best conference for everyone. 

What kind of lasting impact do you anticipate MCWC 2020 will have on the conference in years to come? Do you plan on continuing to incorporate virtual engagement, even in a post-Covid world? What does that look like to you?

Obviously we all hope to reconvene in the beautiful environment of the Mendocino Coast for MCWC 2021, but the reality is that it is unclear when it will be safe for a large group of people to come together indoors again. In the recent Mendocino Virtual Town Hall on COVID19 Response and Recovery, State Senator Mike McGuire shared that he is telling people to prepare for another twelve months of pandemic conditions. So we’re very glad to have the opportunity to go online and learn about the needs and contours of an online conference this year in case we need to remain online next year, or pivot back online at some point in the future. 

We’re also always hoping to learn from our participants what changes and offerings they want to see in the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. For example, for several years, the Board has discussed the possibility of launching a winter conference, but in order for us to launch an undertaking of that scale, we’d need to know that there was significant interest in such an event. Feedback is everything to us. We’re here to serve! My goal is to keep creating new, inventive, and meaningful ways for the MCWC name to bring high-quality literary education to writers from all walks of life. The Conference has changed my life more than once, always for the better. I hope for it to have an equally profound and meaningful impact on all of its participants.

Join us on Friday, July 31, at 5:30 PM PST for reading by MCWC faculty

With that, we would like to leave our 2020 participants with some tips on how to make your virtual experience as fulfilling and exciting as possible:

• Show some personality or create beautiful scenery with a virtual background. This feature can be easily found under preferences on the zoom application (shown in the screenshot below). Just use the + icon to upload an image of your choice. Maybe you write historical fiction, and want to discuss your work with the backdrop of 1920s Russia. Or perhaps you want to get in the spirit of a remote writer’s retreat and use a photo of the Mendocino coast. The possibilities are endless! (We recommend experimenting with this function on zoom before the conference, as it can work differently on individual computers).

• Take some time to thoughtfully design and curate the space you’ll physically be in during the conference. It might be tempting to simply roll out of bed and into your desk chair, but the impact of getting creative with your space can go a long way. Instead of participating in the conference from your room as is, think about how you can maximize your comfort and happiness. This could mean lots of things: cleaning the day before, setting up easy snacks for yourself, lighting some candles…what do you wear to get inspired and start writing? Where do you like to be? Support your energy levels and creativity in any way that feels right to you! 

• If you plan to submit to our Blind Critique or Open Mic sessions, please keep in mind that writers will be chosen at random, and that not everyone can be chosen for reasons of time limitation. For Blind Critique, please prepare the first 200 words of the piece on which you’d like to receive feedback. For Open Mic, you will have two minutes to read from your work. Sign-up forms for both events will be sent out in advance of the conference, so watch your inbox!

• Have fun shopping our virtual bookstore to support our beloved Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino. You can also pick up some MCWC swag through our store on Bonfire, featuring artwork by Mendocino local Deth P. Sun.

We are excited to take this huge step forward and we appreciate all of you for supporting us through this time of change and growth. There is much to learn from this year’s unique event, and hopefully it will have a lasting impact on how we think about what it means to be a community of writers in the years to come.

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Writing Tips and Encouragement from Kerry Madden-Lunsford

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

We hope you will continue writing as protest and self-care. This month’s faculty spotlight interview is chock full of practical advice for a thriving writing practice from MCWC 2020 MG/YA workshop instructor Kerry Madden-Lunsford.

If you would like to come write with us online at the end of July, keep in mind that registration for MCWC 2020 closes on June 30. Seats are available in many of our workshops (including Kerry’s MG/YA workshop), as well as our one-day Publishing Bootcamp. Whether you’d like to take part in the full three-day experience with the workshop of your choice or just spend Sunday learning from our publishing professionals—or both—MCWC’s virtual conference is the perfect writing stay-cation.

Kerry Madden-Lunsford’s prolific writing career includes novels, nonfiction, and picture books. Her children’s novels include Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana Song, and Jessie’s Mountain. Her first novel, Offsides, was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age. Her book Up Close Harper Lee made Booklist’s Ten Top Biographies for Youth. She has published essays and stories in the Los Angeles Times, Five Points, Shenandoah, the Washington Post, and more. Her newest picture book, Ernestine’s Milky Way, was published by Schwartz & Wade/Random House in 2019. She is the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and teaches in the MFA program at Antioch University.

You have experience teaching online for both UAB and Antioch. Can you share any tips for our participants for getting the most out of an online workshop?

I love teaching online both at UAB and at Antioch. I use TC Boyle’s words about writing workshops for all my teaching, whether online or in person: “Think of your colleagues in the workshop—and me, as well—as your trial audience. We will try our best to interpret your work while you, like a bacteriologist wrapped up in a lab coat, will analyze our analyses. We are all looking for great writing and we are all looking to see writers go in their own directions and develop their own voices.  We will be a community. We will be your allies.”  

I truly believe we become better writers when we listen to stories and learn to offer generous feedback. I am not talking about touchy-feely, “that was great!” feedback. I would encourage you to think about what you experienced listening to the story. What were the emotions and images running through your head? What questions do you have for the writer? A workshop is a place to bring work that is new and raw, and it can be terrifying to share work, so the goal is to be generous, thoughtful, and respectful readers and listeners.

In this interview with the UAB Reporter, you talk about the woman who inspired your latest children’s book, Ernestine’s Milky Way. How was your experience of honoring that individual through writing? What advice do you have for any writers translating an important relationship into their fiction?

I struggle with fear and hold myself back, thinking “What if they don’t like it? What if they hate it?” Ernestine first told me that story in 2009, but I didn’t give myself permission to write it until 2014, and then it was bought in 2016 and published in 2019. So, I absolutely do not recommend my on-the-fence/dilly-dallying way. I did write an essay about Ernestine that came out this year in the North Carolina Literary Review, which was so much fun to write because it was all the stuff that couldn’t be squeezed into a picture book.

I think if you write a person with love and joy, you will honor the relationship. I used to write with contempt and made my first writers’ group suffer until there was a mutiny—“No more Jake!” Jake was inspired by my late and infuriating brother-in-law, whom I did not write with love. Only when I began to write him with love did he find a home as Uncle Buddy in my Smoky Mountain/Maggie Valley Trilogy children’s novels.

Of course, you won’t please everyone, and you’ll go bananas trying, but do go easy on yourself and write with love, and if you can’t do that, write it anyway. You can always ask for forgiveness if you want to—much better than to ask for permission. Give yourself permission to tell the story that’s burning in your heart.

You have an extensive and varied list of publications. How do you manage your writing time and keep moving your projects forward? Do you tend to have multiple projects in the works all at once?

It’s really hard, I’ll just be honest. Some days, I have more bandwidth than others. I do have multiple projects going so that if one comes to a screeching halt for some reason, I can turn to another with fresh perspective. I might have a novel that’s giving me hell, so I’ll turn to a picture book or an essay that will occur to me, and I usually write essays in one sitting and follow up with lots of editing. I do have to be mindful of not falling into the sinkhole of revision. I use Submittable and that helps me keep track, too, although I do go through dry periods where I don’t submit for a while. I also keep a notebook by my bed, and I orbit around my writing spaces—desk, front porch, wingback, under the cherry tree, airplane seat (back in the day) and bed.

You mention your family in many of your interviews. Can you share with us more about the successful collaboration between your family life and your writing life? Do you have any encouragement for those struggling to balance both, especially right now while so many people may still be home with their families?

I remember a friend from my early days of being a young mother who would draw a chalk-line and her two-year-old knew not to cross that line when Mommy was writing. That friend wrote a hugely successful book, but I never managed the chalk-line strategy. Sometimes the kids were sitting on my lap when I was writing and I couldn’t escape feeling desperate—that I would never finish or write anything of meaning—and I wanted to unpeel them from my body. But the good times I remember are the times I let go and invited them into the story. I would let them dictate a story to me for fun. Or I encouraged them illustrate a story, and they sometimes did so under my desk while I finished something. Or I would look at them and see one kid’s braces or another kid’s tooth coming in and use it in my story.

When children do grow up though, it’s wonderful, especially if they find things they love. I loved collaborating with my daughter, Lucy, on Nothing Fancy About Kathryn & Charlie because she’s such a beautiful artist. Of course, there were days when she thought I hated her illustrations because I was quiet about them, when really I was being quiet because I was getting dog food (in our garage/her art studio) and didn’t want to disturb her. But I would collaborate with her again in a heartbeat. I would love to collaborate with all three kids in the future, but only if they suggest it or want it—and in the meantime, my sister and I are beginning to talk about collaborating on a graphic novel for teens called Coach about growing up as daughters of a college football coach. I wrote Offsides, but there are more stories to tell as sisters, being the oldest and youngest, in a football family.

In this interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith, you describe your long career and some of the things you wished you’d done differently looking back. Can you share a few tips for our participants hoping to make careers out of their writing? 

I wrote this essay ten years ago called “Rock Bottom,” before I understood there were many trap doors under my “rock bottom” waiting for me.

Looking back at what I would have done differently, I would have avoided ghostwriting. I would advise writers to never accept a ghostwriting job unless you have a solid contract and you really want to do the work. But if you are trying to write your own stories, know that if you ghostwrite, your brain and heart will be eaten up with someone else’s story. So, if you don’t have to ghostwrite, don’t do it, or do it once and get out it out of your system, because you will learn a lot.

I would say this for any job—whether it’s teaching, ghostwriting, mothering—pay yourself first. There are days when I have a stack of stories to edit from students or beloved friends, but I do my own writing first. I didn’t used to do this, and sometimes, I still don’t, but whenever I work on my own stories first, I don’t feel resentful or destroyed by editing someone else’s.

Finally, don’t get your self-worth wrapped in your next book contract, because sometimes they will be few and far between. I recommend choosing friendship, meditation, sleep, a good diet, and kindness to yourself even on the darkest of days. And of course most of all: write.

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To learn more about Kerry, visit her website at www.kerrymadden.com.

To sign up for Kerry’s MG/YA workshop at MCWC 2020, or any other workshop, visit mcwc.org. Registration closes June 30th.

A Message From MCWC

Normally our June newsletter features our last faculty interview before the close of registration at the end of the month. But this is not a normal year and we feel it would be a disservice to those fighting for justice to pretend as such. MCWC supports the goal of creating an anti-racist society, and we are committed to listening to and learning from all voices working towards that goal.

We believe writing and reading are powerful methods of processing, expressing feelings, and fostering the internal change that is necessary for societal change. If you have not already done so, we encourage you to educate yourself using resources such as these:

• Anti-racist literary list from the East Bay Booksellers

• Anti-racist reading list compiled by Ibram X. Kendi in the New York Times

• Anti-racist reading list for all ages from Vroman’s Bookstore

• Anti-racist reading list from Bookshop

Please also consider donating to one of the black literary organizations on this list compiled by our Social Media Manager, Adriane Tharp: https://twitter.com/MCWConf/status/1269003529974280193

Join Susan Stinson at MCWC 2020—Online!

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

Yes, you heard that right: MCWC will be venturing ONLINE for this year’s conference. In light of COVID-19 and Califonia’s shelter-in-place measures, we cannot safely welcome participants to the Mendocino Coast for MCWC 2020. But we feel that writing and community are as important now than ever, and have decided to offer a virtual experience in line with the instructive, supportive, and celebratory conferences we’ve provided for the last thirty years.

This year, though we cannot be together in person, we have the chance to create a conference that will connect us in this time of isolation and loneliness. We are embracing the opportunity to redesign our gathering and bring our cherished traditions—deep and productive workshops in ten subjects, afternoon seminars presented by a range of faculty, opportunities to consult with publishing industry experts, readings by our world-class authors, open mics, and other opportunities to make connections—to our participants from across the distance.

In this month’s spotlight interview, we are featuring MCWC’s first-ever historical fiction workshop instructor, Susan Stinson. Winner of the Lambda Literary Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, Susan is the author of four novels, including Martha Moody (soon to be reissued by Small Beer Press), Venus of Chalk (Lambda Literary Finalist), and Fat Girl Dances with Rocks. Her latest novel, Spider in a Tree (Small Beer Press), is inspired by Northampton, Massachusetts in the time of eighteenth century preacher and slave-owner Jonathan Edwards.

Though your latest novel may appear to be a departure from your previous themes of queerness and body image, you explain the process that led you to write Spider in a Tree in this interview on Bookslut, saying, “I feel that the book, as an object, brings together these different worlds that have always existed in me.” Can you speak a little more about the process of exploration and how you followed your writing into new territory?

One of the things that brought me to write Spider in a Tree is the landscape of Northampton, Massachusetts, where I live. That I am a lesbian and that I wanted to be a writer is why I am here, since I moved here for a relationship more than thirty years ago. This area has a rich history of literary, queer, and adventurous women’s culture, including Emily Dickinson, Smith College, and, as I discovered, Jonathan Edwards. Edwards is an important part of literary—he’s an extraordinary writer—and religious history, and at first it felt transgressive for me to write about him since all of my previous books had centered on the complex lives of fat lesbians. But much of his family is buried in the cemetery across the street from my apartment. I ran across the gravestones as I walked and wrote there, and began imagining their lives. I was raised a Protestant, and am a descendant of English immigrants from many generations back, so this felt like a story that was part of my heritage. Calvinist attitudes towards the body and sexuality had profoundly shaped me (and many contemporary institutions) without me being fully aware of it. When I learned that people were enslaved in the Edwards household, an exploration of what that meant, and continues to mean, became central to the story.

In this interview with Write Angles, you describe the ten-year writing and researching process behind Spider in a Tree. Did you anticipate the book would be such an intensive project? Did the research come naturally to you or was it a skill set you had to develop? How did you keep momentum for the project over such a long writing period?

I had no idea how long it would take when I started! I had to learn the skills for research. They were much more varied and exciting than I expected. I became a bit obsessed. My research took me places like Budapest for a Jonathan Edwards conference, and all sorts of expeditions to find an eighteenth century meeting house, for instance, or details of Jonathan Edwards’s clothing and other household items in his will. The generosity of researchers and scholars was a great gift. The landscape in the town where I live became a kind of living archive. I rode an adult tricycle all over town, and wrote outside in all seasons, trying to get direct sensory information for my explorations in the past. The urgency of all I didn’t know kept me going. I started giving cemetery tours once a year around Jonathan Edwards’s birthday, and the ongoing interest the people who showed up for those and for readings gave me a boost, too.

When I read Spider in a Tree, I was impressed by your ability to capture the culture of the characters in such a complete way; I felt like I was immersed in a different time period, but could still see the cultural connections between the historical characters and current mindsets present in our society today relating to evangelicalism, sexism, and racism. How much of that successful world building would you attribute to research and how much comes from your imagination?

Thank you. It helped that Jonathan Edwards was a writer, so reading him gave me a direct line into his worldview and the richest eighteenth century Calvinist language—both in his sermons and treatises, and also in his letters and other personal writings. He wrote beautifully about his wife, Sarah, when he was courting her. One big challenge for this book was that there was so much writing and scholarship that centered on Jonathan Edwards, so how was I going to create deep, accurate characters who saw the world differently? I did as much research as I could, then, grounded in that, I made imaginative leaps. Unexpected imagery came up through insects. I was constantly running into them on my trike rides around town, and Jonathan Edwards included spider and insect imagery in his work, so the rule became that whenever I encountered an insect, I had to stop what else I was doing and write about what it was doing. That helped me find centers of experience other than Jonathan Edwards.

In this interview with Plum, you discuss the choice to follow your passions in writing, rather than pursuing more commercial goals. What advice do you have for writers tackling unique projects that speak to them, but may not be easy to market?

The most important thing in sustaining a life as a writer is to find a community of other writers. Writing friends are invaluable as first readers, cheering squads, and for deepening the pleasure in the process of writing, which—believe it or not—really is the best part. As the current upheavals in life as we know it make very clear, marketing is unpredictable. Writing a good story or a book about something that fascinates you is a transformative experience beyond anything that can be bought or sold.

Would you like to share any thoughts on writing during the current events of COVID-19?

I want to say one thing about writing historical fiction in the time of COVID-19. Writing is inherently an optimistic act because it presumes a future reader. It is an act of trust in the future. For me, stories from the past hold invaluable insights and possibilities. People have been through a lot on this earth. Beings of all kinds, beyond the human, have adapted and survived under tremendous pressure. The life force of all of that survival—along with all of the specific messiness of individual human minds, feelings and relationships—that’s the stuff of wonderful, necessary, urgent, illuminating, comforting art. Writing from history is a way of knowing more about the ground we are standing on. That is such a good way to get ready to take the next step.

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To find out more about Susan Stinson, check out her website at www.susanstinson.net.

To register for MCWC 2020 visit mcwc.org. For questions regarding the online conference, email info@mcwc.org.

Congratulations to the MCWC 2020 Scholarship Winners

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

MCWC 2020 Update: We here at MCWC are closely monitoring the current situation around COVID-19. The health of both our participants and our community here on the Coast are of utmost importance to us. While we wait for more information over the coming weeks, we are looking into alternate options for MCWC 2020, including the possibility of holding the conference online. We will be in touch with more information closer to May/June, but for now, we are still taking registrations. In addition, we have decided to waive our cancellation fee this year for all registrants. 

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email us at info@mcwc.org. This is a very uncertain time for us all, and our thoughts are with the MCWC community. 

We are thrilled to welcome this year’s scholarship winners to MCWC! The following writers were selected out of a highly competitive field of applicants. We asked them to tell us a little about their current project and/or what they hope to get out of their conference experience.

Scholarships strengthen the MCWC community by bringing in talented individuals who may not be able to attend otherwise. These opportunities would not be possible without the support of our generous donors. We cannot thank them enough!

BYERLEY MEMORIAL NOVEL SCHOLARSHIP

Antonia Angress was born in Los Angeles and raised in San José, Costa Rica. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Arts & Letters, Lunch Ticket, and more, and has been nominated for New Stories from the Midwest 2020. Her work has received awards, recognition, and support from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, the Faulkner Society, and the Writers’ League of Texas. She’s a graduate of Brown University and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota, where she’s a College of Liberal Arts Graduate Fellow.

Antonia writes: “I’m working on a novel set in the art world during the Occupy Wall Street movement. I loved Julie Buntin’s Marlena and I’m looking forward to working with her on a chapter of my manuscript.”

DOUG FORTIER SHORT FICTION SCHOLARSHIP

Angie Sijun Lou is from Seattle and Shanghai. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the American Poetry Review, FENCE, Black Warrior Review, the Adroit Journal, the Asian American Literary Review, Hyphen, the Margins, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow in Fiction and a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also teaches calculus and poetry at San Quentin State Prison.

Angie writes: “I will be working on a series of interlinked short stories that contend with the Asian American diaspora, rituals, suburbia, and capitalist realism.”

Founder’s Scholarship for Fiction Writers - Historical Fiction

Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer scribbling about race, colonization, and women who don’t toe the line. Her stories have appeared, or are forthcoming in Porter House Review, Atticus Review, Jezebel, Fiction Attic Press, Fiction Factory, Mekong Teahouse, Untapped Cities, and more. Her work was recently a finalist for the Porter House Review Editor’s Prize judged by Carmen Maria Machado. Vanessa is based in New York where she is an MFA candidate at The New School, after a ten-year career in public relations. She has a B.A. in Political Economy from UC Berkeley. You can find her at: https://twitter.com/vanjchan

Vanessa writes: “I am excited to work on my historical novel about three siblings trying to find humanity during the Japanese Occupation of Malaysia during WWII. I’m thrilled to be working with Susan Stinson and my fellow historical fiction writers—excavating from one’s own family and nation’s history is sensitive and challenging, and I hope to build the craft skills and the community to help me do this responsibly.”

GINNY RORBY MG/YA SCHOLARSHIP

Alicia London’s debut middle grade novel, Land of Sweet and Bitter, received first place for MG/YA in the 2019 MCWC Writing Contest. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two young daughters.

Alicia writes: “My novel is set in rural Bolivia where I lived and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer for three years, and my characters face many of the difficulties I witnessed while living there. I am interested in sharing unfamiliar worlds and perspectives with middle grade readers.”

Hether Ludwick First Taste Scholarship

Gerardo Pacheco Matus is a Mayan Native and recipient of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, The Frost Place, Macondo and the Miami Writers’ Institute. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared and are forthcoming from the Grantmakers in the Arts, Apricity Press, Amistad Howard-University, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, The Packinghouse Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, West Branch Wired, Four Way Review, The Cortland Review, Nashville Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, Memorious Magazine, Tin House Magazine, Play on Words, and in the first CantoMundo folios at Anomaly Press.

Gerardo writes: “One of the many positive outcomes from participating at MCWC 2020 is to be able to have time and space to revise and write new poems. In addition, I am super excited to be part of the intimate and interactive writing workshops, and I believe that I will be able to write new poems as a result.”

MCWC POETRY SCHOLARSHIP

Janferie Stone has been a resident of the Mendocino Coast for many years. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript, two short stories and a novel/memoir about Communal living and marijuana cultivation in the Emerald Triangle. Previous publications include essays in and co-editing of West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California (2012) and stories and poetry in the Chicago Quarterly and Canary.

Janferie writes: “I looks forward to MCWC for feedback on the Commune project, inspiration and focus.”

NORMA WATKINS MEMOIR SCHOLARSHIP

Olivia Won is a writer, producer, and plant-tender living in her hometown of Oakland, California. She currently works at KQED, where she writes about Bay Area food culture and produces the long-running television program Check, Please! Bay Area. She’s obsessed with female desire, the Hulu show PEN15, Jenny Odell, and winter kishus.

Olivia writes: “I am currently working on novel about my relationship with my halmoni that explores food as a love language and a medium for building intergenerational resilience in the face of diasporic traumas.”

Soroptimists International of Fort Bragg Nonfiction Scholarship

Kailyn McCord writes fiction and nonfiction in Oakland, California, her hometown by way of Oregon, Alaska, and New Orleans. Her work has been shortlisted at Glimmer Train and has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Brevity, The Believer, and The Rumpus. She holds a BA from Reed College and an MFA from the University of New Orleans, where she was the editor of Bayou Magazine. Kailyn has received support from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Ucross Foundation, and now, the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. When not writing, Kailyn likes a good camping trip.

Kailyn writes: “My current project is a history of fire in Oakland, California, centering around my childhood home, which so far, has survived. It’s an experiment in memory and disaster narrative, and what nonfiction as a genre can do. I’m looking forward to critiquing it’s beginning in Julie Buntin’s class, and also spending some time at the ocean.”

Terry Connelly Scholarship for a First Time Participant

M. Thomas Gammarino is the author of the novels King of the Worlds and Big in Japan, and the novella Jellyfish Dreams. Shorter works have appeared in American Short Fiction, The Writer, The New York Review of Science Fiction, The New York Tyrant, and The Hawai’i Review (among others), and he received the 2013 Elliot Cades Award for Literature, Hawai’i’s highest literary honor. He teaches literature and creative writing at Punahou School in Honolulu.

Tom writes: “I love science fiction and have been teaching and writing it for many years, though all of my schooling was focused on literary fiction (which I also love). I’m looking forward to working with Kij Johnson, unapologetically, on genre stuff.”

Voices of Diversity Scholarship

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow and Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her debut novel Bestiary is forthcoming in September 2020. She lives in New York.

K-Ming writes: “I’m working on a collection of magical-realist short stories about Chinese and Taiwanese-American girls in California. I’m excited to connect with the community and be inspired by everyone’s work.”

Voices of Diversity Scholarship

Kat Lewis graduated from Johns Hopkins University where she held the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellowship. In 2018, she received a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea for Field of Mosquitoes, her novel about ghosts in Korean folklore. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in PANK Magazine, Maudlin House, and The Rumpus.

Kat writes: “I am currently working on a novel about a Black film student in South Korea who sees ghosts after a near-death experience. Julie Buntin’s work has had such an important influence on my own writing, and I look forward to workshopping the first chapter of my novel in her class.”

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT WRITER SCHOLARSHIPS

Gracelin Gorman is a sixteen-year-old lover of the arts and aspiring creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction writer.

Gracelin writes: “At the conference, I hope to be exposed to all different genres of writing, learn how to improve my work, and meet people who are both similar to me and extremely different from me.”

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If you would like to join the scholarship winners at MCWC 2020, you can register now at mcwc.org. If you would like to support our scholarship program, please consider donating to MCWC at mcwc.org/donate.

Register Now for MCWC 2020

by Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

Registration for MCWC 2020 is now open! All workshops are fist-come, first-served, and are expected to fill quickly this year. As always, we have been working hard to improve the MCWC experience and have made some big changes this year. Here’s a handy guide to walk you through the registering for MCWC 2020:

Step 1: Pick your morning workshop

The morning workshops are at the core of the MCWC experience. You will meet with your workshop instructor and fellow workshop participants all three days of the conference. Workshop participants exchange work a month before the conference, and you will be expected to read and be prepared to comment on your fellow workshop participants’ pieces. This year, the morning workshops are limited to just eleven participants to ensure faculty and participants have time to delve deeply into each workshop piece.

We are thrilled to feature our first ever Historical Fiction Workshop taught by Susan Stinson, as well as a Master Class, “The Art of Beginning,” with Julie Buntin. Master Class applications are now closed, but there are nine morning workshops for you to choose from when registering (and no application is required): Novel, Short Fiction, MG/YA, Speculative Fiction, Historical Fiction, Memoir, Nonfiction, Poetry, and the Emerging Writers’ Workshop. Visit mcwc.org/morning-workshops for full class descriptions.

Step 2: Review the Afternoon Event Schedule

The $675 conference tuition price includes breakfast and lunch all three days of the conference, as well as all afternoon and evening events. The Saturday Closing Dinner is included in the price of the conference, though there are no partner tickets available for purchase. MCWC 2020 afternoon events include the signature Paths to Publishing Panel, featuring publishing advice and stories from the MCWC community, the Blind Critique, back by popular demand and expanded to two sessions this year, and Open Mics.

Each afternoon, you will have a variety of Afternoon Seminars to choose from taught by our MCWC workshop faculty. We’ve expanded the range of our offerings this year by including two movement classes! We are thrilled to welcome Sara Bassindale and Dyana Sangraal, two local Mendocino instructors, to the MCWC community this year. Their classes in Gentle Movement and T’ai Chi Chih, on Thursday and Friday afternoons respectively, will be the perfect way to break up a day’s worth of sitting and get your creative juices flowing.

While we ask you to let us know your preferences on the registration form for our planning purposes, we do not take prior registration for the afternoon seminars and you are welcome to attend whichever one appeals to you at the conference. Visit mcwc.org/afternoon-events to read the workshop descriptions.

Step 3: Add a consult (Optional)

Twenty minute one-on-one consultations are available with many of our workshop faculty for an additional $60. To add a consult, return to the main registration page after selecting your workshop and click on the image to add a consult to your cart. You must be registered for the full conference in order to sign up for a consult, but conference participants may register for more than one consult. Visit mcwc.org/faculty to read about this year’s faculty.

Step 4: Sign up for the Publishing Bootcamp (Optional)

We’ve revamped our Publishing Bootcamp this year with a dynamic array of activities including Pitch Panels and seminars by our MCWC publishing professionals: agent Ayesha Pande (Ayesha Pande Literary), agent Marya Spence (Janklow & Nesbit Associates), and editor Shirin Yim Leos. This stand alone bootcamp is available as an add-on to the full conference for $150, but registration in the full conference is not required to register for the Publishing Bootcamp. Visit mcwc.org/publishing-bootcamp for full information.

Step 5: Check out through the website and get excited for MCWC!

After completing your registration, check out the resources available on our Accommodations and Location and Schedule pages of our website to plan your trip to the Coast. Then you can start working on your workshop submission and your entry into this year’s MCWC Writing Contest. And feel free to contact us at info@mcwc.org with any questions. We are so proud of MCWC 2020 this year and hope you will join us for what is sure to be our best conference yet!

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Mastering Beginnings with Julie Buntin

by Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

There’s less than two weeks left before our February 15 deadline for applications for the Master Class with Julie Buntin, and for any of our scholarships. This year, we have scholarships on offer in multiple genres, including historical fiction, nonfiction, speculative fiction, and more. There are also scholarships available specifically for diverse writers and young writers. Visit mcwc.org/scholarships to apply for a scholarship and mcwc.org/master-class to apply for the Master Class. Please note: you’re welcome to apply for both, but you must submit two separate applications, following each set of instructions. 

Join Julie Buntin to perfect your first chapter in this year’s Master Class, The Art of Beginnings, a cross-genre, juried workshop geared for experienced writers. Julie’s debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, translated into ten languages, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including the Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Vogue, the New York Times Book Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. Julie shared with us a taste of what she’ll be bringing to MCWC in this month’s faculty spotlight.  

You reference the power of storytelling and it’s interaction with understanding throughout this interview with Literary Hub. You end by explaining that Marlena is “about the act of telling, what it means to do that, and the power our stories have over us.” Do you think that “act of telling” is influenced by the process of learning to write?

I do think deepening your craft as a writer can help empower you to reconsider or interrogate the stories you tell about yourself, and that learning to question your first impulse as a storyteller (both on the page and off) can expand and complicate what you’re trying to say. Learning how to create complex characters, for example, or even thinking through how plot and character intersect—these are skills that can help you think more expansively, and, I hope, more sensitively, about the world and your place in it, as well as how that world might be different for different people. 

In this interview with Craft, you discussed writing the POV’s in Marlena, it’s structure, and your intentions with the novel. You also mentioned the role fear plays in the writing process. How did you manage that fear while you were working on Marlena and what advice do you have for writers struggling with their own doubts about their writing?

I still struggle with doubt and fear and impostor syndrome and all sorts of self-sabotaging baggage pretty much whenever I sit down to write. I wish I had some really ironclad advice about how to deal with it—I would give it to myself! I’m working on getting better at accepting that fear is part of how I do this. The fear is going to be there, and instead of trying to silence it entirely, maybe we can have some kind of uneasy relationship where I let it take over for a little bit and then, once it’s run its course, I can banish it for a few hours and get some work done. I guess I would suggest that writers try and make their fear work for them —can you convert it into an anxiety that will actually help you? For example, a fear that I’m an idiot and everything I write is terrible is hugely unproductive, but if I can kind of massage that fear into an adjacent fear—that if I don’t write, I’ll never say the things I want to say—that can be kind of motivating. 

You wrote a fascinating essay featured by Catapult on writing fiction, how readers make assumptions about writers based on their fiction, and  the power writers have in the way they tell a story. You expressed a bit of a complicated relationship your own novel, Marlena. Has that relationship changed in the three years since publication?

I am not sure that it has. Some of the more difficult personal elements of that relationship—my mother’s issues with my novel, in particular—have mellowed a little with time, but there’s still tension there. I think one major difference between now and then is just that Marlena doesn’t feel as urgent to me anymore. I’m working on something else, and I’m wrestling with a whole new set of questions and anxieties. Marlena, from the writing process to the publication experience and beyond, all just feels a little distant to me now, in a way that I think is probably helpful for my new work. 

In many of your interviews, you mention other writers and teachers who played a big role in the creation of Marelna. In this interview with Literary Hub, you talk about Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? and how both the book, and Lorrie herself, were very influential in your own writing. I also saw you mentioned working with Sarah Bowlin, who was one of our faculty members at MCWC 2019. How important do you think writing partnerships and groups are to a writer’s success?

 As I wade out deeper and deeper into my new project, having a writing group and a handful of trusted readers that I can send very messy work to, without fear of judgement, has been an essential lifeline. I know that some writers can joyfully do this work alone, but I can’t. For me, readers and community are the key to having control over the fear I was talking about in my answer to the previous question. They remind me that I’m not alone in this, and they give me a helpful gut check on the work itself. It can be hard to build community—having just moved to a new place, I’m newly aware of how tricky it is to ask busy people you don’t know all that well to exchange work, for example. But thankfully there are tons of resources online—organizations like Catapult and Grub Street offer incredible and robust online workshops—and I am a strong believer in the power of conferences for not just getting feedback, but finding durable and long-term writing relationships. 

Photo Credit: MCWC 2019 Photographer Mimi Carroll

To find out more about Julie Buntin, check out her website at www.juliebuntin.com.

Applications for scholarships and the Master Class close February 15. General registration will open March 1, and you will be able to register for the morning workshop of your choice after that date; there is no application required for MCWC. We recommend you register as soon as you can when registration opens March 1 to secure a seat in the workshop of your choice.

Start Planning Your MCWC 2020 Experience

by Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

We’re welcoming in the new decade by pulling out all the stops for MCWC 2020 this year! With smaller workshops, more of them on offer, and a redesigned Publishing Bootcamp, MCWC 2020 is shaping up to be our best yet.

Each workshop meets all three mornings of the conference and features three hours of instruction, exercises, and manuscript discussion led by our expert faculty, listed below. Limited to just eleven participants, these intimate workshops provide a personalized learning experience focused on the art and craft of writing.

Afternoon events include open mics and seminars on a variety of topics. Our Paths to Publishing panelists will share their wide range of publishing success stories, and our Blind Critique panelists are ready to give you feedback (anonymously) on your opening lines.

Scholarship applications open January 1 and close February 15. During this period you can also apply for the Master Class, taught this year by Julie Buntin. For full application details, visit mcwc.org. General registration opens on March 1, but you can explore our website to start planning your conference experience now. All workshops are first-come, first-served, so don’t wait to grab your spot once registration opens!

Elissa Washuta

Julie Buntin

Anita Fellicelli

Keynote Speaker: Elissa Washuta

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, Artist Trust, 4Culture, and Potlatch Fund. Elissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.

Master Class: Julie Buntin

Julie Buntin’s debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, translated into ten languages, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including the Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Vogue, the New York Times Book Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the MacDowell Colony, and is an editor-at-large at Catapult. Her novel-in-progress is the winner of the 2019 Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.

Short Fiction: Anita Fellicelli

Anita Felicelli is the author of the short story collection Love Songs for a Lost Continent, which won the 2016 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. She is also the author of Chimerica: A Novel, which was one of The Millions’s Most Anticipated Books of the Second Half of 2019. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Catapult, Joyland, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

Gabe Habash

Rahawa Haile

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

Novel: Gabe Habash

Gabe Habash is the author of the novel Stephen Florida, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and the American Booksellers Association Indies Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year. He was formerly the fiction reviews editor for Publishers Weekly and now teaches at the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Times, Guernica, Lithub, and more.

Nonfiction: Rahawa Haile

Rahawa Haile is an Eritrean-American writer from Miami, Florida. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Outside Magazine, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, AFAR, Audubon, and Pacific Standard. Recently, her essays have been featured in the Best American Travel Writing 2018 anthology as well as Best American Travel Writing 2019. In Open Country, her memoir about thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, explores what it means to move through America and the world as a black woman and is forthcoming from Harper.

Memoir: CHRISTINE HYUNG-OAK LEE

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, which was featured in The New York Times, Self Magazine, Time Magazine, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, the Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. She is an editor at the Rumpus and teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California’s MFA program.

Kij Johnson

Kerry Madden-Lunsford

Tomas Moniz

Speculative fiction: Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson writes short stories and novels, and has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon Awards, as well as the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kansas. She is also the associate director for the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and teaches intensive summer workshops on novel-writing each summer for them.

MG/YA: KERRY MADDEN-LUNSFORD

Kerry Madden-Lunsford is the Director of Creative Writing at UAB and teaches in the MFA program at Antioch University.  Her children’s novels include Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana Song, and Jessie’s Mountain. Her first novel, Offsides, was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age. Her book Up Close Harper Lee made Booklist’s Ten Top Biographies for Youth. Her newest book, Ernestine’s Milky Way, was published by Schwartz & Wade/Random House in 2019. 

EMERGING WRITERS: Tomas Moniz

Tomas Moniz edited Rad Dad, Rad Families, and the children’s book Collaboration/Colaboración. He’s the recipient of the SF Literary Arts Foundation’s 2016 Award, the 2016 Can Serrat Residency, the 2017 Caldera Residency and the 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm residency. He’s recently been published by Barrelhouse, Acentos Review and Longleaf Review. In 2019, he released a chapbook, All Friends Are Necessary, with Mason Jar Press and his debut novel, Big Familia, with Acre Books.

Michelle Peñaloza

Susan Stinson

Poetry: MICHELLE PEÑALOZA

Michelle Peñaloza is the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak, and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes. Her poems and essays have been published in Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Pleiades, River Styx, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She now lives in rural Mendocino County, California.

Historical Fiction: Susan Stinson

Susan Stinson is the author of Spider in a Tree, a novel inspired by Northampton, Massachusetts in the time of eighteenth century preacher and slave-owner Jonathan Edwards. She is winner of the Lambda Literary Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. Her novel Martha Moody is soon to be reissued by Small Beer Press. Her other novels are Venus of Chalk (Lambda Literary finalist) and Fat Girl Dances with Rocks. She has received grants, residencies, and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and Hawthornden Castle, among others. She has taught historical fiction writing at Amherst College.

Ayesha Pande

Marya Spence

Shirin Yim Leos

Ayesha Pande, Agent

Before launching her boutique agency fifteen years ago, Ayesha was a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She has also held editorial positions at HarperCollins and Crown Publishers. She serves on the Board of the AAR (Association of Author’s Representatives), and is a member of PEN and the Asian American Writer’s Workshop. She is drawn to distinctive, original voices in literary or popular fiction, young adult, women’s, and international fiction. She is also seeking authors of nonfiction, including biography, history, popular culture, cultural commentary, and memoir and is particularly keen to champion authors from communities that have traditionally been silenced.

Marya Spence, Agent

Raised in California’s Bay Area, Marya joined Janklow & Nesbit Associates in 2012 after getting her MFA at NYU, her BA in English at Harvard, and working and interning at such publications as The New Yorker, PAPER Mag, Travel & Leisure, Vanity Fair, Publishers Weekly, and more. She represents a diverse range in fiction and nonfiction including, literary and upmarket novels, cultural criticism and voice-driven essays, narrative journalism with a humorous or critical edge, and pop culture. Her writers have debuted on the New York Times Bestseller List and won or been finalists for such honors as the PEN Ackerley Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the California Book Award for First Fiction, James Beard Media Awards, National Magazine Awards, and more. She lives in New York City.

Shirin Yim Leos, Editor

Shirin Yim Leos (formerly Bridges) is an award-winning author, an ex-publisher, and a successful developmental editor. In the last twelve months alone, her editing clients have secured a three-book deal from MacMillan, a two-book deal from HarperCollins, a two-book deal from Penguin, and a simultaneous book-plus-movie deal from Random House and Amblin Entertainment. When not writing and editing, Shirin spends much of her time teaching and coaching writers. She was the Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and has conducted workshops on publishing and writing for Stanford University, University of San Francisco, San Francisco State University, California State University - Fresno, University of Washington, Illinois State University, and Dominican University as well as for writing conferences in the United States, Australia, and Singapore.

Cameron Lund

Ginny Rorby

Paths to Publishing: Cameron Lund

Cameron Lund is a young adult author, singer/songwriter, and cheese enthusiast. Originally from the middle of the New Hampshire woods, she moved to the beach to study film at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has stayed out west ever since. Cameron’s debut novel, The Best Laid Plans, will be released with Razorbill (PenguinTeen) on April 7th, 2020. A long-term fan of the MCWC, she ran the social media accounts and blog in 2016, and was a conference attendee in 2017 and 2018. She’s thrilled to be able to return as a panelist.

Paths to Publishing: Ginny rorby

Ginny holds an MFA in Creative Writing and is the author of six novels for middle grade and young adult readers: How to Speak Dolphin; Lost in the River of Grass—winner of the 2012/2013 Sunshine State Young Readers Award; Hurt Go Happy—winner of the 2008 American Library Association’s Schneider Family Book Award; The Outside of a Horse; and Dolphin Sky. Her most recent, Freeing Finch, was released in October 2019. She has been an MCWC board member for twenty-four years and was co-director with Suzanne Byerley from 1996 to 2004.

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Emotion, Memory and Storytelling with Christine H. Lee

by Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

MCWC 2020 memoir workshop instructor Christine H. Lee has mastered the complex intersections between writing and memory. Her memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, was featured in The New York Times, Self Magazine, Time Magazine, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. An accomplished writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Christine’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, The Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. She is an editor at The Rumpus and teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California’s MFA program.

Christine discussed with us the unusual circumstances that led to the publication of her memoir, her experiences in writing across genres, and her novel forthcoming from Ecco/Harper Collins.

You describe using journals and photographs to document life during your memory loss in this interview with NPR. How did you go about researching your own experiences and integrate that into your writing?

First off—thank you so much for looking all of this up! It feels great as an interviewee to be SEEN by my interviewer.

It took a long time for me to be able to write about my memory loss in one cohesive narrative. During a span of seven years, I certainly tried, but clearly I needed years to absorb my experiences and come to an understanding of the embedded lessons. Luckily, Past Me was pretty diligent about journaling my day to day happenings, both in a hard copy journal and online, on an anonymous blog. Without those items, I think my memoir would be an entirely different creature, one more reliant on external sources rather than my own voice.

Those external sources included friends and family. But also my medical files, which I pulled for the purpose of writing both my BuzzFeed essay and the memoir. 

But bottom line: I learned that what matters most are the emotional memories we collect throughout our lives. 

The events that ring most clear in my mind are those that entered my brain and mind through my emotions. This is the reason we remember a few, very vivid things in early childhood. We forget everything else. I find remembering names more challenging than before the stroke, so when I teach, I ask students (spoiler alert!) to talk about themselves via ice breakers in the first class. This is the way I remember their names: through narratives and through emotion.

And guess what? That’s what we are trying to do as writers. We are trying to enter our readers’ emotional centers. And while our readers may not remember exactly what happens on page ten of our manuscript, the goal is to enable them to feel deeply.

So—yes. Memory is important. Story telling is an exercise in memory. Reading stories is an exercise of memory. BUT—what matters most are emotional memories, and we don’t have to remember everything in order to create those.

The BuzzFeed essay that went viral and led to your publishing deal posted in September 2014 and your memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life, published in February 2017. That's less than three years from the post to the book release! How much time did you have to write the memoir and what was that experience like?

It was intense. I wrote my memoir at a blistering pace. It took me almost exactly one year to write AND revise Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember. And I met my deadline. 

But just so you know, that doesn’t always happen: my novel has taken years and years and years to write. It’s like when I tell people I didn’t have morning sickness whatsoever while pregnant; if you ever want another mother to hate you immediately, tell them you’ve never had morning sickness. But hey, I tell them, I also had Reynaud’s and other very rare and painful complications during pregnancy. So your mileage may vary. 

I think every book has its own personality and each one takes the time it takes. That said, I didn’t write about my stroke and memory loss until years and years after recovery. So, it may be that my subconscious was ready. It may be that I was at a particularly desperate time in my life as I wrote the thing.

I wrote it while recovering from postpartum depression, while going through a divorce from an 18-year marriage, while adjusting to motherhood with an infant, while under dire financial straits. I wrote it because I had zero control over anything else in my life at the time.

We can always make ourselves feel like we could revise our past, revise the way in which we could have done things. But that book and my daughter kept me alive. So there are zero regrets.

You were in the middle of an MFA program and working on a novel when you had the stroke. How did the experience, including publishing your memoir, change your writing life and your fiction goals?

I’m basically still in shock that I went from someone writing her novel in soft pants to a published writer of a memoir with a two-book deal. 

But guess what? I’m still someone writing her novel in soft pants. My goal to have a joyful and productive life with a circle of trustworthy friends hasn’t changed. 

Let me tell you a story. I was once at a writing residency, and my goal was to finish my entire novel in three weeks. You know that this didn’t happen. And it’s because I was a tyrant to myself and to my writing. The more I dictated what should happen and how it should happen, the more blocked I became. 

I spent most of that residency crying in my cottage. The novel, I thought, was bringing me to my knees. But what was really happening, was that I was trying to bring my manuscript to ITS knees, and as a result, it fought back. 

So what did I do? I gave up for a bit. I couldn’t take the agony. I spent the rest of my time taking walks on the beach and sneaking out to town and getting bags and bags and bags of Doritos. And eating them. I made a friend who joined me on the Dorito escapade. That friend became my best friend. 

Life has twists. I went to write a novel and came back home with a best friend. Do I think my life is lesser for it? No. And I learned to listen to my characters. 

Tl;dr: Every setback is an opportunity.

In this interview with The Normal School, you talk about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. Can you tell us a little about that difference and your forthcoming novel ?  

I’m a slow as shit fiction writer. Like molasses. Like crystallized honey.  I’m in the midst of rewriting my novel manuscript. That decision was a tough one to accept; the original manuscript wasn’t working. So I’m starting over. It’s about a family heirloom and three generations of a family and their unique relationship to the heirloom. 

You were an early convert to the blogging scene, and still maintain this blog about your urban farm, as well as a new substack at Christinehlee.substack.com. What role does blogging play in your writing life?

Yes! I still have a blog off my main site. I don’t blog as often as I used to, because I made a decision a number of years ago that I wouldn’t write for free anymore. But I do write a blog, because it is critical to my health as a writer.

I strongly feel that writers must have a venue for low-stakes writing, where it doesn’t feel like everything is on the line. It’s critical to keep ourselves engaged with why it is we write, which is unique for each individual. For me that venue is my blog, where I can keep in touch with my own voice, where I can write without regard to assigned subject matter. Where I don’t feel like every word will be scrutinized. Where I can have FUN. Because writers need to PLAY. That’s the value in workshop, because it’s much easier to play with other writers’ words. And it’s in workshopping others’ work that we learned to play with our own work. 

And it’s funny—when we write our passions, sometimes that can lead to opportunity yet again. I now write about urban farming on a column called Backyard Politics over at Catapult Story, which was informed by my blog posts. I didn’t have a goal in mind when I wrote those posts, but when we engage in our passions, they lead us in the right direction.

Photo Credit: MCWC 2019 Photographer Mimi Carroll

To find out more about Christine H. Lee, check out her website at www.christinehlee.com.

Applications for scholarships to MCWC 2020 will open January 1, and general registration will open March 1. Visit our website after January 1 for the full faculty line-up and event schedule. Till then, you can take a look at MCWC 2019 at mcwc.org. And be sure to sign up for our monthly newsletter below for more faculty interviews and announcements.

Tomas Moniz: A Tale of Two Publishing Worlds

by Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

MCWC 2020 faculty Tomas Moniz started out his writing career in the world of zine publishing, but is celebrating the publication of his debut novel this November. Big Familia released from Acre Books and received a starred Kirkus review that praised, “Diverse characters and a deeply likeable protagonist make this a standout debut.”

Tomas edited the volumes Rad Dad and Rad Families, as well as the children’s book Collaboration/Colaboración. He’s written two novellas, Bellies and Buffalos and All Friends Are Necessary, and is the recipient of the SF Literary Arts Foundation’s 2016 Award, the 2016 Can Serrat Residency, the 2017 Caldera Residency, and the 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm residency.

Tomas attended MCWC as a participant in 2017 and we are thrilled he’s joining us again in 2020—this time, as the Emerging Writers’ Workshop instructor. Tomas shared with us about his variety of experiences in publishing, his advice for new writers, and what he plans to bring to MCWC 2020.

You attended MCWC as a participant in 2017. How did your conference experience impact your writing?

I did attend in 2017 and it impacted me in two ways. I took public transportation to Mendocino from Oakland and had a whole wonderful adventure (think bus rides and breakdowns and gas station pit stops and making friends and talking with strangers). The experience actually became a scene in my novella All Friends Are Necessary. Secondly, it’s always really wonderful to be in a community of writers, publishers, and editors. It reminds me that the struggle is real, but you’re not alone in it. It reminds me to be patient but persistent, and that Imposter Syndrome is an intense thing for so many of us as we emerge and claim our voices and stories. It’s been so helpful to listen to and commiserate with others who also experience those moments of doubt because when I’m back home, struggling with my writing routine, trying to do the work, the memories remind me to trust myself and that it’s all worth it.

You’ve been busy since MCWC 2017! This July you published a chapbook, All Friends Are Necessary, with Mason Jar Press and your debut novel, Big Familia, will release this month from Acre Books. Can you tell us about your new novel and a little about your writing process?

It’s been an exciting (and nerve-racking!) year for me in terms of publishing, but for years I focused on “publishing” things differently. For a long period of time, I would write and publish zines or chapbooks and do the work of distro-ing them and setting up reading tours and attending festivals, all of this outside of the mainstreaming publishing world. So I came to mainstream publishing a bit circuitously partly because mainstream publishing, as we all know, can be a bit of a who-do-you-know network as well as narratively limited (who gets published, which stories get support), but I’m here now doing my best.

This novel is a perfect example of blending the two publishing worlds together: it started out as a zine about Elliott Smith. I wrote it on a dare over the course of a few days, and immediately mailed it out to people. Then it became a collection of short stories because I liked the character I created. I wrote them mostly to read at literary events around the Bay Area, which I discovered is a powerful editing tool—hearing people’s reactions to the stories, writing with an ear to pace and rhythm. Finally, I decided to send it out as a manuscript to a few publishers. After a year of rejections, Hawthorne Books offered to publish it but asked me to add 20,000 words, which I begrudgingly did; I learned a lot working with their editor Rhonda Hughes. Sadly, they then ceased operations (another thing to discuss about publishing), but I finally found another home for Big Familia with Acre Books, who, of course, asked for an entirely new set of revisions.

You were the founder and editor of the zine Rad Dad, which has spurned two anthologies, Rad Dad and Rad Families. What inspired the project and how did it help launch your writing career?

Yes, I learned so much about writing and storytelling by editing and collecting essays all about radical parenting, about challenging patriarchy, about raising children and building community and creating our families. The two books evolved from the zine/self-publishing world as well. And then I reached out to a publisher I knew was also interested in alternative voices and radical politics: PM Press. I learned that sometimes success in publishing is about finding publishers who are looking for your kind of work. In the early 2000’s I put a call out in those early internet days for some submissions to capture stories that were outside of the mainstream narrative around fathering. I wanted different stories than the ones highlighted in magazines and parenting manuals: I wanted queer voices, trans voices, POC voices. Working with this project was less about launching my career, and more about recognizing how powerful it is to share our truths, to risk being vulnerable, and to connect with other people.

You’ll be teaching the Emerging Writers’ workshop at MCWC 2020. What advice do you have for writers who are starting out on their journey and on the fence about whether or not a writing conference is the next right step for them?

I’m super excited to teach the Emerging Writers’ workshop! My initial advice is that attending something like this is incredibly valuable, particularly because of the connections you can make. It’s certainly not the only way to begin creating a writing community but I have found conferences in particular super useful and, in some ways, more valuable than writing programs because what I’m looking for is camaraderie and colleagues rather than grades and degrees (not to mention the debt!). So come join us...my workshop will be playful and critical and supportive and generative and hopefully you can find something similar to what I found: inspiration!

In your bio, you often list a PO Box and say you love to receive letters, and that you promise to write back. Do you actually get much mail? Have any interesting or funny stories come out of that?

I’m always saddened when I finish reading something and am all worked up and want to send a thank you note or ask a question or send a love letter and there’s no information provided on how to do just that. PO Boxes rule! When I became a young father looking for advice around parenting, I happened upon Hip Mama by writer Ariel Gore and I wrote her a letter. She responded! It was one of the key moments of my writing career: feeling connected to other writers. I encourage everyone to provide a way to contact them. And getting letters is super fun. I’ve received so many letters from fathers looking to start their own magazines or columns looking for advice; from random people I don’t know sharing their reactions to zines I wrote ten years ago; from people who want to trade books with me. I have written a number of playful dirty poetry zines and sometimes I get the most awesome dirty stories written in response sent to me: no names, no return address, just someone sharing a sexy secret. I love those! But most powerful, when I hear from people who just want to say thank you for something I wrote because they felt connected or seen or validated. Those kinds of responses make all the work worthwhile. And yes, I write everyone back…

Photo Credit: MCWC 2019 Photographer Mimi Carroll

To find out more about Tomas Moniz, check out his website at www.tomasmoniz.com.

Applications for scholarships to MCWC 2020 will open January 1, and general registration will open March 1. Visit our website after January 1 for the full faculty line-up and event schedule. Till then, you can take a look at MCWC 2019 at mcwc.org. And be sure to sign up for our monthly newsletter below for more faculty interviews and announcements.

Connect Through Poetry with Michelle Peñaloza at MCWC 2020

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

We are thrilled to kick off our MCWC 2020 faculty interview series with a Mendocino County local! This year’s poetry instructor, Michelle Peñaloza, will make the trek over the mountain from Covelo in inland Mendocino County to join us on the coast in August.

Michelle Peñaloza’s debut full-length collection Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire won the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize and was published by Inlandia Books this past August. She’s written two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes, and her work can be found in River Styx, Prairie Schooner, upstreet, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the University of Oregon, Kundiman, and Hugo House as well as the 2019 Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award for Poetry from The Key West Literary Seminar.

Michelle shared with us tips for writing about trauma, why she loves poetry, and what she plans to bring to the MCWC 2020 poetry workshop.

Congratulations on the recent release of your new book of poetry, Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire. How are you feeling now that this collection is out in the world? What stands out to you about the publishing process as you look back on the journey?

Thank you so much. I feel great! I’m really proud of the book and honored and heartened by how it’s been received. I’ve been welcomed into so many spaces to share it with so many folks I know and love and also with so many folks I’ve admired from afar that I’ve only met via their poetry and online presence. I suppose what stands out to me is how there is still so much (good, exciting and hard) work involved after the book gets accepted for publication—in terms of shaping its final form, cover design, and then promotion and getting the book into people’s hands. The overwhelming thing, too, is how genuinely excited people are for you and your first book. I think at first I felt a bit sheepish or awkward doing promotion for it, but I was encouraged by dear friends who reminded me how hard I’d worked to write this and how I owed it to my book and myself to put in the time and effort to promote it. They said (and they are right): “It’s a big deal to have a book!”

In this interview with Poetry Northwest, you discuss the role of grief and trauma in Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, and how writing helped you process those emotions. What was your writing process like in light of that concurrent emotional work? What advice do you have for writers delving into grief and/or trauma in their writing?

The poems in the book were written over the course of ten years so there are varied answers regarding that emotional process in regard to specific poems; however, overall, I’d say that a current that ran/runs through my writing process and the emotional work is that I tried my best to write toward the scariest, hardest things. That thing that Frost says about “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” I think is applicable to emotion in poems; if I wasn’t feeling the poems in my body, I knew I needed to push myself toward the harder thing.

My advice would be two-pronged: first, get all of your truth on the page—shameful, ugly, raw as it can be. That page is just for you. Then, always apply and return to your craft. We all suffer, we all experience trauma. The facts and processing of experiences don’t make poems in and of themselves. Turn to craft. Turn to the poets that have opened you up with their work, that have helped you understand something more about your own truth. Ask, study: how did they do that? How did the craft of their work do that to you, for you? Then, be exacting, be ruthless in your evaluation of what in your own writing craft serves the truth you hope to communicate. Grief and trauma are not new, nor is writing about them; however, your writing can only ever be yours and that is where your power comes from.

The poems in your chapbook landscape/heartbreak evolved out of a project you undertook in Seattle, in which you met with people in various places where they had been heartbroken and listened to their stories while walking. You detail the development of the project in this interview with International Examiner. Can you share a little more about how/why you embarked on a project involving stories from other people? How was the process of reaching out, gathering material, and turning it into poetry?

Thanks for this question. Though it’s been several years, this project is still very dear to me. As to how I embarked: I simply asked people to share their stories (first people I knew) and then it took off from there—via word of mouth, via more folks learning about what I was doing. People began to find me. People really wanted to be a part of the project. People wanted to share their heartbreaks and the places in which they took place. As to why I embarked on the project involving other people's stories...it felt lonely and small to be centered on my own heartbreak alone. As I said in the aforementioned interview, I thought about how the act of walking had given me the strength to leave and process my own hard, traumatic situation and how my experience of walking conversations had been clarifying and heartening. I thought, what if I asked other people to walk with me? What if I, being so new to Seattle, learned the landscape of the city through people’s stories? What if my heart could heal in tandem with others?

The process was actually a very organic one; as only folks who were into the project and open to share their stories and go on the walks where the ones who participated, people were already pretty open by the time we went on our walks. I recorded all of the conversations and then listened to them after the walks and then worked from there. My intimate knowledge of all the participants’ generously shared stories were an intrinsic part of each poem for me. So, that said, a great anxiety of mine throughout the making of the poems was the task of doing justice and paying homage to the openness and vulnerability of the people who took me on walks. Not every walk inspired a entire poem. Not every attempt to write a poem was successful enough to do justice to a story someone had shared with me. Still, I wanted to acknowledge every walk as a part of the project, which I did in the chapbook’s final poem, which I aimed to also correspond with the final map in its form. I think of these smaller pieces as “inside poems” shared between me and the people with whom I walked. These small moments may read as more esoteric than the rest of the collection, but I hope they resonate for every reader, and, I believe, taken as a whole will reiterate the culmination of story and transformation of place in landscape/heartbreak.

You now live on a farm in rural Mendocino County. So many of us here at MCWC have stories of the magic that seemed to draw us to this special place. What brought you to Mendocino and what do you enjoy about living here?

Love brought me here! I left Seattle to be with my then-boyfriend, now-husband. I loved living in Seattle, but it was hard to be apart from my person and also hard to keep experiencing the reality of how hard it is to plant sustainable roots in a city that is so expensive and (continues) rapidly growing more expensive. So, it was a multi-faceted decision.

I enjoy so many things about Mendocino County. I love the seasons; I love the red bud that blooms in the mountains; I love swimming in the rivers; I love being able to buy a permit, snowshoe a bit, and then cut down my own Christmas tree. Mendocino County is gorgeous. And it is very raw and rare in it’s beauty. Covelo, specifically, is unlike anywhere I have ever lived and the community I’ve found here is much like the landscape: beautiful, raw, and rare, too. Living rurally has taught me so many new things about how community shows up and manifests.

Can you share with us about your teaching style and what you love about the craft of poetry? What do you hope to bring to the poetry workshop at MCWC 2020?

I like to think I’m pretty fun. I am a passionate teacher; I use my hands a lot, I’m a bit loud and I am very excited to talk about poetry. What do I love about the craft of poetry? Poetry incites the very practical expansion of one’s capacity for empathy and connection to the world outside the self. Poetry teaches us to read the complex simultaneity of the world—the many truths contained in single moments, the music beneath our transactions of language, the lived intersections of our experiences and identities. I also love the specificity of the craft of poetry—the many forms and genres and devices and flourishes we have at our disposal to create and talk about poems. And! The simultaneous long tradition and spirit of innovation in poetry—how we enter and interrogate an ongoing, “happening-since-ancient-times-but-made-new-all-the-time” conversation when we read and write poems.

I hope to share my passion and experience with my workshop; I hope for us to learn from each other, too.

Photo Credit: MCWC 2019 Photographer Mimi Carroll

To find out more about Michelle Peñaloza, check out her website at michellepenaloza.com.

Applications for scholarships to MCWC 2020 will open January 1, and general registration will open March 1. Visit our website after January 1 for the full faculty line-up and event schedule. Till then, you can take a look at MCWC 2019 at mcwc.org. And be sure to sign up for our monthly newsletter below for more faculty interviews and announcements.

MCWC’s Thriving Community, Thirty Years and Counting

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Executive Assistant

At MCWC 2019, we celebrated our 30th anniversary with over 115 participants in nine morning workshops, two well-attended public faculty readings, and an unforgettable keynote address by Pulitzer prize-winning poet Sharon Olds. The greatest success of MCWC 2019, however, was the conference’s ability to maintain its unique sense of community along with its growth.  

Julie Ushio and the novel workshop with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

MCWC 2019 first-time participant Julie Ushio enjoyed connecting with other writers at the conference. “So many of us carry around stories inside of us,” she said. “Only at a writers conference, can you sit down next to a stranger, and in a few minutes learn something of what they most care about—because when you ask them what they are writing, it’s all right there.”

Though she was new to MCWC, Julie has been a participant at quite a few conferences and workshops. When asked how MCWC compared to her past experiences, Julie said, “The conference far exceeded my expectations. I couldn’t have asked for a better slate of workshop leaders as they were young, ethnically diverse, and all deeply engaged in the current literary scene. The MCWC community of volunteers was terrific and supportive.”

Lindsey Anthony-Bacchione in Myriam Gurba’s Master Class

Lindsey Anthony-Bacchione also attended MCWC for the first time this year after being selected for the Master Class with Myriam Gurba. Lindsey said, “I’ve been doing workshops and writing groups for quite some time, and I’ve come to really appreciate teachers who can facilitate safe spaces that promote inclusivity, question bias, and combat prejudice, where each writer is treated with respect, empathy and honesty. Myriam not only created a dynamic and engaging workshop that accomplished all of this, but she also helped me to break through a creative block I had hit with my memoir.”

Lindsey participated in one of our two Pitch Panels this year, even though she said, “I was super nervous and I have never pitched my book before.” She was surprised when Sarah Bowlin, an agent from Aevitas, expressed interest in her book. “It was a validating experience for me to hear that this project caught her attention,” Lindsey said.

Adriane reading at the Open Mic

MCWC scholar Adriane Tharpe found the direction she needed in MCWC’s newest offering, the Speculative Fiction Workshop, taught this year by Scott Sigler. “I learned so much from Scott about polishing a manuscript and publishing. As someone who is trying to finish a manuscript and wasn’t sure about the next steps, this was incredibly helpful.”

Like Lindsey and Julie, the benefits of MCWC went far beyond just improving craft for Adriane. “At the open mic, I read a flash essay about growing watermelons with my mother and watching her mental and physical health decline over time. For the rest of the evening, people kept coming up to me to thank me for sharing. Several told me about their own family members: a grandmother with dementia, a mother with breast cancer, a mother who recently passed away. I was so moved. I kept thinking, This is why I write.”

We extended the MCWC community to welcome the local public as well. On Friday, August 2, MCWC held its Friday Night Reading at Cotton Auditorium in Fort Bragg for the first time. “The decision to move the event to Cotton was inspired by a desire to truly invite the community in to this event, which is our offering to the Mendocino Coast and our largest public celebration of the Conference,” said Executive Director Lisa Locascio. The reading, which featured Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Victoria Chang, Myriam Gurba, Jeannie Vanasco, and keynote Sharon Olds, was a smashing success. “I’ve heard from so many locals that having the reading at Cotton Auditorium felt festive and welcoming, and encouraged them to take part in the Conference’s offerings more fully than ever before,” Locascio adds. “As this was my first year as ED, I was somewhat nervous about whether the changes and new ideas I brought to MCWC would work out, from moving the reading to Cotton to bringing a Pulitzer Prize-winner into town from New York City. Thankfully, it seems to have gone well—people keep stopping me at the Farmer’s Market to tell me how much they enjoyed MCWC 2019.”

MCWC’s Lisa Locascio with readers Sharon Olds, Victoria Chang, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Jeannie Vanasco, and Myriam Gurba at the Friday Night Reading at Cotton Auditorium in Fort Bragg

We are looking forward to continuing to grow our community at MCWC 2020, and have already started lining up faculty, including poet Michelle Peñaloza and speculative fiction writer Kij Johnson. We are also thrilled to announce we will be expanding into Historical Fiction in 2020 with a workshop taught by Susan Stinson.

To receive updates and faculty announcements for MCWC 2020, add yourself to our mailing list using the form below. And to see all the MCWC 2019 photos from our wonderful photographer, Mimi Carroll, please click here. We encourage you to order a print as a memento of your time with us, and to thank Mimi for her involvement.

Finally, MCWC would not be possible without the generous donations of time and funding by our volunteers, donors, and board members. And thank you, MCWC participants, for making this conference such a beautiful community. If you would like to help us make MCWC accessible for all writers through scholarships, please consider donating here for MCWC 2020. We look forward to welcoming you all back to the Mendocino Coast next year!

MCWC Retiring Board Members

MCWC Board Members Norma Watkins and Barbara Lee retired from the board after MCWC 2019. The Conference would not be what it is today without either of these incredible women and we cannot thank them enough for their years of service. Click on the images above to read more about Barbara and Norma.

Celebrating 30 Years of MCWC

by Amy Lutz, MCWC Executive Assistant

MCWC 2019 registration closed with record numbers, making this year’s conference our largest yet! We are thrilled so many people will be joining us for our 30th year.

Of course, thirty years of MCWC would not be possible without the support of our returning participants, our generous donors, and our dedicated board. We spoke with a few of our board members this month to learn more about the history of MCWC and celebrate its future.

MCWC started in 1989 when Marlis Boardhead, a creative writing teacher at College of the Redwoods, decided to bring a few published authors to speak at the college. By the time MCWC President Ginny Rorby started volunteering in 1996, the event had blossomed into a full weekend conference. After Marlis moved out of state in 1997, Ginny and her friend Suzanne Byerley led the conference, with the support of College of the Redwoods Dean, Dr. Leslie Lawson.

In 2004, Ginny and Suzanne turned the directorship of conference over to Charlotte Gullick (who is returning this year as faculty for the MCWC 2019 Emerging Writers’ workshop). When Charlotte left for a full-time teaching job in Texas, leadership passed to Maureen Eppstein and Katherine Brown. The conference then separated from College of the Redwoods and become an independent non-profit. Maureen continued as the Executive Director for a number of years, followed by Karen Lewis for two years, and then Shirin Bridges for two years. Shirin passed the torch to our current director, Lisa Locascio, after the MCWC 2018 conference.

Past ED Shirin Bridges and Board Member Amie McGee manning the registration desk at MCWC 2017

MCWC has survived the changing tides of thirty years thanks to the dedication of its all-volunteer board. “We have a 12 member committee,” Ginny explained, “some of whom have been a part of this conference since 1998. MCWC would have been a failed endeavor without those committee members. Three have passed away, and, tragically, Suzanne was killed in a car accident in 2014.”

MCWC Secretary Norma Watkins has been an integral part of MCWC’s development since she started working with Ginny and Suzanne in 1997. Norma remembered one year in particular, when the board decided to throw a Thai-themed closing dinner, including special decorations and catering. The board even served the dinner themselves, a testament to their dedication. “The exhausted board voted it the greatest closing dinner ever and swore never to do it again,” Norma said. The board does still maintain the long-standing tradition of cooking for and serving at the Thursday Welcome Mixer.

Susan Bono welcoming everyone to the MCWC 2018 Friday Reading

The years of hard work have been more than worth it for Susan Bono, another long-serving board member and the editor of MCWC’s literary magazine, the Noyo River Review. “MCWC has been essential to my life as a writer and small press publisher,” she said. “From the beginning, which for me was more than twenty years ago, I was welcomed, respected, and taken seriously. The encouragement I found helped shape my identity and build community. I’m not the only one. In my time with MCWC, I’ve seen many new writers take root and blossom. Like me, they return again and again.”

Nona Smith has served eight years on the board, spending three of them as president. She said the highlights of her time at MCWC have been watching participants grow as writers over the years. She shared a fond memory of one of MCWC 2018’s participants: “The story he brought to his workshop was a unique one for him to write. It was about his experiences during the Vietnam War, something he’d never written about before. He was so enthused by the reception his work received in his morning workshop, that he read it in an afternoon open mic session. Noyo River Review editor Susan Bono attended that session and encouraged the participant to submit the story for publication in the Review…which now makes him a published author.”

One of our newer board members, Kara Vernor, started first as a participant at MCWC. “I had been feeling somewhat isolated as a writer before attending my first MCWC conference, where I ended up making  lasting connections both years I was a participant,” she said. Kara taught at MCWC 2017 and was then invited to join the board by past director Shirin Bridges. “I jumped at the chance to contribute,” Kara said. “The conference is a rare blend of friendly, affordable, and effective—our faculty is consistently excellent. MCWC continues to be a rich and incredibly generative community.”

Norma Watkins helping at the MCWC 2017 Thursday Mixer

Looking forward, Norma hopes MCWC can continue to become more accessible to a wider range of participants. “We live in a remote and beautiful place. It’s difficult to get here and expensive to stay. It’s an ongoing challenge for the conference—how to spread the word about the unique beauty of the place and, at the same time, provide affordable options for the diverse and younger writers we hope to attract.”

This year, MCWC has made strides towards becoming more accessible by offering seventeen scholarships, all of which were funded through donations. We are so grateful for the wonderful arts community of the Mendocino Coast, including the hosts, donors, volunteers and local participants who have supported this conference for thirty years.

We hope to share MCWC with the community through our list of public events this year, including a Paths to Publishing panel on Thursday and Open Mics on Friday and Saturday (all of which start at 1pm at the Mendocino K-8 School). We also have two faculty readings: one on Thursday evening at St Anthony’s Hall and one on Friday at Cotton Auditorium, both beginning at 6:30pm. For full details about events open to the public, please visit mcwc.org/afternoon-events.

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For full list of conference schedule, including location addresses, please visit mcwc.org/location-and-schedule.

For tips and advice on preparing for MCWC, including what to bring and how to make the most of the conference offerings, click here to visit last year’s July blog post.

Ismail Muhammad Explores Culture and Literature in Nonfiction

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Executive Assistant

As a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at U.C. Berkeley, MCWC 2019 nonfiction instructor Ismail Muhammad combines his mastery of academic writing with personal narrative in his criticism, essays, and book reviews. By blurring the lines of genre, Ismail explores the intersections between literature, art, identity and culture. His work has appeared in Slate, New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Catapult, and more. He’s the reviews editor for The Believer, a staff writer at the Millions, a contributing editor at ZYZZYVA, and a board member at the National Books Critics Circle.

Ismail is currently working on a novel about the Great Migration and queer archives of black history. He shared with us about how nonfiction and fiction work together in his creative process, as well as tips for honing our writing skills. To continue learning from Ismail, you can sign up for one of the last few open spots in his nonfiction workshop at MCWC 2019 at mcwc.org.

How does writing nonfiction provide you with opportunities to explore the natural connections between topics like race, pop culture, politics and literary critique? Do you have a writing process for structuring those intersections?

The nonfiction writers who influenced me most in high school and college were Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; they’re writers who just assume the connections between literary critique, pop culture, race, politics, and personal narrative. I admired how their essays careened between a diverse set of topics, from jazz, to 19th century American literature, to 20th century film, to black humor, often within the same essay. Reading them was an early education in criticism, so I suppose I never really learned about criticism as anything other than a practice that helps us articulate the connections between disparate cultural fields, even genres. The flexibility of the critical essay form allows me to inhabit whatever genres or modes I need to in order to approach a certain topic productively.

My process for structuring intersections between these fields mostly involves a lot of false starts, a lot of trial and error, and a lot of revision. I often find myself writing drafts of essays that I think of as being separate, but actually turn out to explore overlapping ideas. I set aside most of what I write, only to return to it in a later context, when a new perspective allows me to see something I couldn’t perceive before. I just have to give myself the time and space to write, mess up, cover a lot of ground, and see what happens when I’m done. It’s all somewhat haphazard and improvisatory. The most important thing is to write every day, to the extent that that’s possible. I try to write at least 300 words a day, just to see what comes out.

How did you get into writing book reviews, criticism, and interviews? Has writing nonfiction helped you grow as a fiction writer as well?

I came to book criticism through my studies as a graduate student in the English Ph.D. program at Cal Berkeley. By the time I was writing my dissertation, I found myself feeling dissatisfied with academic writing: I enjoyed the process of criticism that the program had taught me, but felt constrained by the formal demands of academic writing. Writing public facing criticism became a way to work through the ideas I was studying, without the formal burdens of the dissertation. I feel like public criticism has been a way of teaching myself how to think and write in a way that clarifies my literary critical chops, even if I never actually return to academic writing as a profession.

Nonfiction writing has definitely helped me grow as a fiction writer. Writing my criticism—which often interweaves elements of personal nonfiction and literary critical analysis—has helped me refine skills like scene craft, or narrative structure. I never studied creative writing in an academic setting, so nonfiction has been a kind of school for me, a space where I can experiment with and sharpen my skills.

In this interview with Literary Hub, you describe being a critic as “much more about learning—from the authors I’m reading, conversations I have with other critics, and other readers’ observations—than knowing.” This reminded me of the age-old writing advice that reading is the best way to learn how to write. What advice to you have for writers who want to read and write with the intention of learning?

The best advice I can give is read as broadly possible, even if you don’t “like” a certain kind of literature, don’t see yourself reflected in it, or find yourself disturbed, unsettled, or offended. I went to a college where education was conflated with reading deeply in the canon of Western literature and political thought. That rubbed me the wrong way, considering my background. I reluctantly read a lot of stuff that I would never have found myself reading in any other circumstance: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, St. Augustine’s City of God, Machiavelli’s Discourses, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Austen’s Emma, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, on and on. On the surface, these books had nothing to say to me; but I always found myself shocked at how they resonated with me on frequencies I didn’t know I had access to, and how they taught me elements of craft and inquiry I never would have learned otherwise.

There’s a theme through some of your writing about the presence and accessibility of culture and politics in today’s world through the internet and social media. How do you think writers play a role in adding to the conversation productively, and what might be practical steps writers can take to avoid media burn-out?

In a time where critics are expected to have an opinion ready within a day, if not an hour, of a cultural object’s appearance, a writer productively contributes to the conversation by speaking less and thinking more. It feels important that we all take a step back, observe, think, and then speak, instead of obeying the Internet’s dictate that we broadcast our first impressions to the world as soon as we have them. Good criticism feels dependent upon durational attention and considered speech. You’ve got to read something, meditate on it, maybe even read it again—and then speak.

I’m not sure that my strategies for avoiding burn-out will work for everyone, since I’m just not very into Twitter, Instagram, etc. But I engage with social media very little. I like to see what people are talking about, if there’s anything cool to learn out there. I like to see what people are excited about, what people are reading and watching and listening to. Otherwise, I stay off social media. I spend most of my time listening to music, reading, watching movies, following sports. I talk to my friends. I just like paying attention to what I think and feel, and what my friends are thinking and feeling.

You’ll be teaching the nonfiction workshop at MCWC and intend to focus on hybrid forms of nonfiction. What can participants expect from your workshop and what do you hope will be their biggest take-away?

I want the workshop participants to consider ways that the personal essay can be less a revelation of the self, and more a series of aesthetic explorations that refract society and culture through the self. I think that happens best when we allow the narrative personal essay to slide into genres that we normally think of as diametrically opposed to the personal, like cultural criticism and academic inquiry. Our chief question will be, How can we tell our stories through attention to cultural objects? Participants can expect to read and discuss excerpts from authors like Saidiya Hartman, Imani Perry, James Baldwin, Brian Blanchfield and Theresa Cha, and to do exercises that encourage them to investigate their relationship to cultural objects.

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To learn more about Ismail, visit www.ismail-muhammad.com.

Registration for MCWC 2019 closes on June 30th. There are just a handful of open seats left, so don’t wait to register!

Empowering Young Readers with Mitali Perkins

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Executive Assistant

MCWC 2019 Middle Grade/Young Adult faculty Mitali Perkins believes stories have the power to create safe spaces for young readers. Born in Kolkata, India, Mitali lived in Ghana, Cameroon, London, New York and Mexico before her family settled in California when she was eleven. Inspired by her own experiences, her novels feature characters trying to cross borders, bridge differences, and find community.

Mitali’s novel You Bring the Distant Near was nominated for a National Book Award and a Walter Award honor book. Rickshaw Girl was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the top 100 books for children in the past century. Bamboo People was an American Library Association Top Ten Novel for Young Adults, and Tiger Boy won the Charlotte Huck Honor Award and the South Asia Book Award. She has been honored as a “Most Engaging Author” by independent booksellers across the country and selected as a “Literary Light for Children” by the Associates of the Boston Public Library.

Mitali shared with us about her decision to be “all in” as a writer, her passion for reaching the hearts and minds of young readers, and her plans for the MCWC 2019 MG/YA workshop.

Congratulations on the recent publication of your twelfth book, Forward Me Back to You! As you add another book to your long list of award-winning publications, how do you feel looking back over your career?

I’m surprised that I’m still doing this and making a living at it. Though I haven’t written bestsellers, my books have been mid-list steady sellers, mostly thanks to the school and library markets. I just earned out an advance from a book published ten years ago, for example! After twelve books, all still in print and being read by young people here and in other countries, the long game begins to pay off. My agent—Laura Rennert of Andrea Brown Literary Agency—has represented me with devotion and excitement for more than fifteen years. She and my publishers and editors believe in me and my contribution to the literary landscape. My booking agent, Sarah Azibo, lines up gigs to cover the speaking portion of my income. All in all, I’m still standing, still writing, still trying to serve and empower my young readers with stories. That feels like more than a surprise—it’s a miracle.

You have another book coming out this September, Between Us and Abuela, which will be your first picture book. Though this is a new format for you, it follows your theme of “writing between cultures,” as you’ve described your work. How have your own experiences influenced your passion for writing between cultures?

All of my stories explore the tension, joy, gains, and losses of crossing borders. I’ve done that my whole life. Whether it’s the space between those with money and power and those with less (as in Forward Me Back to You), the space between cultures (as in Between Us and Abuela), or the gap between South Asia’s girl children and their male counterparts (Rickshaw Girl and Secret Keeper), my stories always take place along borders.

You’ve written both Middle Grade and Young Adult novels. What advice would you give to a writer trying to figure out if their story best fits MG or YA?

Which do you like to read? I enjoy them equally, along with picture books, so I write all three. Pay attention to your preference as a reader and that will illuminate your writing voice. We can also discuss this during the workshop, when I can provide one-on-one attention to your writing.

You studied political science at Stanford and public policy at UC Berkeley, and then taught middle school, high school, and college before transitioning into writing fiction. What inspired you to start writing?

I always wrote, scribbling poetry and stories as early as eight or nine, so the joy of words and story craft has been and will be a lifelong way for me to play. I didn’t start pursuing a full time career as an “author” until my second novel, Monsoon Summer, was rejected by twenty-two publishers over eleven years. When it was finally published, I decided that if I couldn’t be thwarted by all that opposition, it was time to be “all in.”

Can you give us a taste of what you’ll bring to the MG/YA workshop at MCWC 2019? What can participants expect and what do you hope will be their biggest take away?

I love teaching. My mentees in the past who have gone on to be published are teachable and focused on improving their craft. You’ll learn how to make your dialogue zing, take us to a setting with all five of our senses, and find fixable flaws in story structure. I will openly share much of what I have learned and hope you will join me to make your stories sizzle. I want them to reach the hearts and minds of young readers and I’ll do my best to help you get them there.

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To learn more about Mitali and her books, visit www.mitaliperkins.com.

You can still register for Mitali’s MG/YA workshop at MCWC 2019. But don’t wait, because there are only a couple seats left!

Congratulations to the MCWC 2019 Scholarship Winners

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Executive Assistant

We are thrilled to welcome this year’s scholarship winners to MCWC! The following writers were selected out of a highly competitive field of almost eighty applicants. We asked them to tell us a little about their current project and/or what they hope to get out of their conference experience.

Scholarships strengthen the MCWC community by bringing in talented individuals who may not be able to attend otherwise. These opportunities would not be possible without the support of our generous donors. We cannot thank them enough!

BYERLEY MEMORIAL NOVEL SCHOLARSHIP

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a poet, playwright, writer, and researcher from Panama City, Panama, and the former Panama Canal Zone. He is the recipient of a 2019 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry and fellowships or scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and others. His poetry has been awarded the C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, BOAAT Poetry Prize, Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize in Poetry, and others. His poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere in print and online. 

Darrel writes: “I am writing a novel based in Panama City, Panama across several decades. I really enjoyed reading Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s book Fruit of the Drunken Tree and look forward to working with her on excerpts of my novel. “

DOUG FORTIER SHORT FICTION SCHOLARSHIP

Gail Ansel completed her first novel, JENN & POLLY, in the Stanford Novel Writing Certificate Program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Whirlwind Magazine and the Noyo River Review. She is at work on her second novel about the life-long consequences of losing custody of a child to adoption.

Gail writes: “I so loved the warmth and support I found at MCWC my first time in 2018, I invited ten of my friends for 2019. I’m workshopping my second novel, Suzanne, Finally with Ingrid Rojas Contreras, using the July deadline to kick some serious third draft magic. I write about women’s choice, voice and agency.”

GINNY RORBY MG/YA SCHOLARSHIP

Lisa Manterfield is the award-winning author of Adult and Young Adult fiction. Her work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Los Angeles Times, and Psychology Today. Originally from northern England, she now lives in Santa Rosa, California with her husband and over-indulged cat.

Lisa writes: “My current project is a psychological suspense about a teen searching for answers about her twin sister’s murder. I’m doing final revisions on this project right now, so I’m looking forward to working on something new at the conference. I have a few ideas bubbling away, and I’m anxious to see which one catches fire.”

NORMA WATKINS MEMOIR SCHOLARSHIP

Leah Parman lives in San Francisco with her teenage daughters. She is many things, and is still becoming. In her stolen time, she is working on a piece about identity, denial, power, shame, courage, sexual dynamics, forgiveness, and transformation in the context of domestic abuse.

Leah writes: “I can’t wait to escape to the Mendocino coast to connect with other writers and nurture the writer in myself.”

MCWC POETRY SCHOLARSHIP

Valerie Wallace is the author of House of McQueen, selected by Vievee Francis for the Four Way Books Intro Prize (Spring 2018), and the chapbook The Dictators’ Guide to Good Housekeeping. Margaret Atwood chose 10 of her poems for the Atty Award and she has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the San Miguel Writers’ Conference Poetry Award. 

Valerie writes: “I’m so excited to meet other writers, work with Victoria Chang, develop new work for my next book, and of course, go for coastal walks. My first book came out a year ago, and I’ve spent a great deal of my creative time in the past year traveling and giving readings. I’m eager to be among writers and to have space and time to generate new work, and affirm daily writing habits.”

Soroptimists International of Fort Bragg Nonfiction Scholarship

Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo is a writer and audio-producer living in the Bay Area. She is the co-creator of Debutakes, a podcast about two women trying desperately to get onto a red carpet, and she produces audio for the Bay Area radio producers The Kitchen Sisters. She also works for City Arts & Lectures in San Francisco, and contributes to fields magazine. She is currently working on a television pilot about the apocalypse.

Juliet writes: “The piece I’ll be workshopping at the conference is titled ‘Critical Clothing,’ and begins with my lifetime obsession with being a spy. It is also about clothes. Barthes and Eileen Myles are on my reading syllabus, and so are Patti Smith and a guide for medieval anchoresses.”

OCTAVIA BUTLER MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP FOR SPECULATIVE FICTION

Adriane Tharp is a writer, dancer, and novice conservationist. She grew up in Alabama and currently lives in Connecticut, though not for much longer. Her writing can be found in DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and The New York Times.

Adriane writes: “I’m currently working on a collection of speculative short stories about women in rural Alabama.”

Theresa Connelly Scholarship

Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes is a writer from the Big Island of Hawaii now living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee. Her novel in progress, Hula, won the Southern California Writers Conference Fiction Award. She is an alumnae of the Iowa Writers Workshop Summer Program and the recipient of a Hedgebrook fellowship.

Jasmin writes: “Much of my work focuses on the connection between cultural inheritance and personal identity. During the conference I am looking forward to workshopping a memoir that tackles my complicated relationship with Hawaii and asks the question: who are you if where you’re from doesn’t exist?”

Hether Ludwick First Taste Scholarship

Minyoung Lee is a writer living in San Francisco, CA with her well-traveled calico cat, Matisse. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in MoonPark Review, Riggwelter, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and The Drabble.

Minyoung writes: “I write flash fiction, short stories, and creative non-fiction focused around themes of grief and loss. During the conference, I hope to explore my fears in writing with Shobha Rao and build a writing community that I can grow with in the future.”

Voices of Diversity Scholarship

Nay Saysourinho is the daughter of Lao refugees who immigrated to Montréal in the late 70’s. She has received fellowships from One Story, Kundiman and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She is a Tin House Summer Workshop alumna and her writing can be found in The Funambulist and The Margins, and is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review Online.

Nay writes: “I am currently working on a novel about endangered species in Southeast Asia, but will be workshopping a work of creative non-fiction during the conference.”

Under-30 Scholarship

L. A. Johnson is from California. She is the author of the chapbook Little Climates (Bull City Press, 2017). She is currently pursuing her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California, where she is a Provost’s Fellow. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and other journals.

L. A. writes: “I’m hoping to workshop new poems that address female desire through an exploration of California’s landscapes. I’m looking forward to meeting other writers and broadening my writing community!”

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT WRITER SCHOLARSHIPS

All High School Student Writer Scholarship recipients are residents of the Mendocino Coast.

Maxwell Brown

Maxwell writes: “What I would hope to get out of this conference is to connect more with my inner writing spirit and gain more confidence in my writing, as well as improve my current skills in general.”

Amethyst Douglas

Amethyst writes: “By attending MCWC, I hope to further develop my personal writing style and creative skills. I am also looking forward to meeting other people who have the same passion for writing as I do.”

Rhiannon Hawthorn

Rhiannon writes: “In the writer’s conference, I’d love to learn more on how to become a better poet and share my poems for feedback. I have a great passion for writing poetry and I would love this opportunity to be in the conference.”

Jaden Valentine

Jaden writes: “I want to take this opportunity to really dive into my inner writer and learn more about myself. I want to grow with the help and guidance of those more advanced than I am.”

Molly Windsor-Marshall

Molly writes: “This conference is an opportunity of which I plan to take full advantage. I want to soak-up any knowledge you’ll give me, as well as see where other writers of all ages are on their journeys. I am grateful for this chance to develop my skills, as well as receive and give feedback.”

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If you would like to join the scholarship winners at MCWC 2019, you can register now at mcwc.org. There are still a few seats available in many of our workshops. And if you would like to support our scholarship program, please consider donating to MCWC at mcwc.org/donate.