Two scholarships to honor Doug Fortier at MCWC 2022

In April 2022, our community lost our friend Doug Fortier, a long-time Conference participant and advocate for writing on the Mendocino Coast. Two scholarships to this year’s conference have been created in his memory.

The WMC Doug Fortier Scholarship

Doug played a central role in the Writers of the Mendocino Coast, the local chapter of the state-wide organization, the California Writers' Club. In honor of Doug’s love for MCWC and the Coast’s writing community, WMC sponsored a scholarship for one of its members to attend the conference. It has been awarded to the poet Karin C. Uphoff.

Karin is author of Botanical Body Care; Herbs and Natural Healing for your Whole Body (2007), and writes a monthly column, Words on Wellness for Lighthouse Peddler Newspaper. She has published poetry in Noyo River Review (2015) plus Writers of the Mendocino Coast anthologies Hooked (2018), Erosion (2021) and Borders (2022).

Karin writes: “Although my career in healthcare continues to require I write informational non-fiction, the language of my heart is poetry. I am creating a chapbook and eager for guidance and the exchange of feedback from the diversity of voices that MCWC offers.”

The Doug Fortier Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction

In memory of Doug, a group of writers fundraised the Doug Fortier Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction. It was awarded to Muriel Leung.

Murel is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers, and currently serves as the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World fellow.

Muriel writes: “I am excited to work on a linked speculative short story collection set in New York City during the sudden appearance of weekly acid rainstorms. In the midst of this ongoing disaster is a queer love story between two Asian American women, navigating the world of ghosts, heartbreak, lost opportunities, and the space between life and afterlife. I look forward to developing this collection further with the support of a writing community at MCWC.”

Thank you to generous donors who funded the Doug Fortier Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction:

Jane Armbruster
Cassia Brill
Debbie DeVoe
Jamie Ericson
Chris Hall
Leata Holloway
Shirin Leos
Alicia London
Cameron Lund
Amy Lutz
Marjorie Miles
Lisa Manterfield
Cady Owens
Ginny Rorby
Jenn Siebert
Carole Stivers
Dana Wagner
Mike Winn
 

Congratulations to both scholarship winners! We hope you’ll join them at the conference from August 4-6; registration closes on June 30.

Remembering Doug

We are collecting remembrances of Doug Fortier to be published in the MCWC literary magazine Noyo Review. Please send your remembrance—in any writing or visual format—to noyoreview@gmail.com by July 1. 

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE MCWC 2022 SCHOLARSHIP WINNERS

We are thrilled to welcome this year’s scholarship winners to MCWC 2022! We received a record number of scholarship applications and the following writers were selected out of a highly competitive field. We asked them to tell us a little about their current project and/or what they hope to get out of their conference experience. If you would like to join these writers at MCWC, be sure to register for the workshop of your choice by June 30.

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!

ALBERTINA THOLAKELE DUBE SCHOLARSHIP FOR YOUNG WRITERS

We were delighted to award this scholarship to 12 young writers.

Clockwise, from top left: Kathryn Hargett-Hsu, Julie Ae Kim, Alice Ehlers, Kaitlin Harness, Sidney Regelbrugge, huiying b. chan, Veasna Has and Ryan Artes

Kathryn Hargett-Hsu is an MFA candidate in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. Born and raised in Alabama, she is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, Belgrade Art Studio, and UAB. Most recently, she received the Barksdale-Maynard Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2021 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize. Find her in TaiwaneseAmerican.org, Muzzle Magazine, Cherry Tree, Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere.

Kathryn says: "I'm working on my first poetry collection, CROCODILE, which centers the Asian American woman body and metamorphosis. At the conference, I hope to investigate ecopoetics and draw inspiration from the beautiful Mendocino Coast. I'm excited to join the MCWC community and to learn from everyone this summer!" 

Julie Ae Kim is an organizer and writer from Queens, NY. She is an incoming MFA student in Creative nonfiction at Ohio State University. She is the co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective and the co-editor of the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities Project at The Margins. Currently, she is working on a memoir on sexuality, desire and Asian America.

Alice Ehlers is a writer and published author born and raised in Mendocino County. She is currently a sophomore at the Mendocino Community High School, where she has the freedom to pursue her aspirations of building a life out of her writing. 

Alice writes: “Recently, I've been trying my hand at writing short fiction. I am also really excited to workshop a couple of my poems, as well as meet other young and ambitious writers!“

Kaitlin Harness is a senior at Developing Virtue Girls' School at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, where she is currently studying AP English Literature and Composition after realizing a deep interest having taken AP English Language the previous year. 

Kaitlin writes: “Having started my study of literature and poetry, I am very excited to learn from experienced writers and gain more depth in my own writing. I look forward to meeting everyone and reaching new poetic heights in such a creative environment.”

huiying b. chan is a visionary poet, cultural worker, and educator from Brooklyn, NY on Lenape Land. huiying’s writing explores what is forged in diaspora, and charts how we heal from societal wounds. huiying’s work is published in Best New Poets 2021, The Offing, and The Margins. He has received fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, VONA/Voices, DreamYard, and elsewhere. As a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow at Rutgers University-Newark, huiying is working on a manuscript that explores matriarchal legacies and self-remembrance. For more, visit huiyingbchan.com.

huiying writes, “At the conference, I plan to work on ‘Speak to Me in Toisanese,’ a hybrid poetry and prose memoir project that uses Toisanese words as an organizing principle to tell the stories of matriarchs and elders in my family across generations. In its storytelling, it is a project that preserves the culture of a language decreasing in speakers with each generation.”

Veasna Has is a writer and nonprofit administrator based in Queens, New York, by way of Long Beach, California. She was a 2020 Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellow in creative nonfiction and is most interested in storytelling through written, cinematic, and dance mediums. Her writing has been featured in 433 Mag and the Asian American Feminist Collective's First Times collection. Her work explores themes of family and cultural identity, rooted in her Cambodian American upbringing and an ongoing effort to define what that means.

Veasna writes: "I'm looking forward to meeting and connecting with other writers after a bit of a hiatus from producing work, and to enjoying a creative recharge by the sea, on my home coast."

Ryan Artes is an adoptee, activist, novelist, and poet. He self-published his debut poetry chapbook, After Midnight, in May 2021. He hosts two monthly events for adoptees only, a generative writing workshop and an open mic. Ryan is simultaneously creating and pursuing his DIY MFA.

Ryan writes: “I will continue to develop my third poetry manuscript, which offers a model of healing for queer Indian adoptees. After a lifetime of seeking such a model, I have realized one does not exist. I aim to begin filling this void by sharing my narrative.”

Sidney Regelbrugge is a Junior at Point Arena High School.

Sidney writes: “Currently, I am the Mendocino County Youth Poet Laureate and will be in to February 2023. With my writing in my current Laureate position, I will be publishing a collective book of poetry, as well as having countless county-wide readings. I hope to expand my writing into a different genre of literature. I am also quite looking forward to being around all sorts of writers.”

Jessica Zhou (she/they) is a writer, researcher, and artist rooting in San Francisco. She'd love to talk to you about digital diaspora, each of our cyborgnesses, and finding one another online. Her writing has been supported by Kundiman, Kearny Street Workshop, Southern Exposure, and Friends with Benefits.

Jessica writes: “I’m so excited to dedicate time and attention to hanging out and learning with fellow writers! My speculative non/fiction collection involves nonlinear narratives of dreams and memories, so I'm looking forward to honing in on writing that can be truth-telling and myth-making all the same in Jean Chen Ho's short fiction workshop, and in the rest of the incredible faculty's afternoon seminars.”

Frej Barty is an aspiring filmmaker, cinematographer, and storyteller. Always looking for new opportunities to learn filmmaking, he plans on making movies that inspire. He interviewed Jamie Heinemann of the MythBusters. He is also a roller skating champ, Dungeons and Dragons lover, and nerd.

Frej writes: “For this conference I plan on working on the script for a film. There is not point to all of the wonders of cinematography without a good story to tell. I am super exited to see what the conference can do to the script, and how the film will turn out. The goal isn’t to make the best film ever, but to develop skills for me and others who will work on the project.”

Lizeth Granados is currently enrolled at the Mendocino Community High School.

Lizeth says: “I write a quiet lot of poetry when I have very intense emotions. Whether it be feeling sad, nostalgic or happy. I plan to work on poetry, and I hope to get better at it as well as learn new ways of creating it. I’m very excited to meet everyone and hear about their poetry.”

Phannarai Inkun is a writer and a student going into their Sophomore year. Originally born in Thailand, they have been writing for years because of their love for storytelling. They have written in many different genres such as romance, fanfiction, post-apocalyptic, and fantasy. They would love to try their hand at more.

Phannarai writes: “I hope to get more writing experience out of this workshop. My love of storytelling stems from the fact that it creates strong communities and lasting connections between readers.”

From left: Phannarai Inkun, Lizeth Granados, Frej Barty and Jessica Zhou

TERESA CONNELLY FIRST TASTE SCHOLARSHIP

This scholarship has been awarded to two writers who are attending the conference for the first time.

Ebony Haight (left) and Tom Gammarino (right).

Ebony Haight is a 2022 Periplus fellow and graduate of The University of Oregon writing program, with work appearing in KQED, Good Company Magazine, and This Long Thread: Women of Color on Craft, Community, and Connection. You can find her on the web at ebonyhaight.substack.com. 

She’s currently working on a speculative memoir about transracial adoption and will use her time at the conference to workshop and refine this project.

Tom Gammarino’s most recent novel is King of the Worlds. Recent shorter works have appeared in The Tahoma Literary Review, Bamboo Ridge, The Writer, Entropy, SFS Stories, and Hawai'i Pacific Review, among others. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and a PhD in English from the University of Hawai'i, and he teaches Science Fiction, Magical Realism, and Jazz Literature to high school kids in Honolulu.

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

Anne G. Locascio Scholarship

This scholarship was awarded to two writers whose work has grappled with intergenerational trauma, family history, and/or homelessness.

Ida Soon-ok Hart (left) and Danny Thanh Nguyen (right).

Ida Soon-ok Hart is a Korean War baby currently living in Los Angeles.  She is a retired educator writing her memoir.  She was a Writer’s Digest competition winner in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and has been published in 3 anthologies for women of color and will be included in Nonwhite and Woman to be released in September 2022.  She volunteers sponsoring women in recovery from alcoholism and addiction.  She can be contacted by email:  Idahart1@gmail.com

Ida writes: “During the 2022 Mendocino Writers Conference, I will be workshopping excerpts from my memoir The Camel Hump Mountains of Sangok Dong, the part focusing on my year of teaching English in Seoul while searching for my mother.  Also, maybe, a new short story I’m currently writing, “This One Was Born in Zion” (Psalms 87:6 – The Lord will write in the register of the peoples: ‘This one was born in Zion.’) upon finding out the Korean Registry had removed my name from their books.”

Danny Thanh Nguyen (they/she/he equally) has published stories and essays in GQ, them. magazine, The Offing, The Journal, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. In the last year, they have been awarded fellowships and grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, Caldera Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Ucross Foundation. Her column on kink and leather culture appears in the international social network platform Recon. Find him on social media @engrishlessons.

Danny writes: “Because I've been solely focused on completing my queer kinkster memoir/essay collection, I'm excited to shift gears at MCWC reconnecting with fiction by returning to my Southeast Asian folklore-inspired magical realism story collection, which I haven't touched in over two years.”

Nella Larsen Memorial Scholarship

Maryam Ghadiri is a researcher, a life-coach and a storyteller. As a researcher, she studies and writes about how children interact with nature and learn science. As a life coach, she works with mission driven individuals who want to have a bigger impact and transform their life by finding their voice and redefining their personal stories. Her love for writing and storytelling grew after her immigration to the United States about 10 years ago, when she found her healing in the process of writing about her childhood memories, documenting her experiences and feelings in a new academic system and exploring her identity in a new land that now she calls “home”.

Currently, she is in a journey of writing her memoir called Alien from Iran in which she shares the story about her identity as a first generation Iranian immigrant and how it was formed and transformed during her time in a land far away from the place she was born and raised. In this conference, she is excited and grateful to meet amazing writers, co-create a creative space and learn from everyone and enjoy every moment.

Marion Deeds Scholarship

Keish Kim (she/her/hers) is a first-generation transnational feminist writer. Keish’s writing focuses on (dis)ability and citizenship, and she studies literary and cultural texts by queer and undocumented im/migrant artists. In her spare time, you can find her in the ceramic studio, in front of the oven, or going on bike rides. She is also a co-host of A Revolutionary Love Letter podcast (https://linktr.ee/migrantloveletters). 

Keish writes: “I am excited to be in a community with writers across genres & forms. I am looking forward to workshopping my writing in Jean Chen Ho's Short Fiction workshop.”

Thank You To Healthcare Workers Scholarship

Natalie Rose Gove is a writer, poet, and performer who works in acupuncture, caregiving, and waits tables for the brunch crowd. A former public school teacher and mentor, she is currently working towards receiving her MFA from Queens University Charlotte, where she is studying three genres in their Latin American Track. She will be attending a writing residency this July in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is currently working on sifting through piles of papers under the bed and planning her move this summer to New Orleans.

Natalie writes: “I am revising pieces from a collection of short nonfiction that focus on trauma in the roots and landscapes of memory from childhood until now. I am excited to work with Anastacia-Reneé on cutting into these words and creating a hybrid work that will become a healing memoir.”

Frances Andrews

Sarah Wang is has written for the London Review of Books, American Short Fiction, BOMB, The New Republic, n+1, and Harper’s Bazaar. She is a 2021-2022 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, a Tin House Scholar, the winner of a Nelson Algren prize for fiction, and a former fellow at the Center for Fiction, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Witness Program, and Kundiman’s Mentorship Program. See more of her writing at wangsarah.com and follow her on Twitter @sarah_wwang.

Octavia Butler Scholarship for Speculative Fiction

Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and Indiana University MFA alum whose fiction appears in such journals as AAWW's The Margins, Foglifter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Their work has won the Ploughshares Emerging Writers' Contest and the NANO Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Their debut collection, The Anchored World, is forthcoming through Rose Metal Press in fall of 2022. They serve as an associate fiction editor for Fairy Tale Review. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives outside St. Louis. Learn more at jasminesawers.com and @sawers on Twitter.

Jasmine writes: “As I prepare to write a very queer, very magical, and very Thai American novel, I am eager to learn more about the craft of worldbuilding in speculative fiction, which hasn't been a focus in my writing education thus far. I'm also looking forward to being in community with everyone at the conference and visiting California for the first time.”

Ginny Rorby Scholarship for MG/YA Fiction

Described by one professor as “the Great Iconoclast,” Logan Silva was born and bred in Mendocino County. Amazing teachers and writers passed their love of the written word to Logan, and he tries to pass that love on to his students in middle school, high school, junior college, and university. Historical studies have taken Logan to Cal, Stanford, Dartmouth, and Yale, but he never lost his love of storytelling. 

Logan writes: “I plan on using the conference to soak up as much craft as I can from an amazing field of experts and fellow writers. I’m moving from education writing and curriculum to the young adult fiction genre and hope that the conference will help me bridge that gap.”

James I Garner Scholarship

Raquel Baker earned a PhD in English Literary Studies from The University of Iowa. She specializes in Postcolonial Studies and 20th- and 21st-century African literatures in English. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Postcolonial and Transnational Literatures at California State University Channel Islands, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and Africana Studies courses. 

Raquel says: “I am currently working on a cyberpunk flash fiction collection and look forward to engaging the tools, community, and space to move the project forward.”

Norma Watkins Scholarship

Jordan Alam is a queer Bangladeshi-American writer, performer, and therapist based out of Seattle. Their short stories and articles have been published in The Atlantic, SeattleMet, Autostraddle, CultureStrike Magazine, Entropy, and The Rumpus among others. They have performed on stage and facilitated workshops on embodied writing nationwide, most recently at Kundiman, Hugo House, and Town Hall Seattle. Their debut novel is a story of family secrets told from the points of view of four Bangladeshi American women in the aftermath of their mother's unexpected death.

At the conference, they'll be doing something completely different—embarking on an early draft of their memoir about transnational adoption and uncovering one's own history in fragments. Learn more about their work at their website: www.jordanalam.com.

Doug Fortier Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction

In April 2022, our community lost our friend Doug Fortier, a long-time Conference participant and advocate for writing on the Mendocino Coast. In memory of Doug, a group of writers fundraised the Doug Fortier Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction.

From Queens, NY, Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books), Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers, and currently serves as the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World fellow.

Muriel writes: “I am excited to work on a linked speculative short story collection set in New York City during the sudden appearance of weekly acid rainstorms. In the midst of this ongoing disaster is a queer love story between two Asian American women, navigating the world of ghosts, heartbreak, lost opportunities, and the space between life and afterlife. I look forward to developing this collection further with the support of a writing community at MCWC.”

Top row (from left to right): Maryam Ghadiri, keish kim, Natalie Rose Gove

Middle row (from left to right): Sarah Wang, Jasmine Sawers, Logan Silva

Bottom row (from left to right): Raquel Baker, Jordan Alam, Muriel Leung

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If you would like to join the scholarship winners at this year’s conference, 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.

MCWC 2022: Registration is now open!

Registration is now open for the 33rd annual Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference (MCWC). After two years of being held online, the conference will be held again in-person on the Mendocino Coast.

“We have a phenomenal line-up of acclaimed teachers for this year’s conference,” says MCWC Executive Director, Lisa Locascio Nighthawk. The faculty includes Pablo Cartaya (Middle Grade/Young Adult), Claudia Castro Luna (Poetry), Jean Chen Ho (Short Fiction), Lydia Kiesling (Novel), Ayize Jama-Everett (Speculative Fiction) and Anastacia-Reneé (Emerging Writers). Naomi Hirahara will be teaching the conference’s first-ever Mystery Workshop and Faith Adiele will facilitate a Memoir Master Class. Special guests include keynote speaker and UC Santa Cruz professor emerita Karen Tei Yamashita, winner of the 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation, and literary agent Jonah Straus.

Registration for MCWC 2022 is open until June 30, 2022. Writers of all ages and levels of experience are encouraged to register (click here to do so). Registration is open to all and requires no application or writing sample. Tuition is $675 for the three-day conference, which includes morning writing workshops (limited to twelve students), afternoon seminars on the craft of writing and the writers’ life, open mics, pitch panels, blind critique panels, opportunities for one-on-one consultations with literary agents and authors, and evening readings by faculty. The registration fee also covers breakfast and lunch for each day of the conference, along with a celebratory dinner on the final night.

All MCWC 2022 participants and faculty are required to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination. Masks must be worn at all times indoors. Meals before and after the morning workshops will be outside.

 “We are monitoring the constantly evolving public health situation closely. Additional safety protocols may be implemented in accordance with state and county guidelines,” adds Locascio Nighthawk.

•  To register for the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference registration, click here. Questions can be directed to Operations Manager Alexander Matthews at info@mcwc.org.

"Exploring the multiplicity of the human condition": A Q&A with Pablo Cartaya

Pablo Cartaya. Photograph by Zoe Milenkovic.

We chat to acclaimed author Pablo Cartaya, the faculty of the MCWC 2022’s Middle Grade/Young Adult Workshop, “The Villain Speaks”.

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

My inspiration always begins with my abuela and abuelo. They are the foundation for my work and how I represent their legacy through culture, family, and community in the stories I write. And my kids are a parallel inspiration—they teach me so much about the world. And they're funny!

What drew you to begin writing books for kids and young adults instead of for grown-ups?

I don't necessarily write with the aim to tell stories for young people. I write to tell human stories and young people are often my protagonists. Sometimes I write adult protagonists but I don't change my approach to the craft. Exploring the multiplicity of the human condition is what I'm most fascinated by and writing characters who are young people are great vessels for that creative exploration.

What's the secret to a great MG/YA novel?

Read. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.....Repeat.

How does being fully bilingual influence your writing and creative practice?

It influences every aspect of my creativity. It's like breathing air. It took me a long time to feel I had permission to write sentences akin to the way I think—where thoughts often begin in one language and end in another.

What do you love most about teaching writing?

One of my favorite parts of teaching writing is watching students get that glimmer in their eyes when a story emerges. Helping them discover the hidden secrets of that story and then watching them fly off with it is an incredible feeling. I've had several students get story ideas in my class that turned into full novels and became published.

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

That they feel free to explore the endless possibility of their creativity and come away with a renewed sense of where their stories will go next.

About Pablo’s workshop

What’s the deal with the antagonist in your story? Why do they make the life of your protagonist so miserable? Is it merely to exist or is there something more profound going on? How do we provide nuance to our protagonist’s foe? In this workshop, writers will immerse themselves into the world of villains to get an understanding of why they do what they do. The workshop will be aimed at spotting static villains and learning to avoid stereotypical depictions of the antagonist. This class will consist of writing the villain monologue. Writing the villain’s backstory. And imagining the life of the villain without the protagonist getting in their way. Sample texts will be explored as well as several writing exercises.

About Pablo

Pablo Cartaya is an internationally acclaimed author, screenwriter, speaker, and educator. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, and on Oprah’s Booklist. Pablo has worked with Disney, Apple+, and Sesame Street on projects adapted from television series and movies. In 2021, he served as a judge for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature and is currently an associate professor in the low residency MFA creative writing program at the University of Nevada. He calls Miami home and Cuban-American his cultura. Novels include: The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora, Marcus Vega Doesn’t Speak Spanish, Each Tiny Spark, and the upcoming climate dystopia The Last Beekeeper. Awards and Honors include: 2020 Schneider Family Book Award Honor, 2019 ALSC Notable Book, 2018 American Library Association’s Pura Belpré Honor, 2018 Audie Award Finalist, and 2018 E.B. White Read Aloud Book Award Finalist.

"The hero is the cult of the dead": A Q&A with Speculative Fiction faculty, Ayize Jama-Everett

Conference Assistant Frannie Deckas chats to Ayize Jama-Everett, instructor of the Speculative Fiction workshop at MCWC 2022, POV/Voice and Worldbuilding: The way through.

What are some of the people, places, things, and ideas that inspire you?

I've got my heroes like everyone, but the unifying factor in them all is an inability to live a life prescribed to them. I'm inspired by those who take ownership of their lives and don't let norms, trauma, or conventional thinking dictate their moves in the world. In terms of places, I've heard about an island full of dogs that sounds amazing. I like deserts and secluded large lakes, quiet places. But I also grew up in NYC, so I'm a sucker for good nightlife, at least I was before COVID. Now the thought of being around a mass of strangers is a bit daunting to me. Still, though, the magic of the dance floor is always on my mind.

What does your ideation process look like for a new book?
Percolation, percolation, percolation + mind-numbing tedium called typing X burst of inspirational jotting/reading said accumulations of letters on the page, bracketed by an inability to stop=A novel, short story, or graphic novel. That makes sense, right? I write. When I have enough down that I think it makes sense, I read it. Then I figure out what else to write. Rinse and repeat until someone else tells me it's done. I think there's a belief that I've helped to perpetuate, that writers are self-aware and know what we're doing most of the time. The older I get, the more seasoned in the game, I realize that the best writing comes from being open to being wrong about everything I'm doing but doing it anyway. For instance, I have a cult novel, my cult novel. My obsession with intentional communities has persisted since I was four-years-old. I have at least 200 pages of a good cult novel. But just last week, after realizing that someone I'm very close to has been in two cults in her life, I realized my angle on the novel was wrong. So those 200 pages will probably never come to light. Something will come out of them, but if I try and make those pages my cult novel, I'll be doing a disservice to what I know to be true. What's that? Ideation? Trying something and screwing up? Being open to failure? Bad writing? I call it my process :)

Sometimes, when writing, voice can feel like it wants to hang on into the next work. How do you make the shift in voice between one story to the next?

Usually, through POV (point of view), omniscient narrators are no longer in favor. Still, I'll say that most narratives I start have that god-like overview of the world, the character's psyche, and the future of the narrative (though that often time tends to be false). What I burrow into, what makes it fun for me, is to strip away all that insight by focusing on one character or a set of characters. It's like a flashlight that can only cast so much brilliance in front of them. Like us all, the characters fumble in the dark, pretending they're aware of the world around them in total. When in actuality, we're all just trying to give ourselves a little bit of security with the lie, "It's not that dark in here." Voice, for me, comes from the tone of that lie and the amount of luminance surrounding the character. I tend to write intimate stories, with characters doing their best to pay attention only to what's in front of them. It's the world that invades their space, not the other way around. So the character's voice is determined by how they deal with the unknown. The narrative's voice is determined by how much knowledge I choose to convey to the reader.

What's your best advice on writing flawed but redeemable characters?

The hero is the cult of the dead. Please don't have them seek out redemption. Hercules killed four mythical creatures, captured three more, and stole a goddess girdle to atone for killing his wife. Is that redemption? I guess for the times, it was. So make redemption culturally specific and intriguing if you're going to do that. I don't need redeemed characters. I need characters who make choices, hard choices and live with the consequences. I like Giles Corey from the Crucible asking for more weight. I like Marv from Sin City getting electrocuted only to ask, "Is that all you got?"

Flawed characters are characters. They're human. And while audiences like to read about how a character changes over time, I don't think every novel needs to mimic therapy; by this, I mean it doesn't have to be a standard arc of improvement for a character. We can revel in their flaws, or we can be disgusted by them, but they've got to have those dings in their armor so we can relate to them. This is why for the most part, I don't like Superman. It's not the ubiquity of his powers; it's the fact that he never has a moral failing. It's why I love Daredevil. A blind lawyer goes out at night dressed like a devil and fights the wealthiest and most wealthy people his lawyering can't touch. Show me someone stuck in a constant moral compromise, and you show me someone as flawed as we all are. That's the beginning of piquing my interest: Kerouac's Dean Moriarty the perfect example. A flawed character never to be redeemed but at the same time a literary zeitgeist.

What, if anything, do you translate from your own life into the lives of your characters?

Damn near everything! What else am I to draw from? Even if I do my research, it's how the study hits my ears, eyes, and heart. The fun part of writing, which some have taken too far, is to live a life worthy of drawing from. That's why we're about to have a flood of novels about being locked down, locked in, pandemic length relationships, and the tentative nature of the social contract. :) We've all been living through the same thing globally.

How do you build on POV to create your story world?

No world exists without characters to experience it. The POV allows the writer to zoom in or out of any particular aspect of the world that impresses the character. But just as all knowledge is subjective, so too is the focus. What may seem like a close read to a first-person narrator maybe be frivolous to a third person. I find it interesting that these POV's come in and out of style. I'm sure there's some macro psychological reason as to why, but damned if I can call it.

I had an opportunity to write up an interview in the second person. It was of Ahmed Best, the dancer, singer, musician, and all-around great guy who, among other roles, played Jar Jar Binks. That role haunted him and caused a lot of people to question his standing in the Black artistic community. I'll confess that I had some of those questions myself. Man, I felt like an asshole after hanging out with that man. He was so charming, so kind, so generous. He shared what it had been like to him to be ostracized by both the Black community (those that knew it was him playing the role and disagreed with its depiction) AND the Star Wars fans. He became suicidal briefly. Thankfully, he got the help he needed and is now thriving and being his usual excellent self.

Anyway, the interview was for a class Tom Lutz was teaching, then editor in chief of the L.A. review of books. I wanted people to feel Ahmed the way I thought him, to experience his highs and lows the way I did. So I pitched writing the interview in the second person. "You're Ahmed Best. You're fifteen and your mother has just recorded another album. You commit yourself to creating an album of your own". That sort of thing. Tom Lutz was not a fan, but he hit me with the "Prove me wrong" like all great teachers. So I wrote it up...and he loved it. That's the power of the proper POV. It adds the dimension of the Lacanian Real, the inarticulate, to a narrative. It's also a convention of the time, the metastructure through which the audience expects the narrative.

About Ayize

Ayize Jama-Everett was born in 1974 in Harlem New York. He has traveled extensively in Northern Africa, Northern California, and Oaxaca, Mexico. He holds three Master’s degrees (Divinity, Psychology, and creative writing), and has worked as a bookseller, professor, and therapist. He has a firm desire to create stories that people want to read. He believes the narratives of our times dictate future realities; he’s invested in working subversive notions like family of choice, striving when not chosen to survive, and irrational optimism into his creations. Three of his books have been published by Small Beer Press, The Liminal series, with another on the way. He’s published a graphic novel with noted artist John Jennings, entitled The Box of Bones, and has forthcoming a graphic novel adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo coming from Abrams Press. Shorter works can be found in The Believer, LA Review of Books, and Racebaitr.

"Memoir heals us as individuals and transforms our society": A Q&A with Master Class Faculty Faith Adiele

A conversation with the acclaimed memoirist and travel writer Faith Adiele who will be teaching the MCWC 2022’s Memoir Master Class, Finding Memoir Everywhere.

Your memoir, Meeting Faith, recounts your experiences as Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun. In addition to being central to the book’s contents, are there any ways in which spirituality has shaped your writing(s)?

My experience with Thai Buddhist nuns allowed me to see that my spiritual work was my creative work was my political work. I don’t need to separate my different passions, the way we tend to do in the West. Mindful practices also taught me to face the very things I’m afraid of, head on, which is what I want my writing to do for myself and others. Writing transforms and heals, which makes it by definition a spiritual practice, and both memoir and travel writing (my main genres) are influenced by the shape of spiritual narrative.

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

Alas, I’m not one of those disciplined writers with a set, daily practice—I’m a binge writer. I need methods of accountability—deadlines, a solid writing partner, a regular writing group. I’m wary of the privilege embedded in prescriptive writing advice (“have a special chair,  a beautiful view, write it by hand every day, blahblahblah”), but I agree with the underlying importance of ritual. I may do a little meditation first and immerse myself in the world I’m trying to evoke by playing music, reading aloud what I’ve written thus far—really feeling the words in my body, and surrounding myself with photographs, maps, timelines. 

What are the greatest challenges you’ve encountered when writing memoir, and what tools/approaches have you used to overcome them?

All writers, but especially memoirists, and even more, those of us who don’t fit in neat boxes, struggle with self-doubt: does anyone care about my story? I’m always being told that my writing is too complex, but simple, linear storytelling just doesn’t fit my story or my brain. Because I’m not just interested in the story, but in how it’s being told, the structure and form it wants, I’m a really slow writer. One of the ways I’ve handled this is to write about it—to turn what stops me from writing into an essay about writing.

You’ve said that memoir is the ultimate civic act. Tell us more about this view.

What I absolutely love about memoir is that it democratizes story. By enabling people who have been intentionally erased from the master narrative (BIPOC, women, LGBTQIA folks, the incarcerated, immigrants, disabled folks, neurodivergent thinkers, combat vets, marginalized folks, etc.) to tell their stories, we are participating in democracy. And this civic engagement creates a more authentic, rich, nuanced, multicultural, national narrative.

What do you love most about teaching memoir?

Well, as you know, I believe that memoir heals us as individuals and transforms our society, so what could be more rewarding than being a steward of that? I came to teaching through my social justice work and discovered—much to my surprise—that I was really good at it. I love getting emails from students I taught 10 or 20 years ago saying that they still use the lessons I taught them every day. Unlike poetry and fiction, I believe that every single person has at least one great nonfiction story. And I have the tools to help you unearth, capture and shape it. 

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

Well, the Master Class is titled FINDING MEMOIR EVERYWHERE, so we’re going to find the connections between personal experience and larger social, spiritual, cultural, historical, or political stories. I’m going to bring my signature blend of tough love, so you will get a strong education in craft while also feeling confident challenging traditional advice and structural models. The description warns folks to bring a bold heart and wicked sense of humor, so we’re gonna go deep–but laugh a lot while doing so! I do a lot of work to create community and safer space, and participants often remain in touch and continue to support each other in the years to come.

The Master Class is a juried-in workshop for twelve selected participants. Find out more details and about how to apply here. Applications close February 15.

About Faith

Faith Adiele is author of two memoirs, Meeting Faith (WW Norton), which won the PEN Open Book Award and routinely appears on travel listicles, and the mini ebook/audiobook The Nigerian Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems (SheWrites). Her media credits include A World of Calm (HBO Max), My Journey Home (PBS), and various Sleep Stories (Calm App). Named one of Marie Claire Magazine’s “5 Women to Learn From,” Faith is co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press) and host of African Book Club (MoAD). Her essays appear in O Magazine, Yes!, Essence, The Rumpus, Flaunt, The Offing, and numerous anthologies. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, and Harvard, Faith lives in Oakland, California.

In healthcare? Apply for our Thank-You to Healthcare Workers Scholarship to attend MCWC 2022!

When poet and former MCWC executive director Maureen Eppstein offered to donated the Thank-you to Health Care Workers  Scholarship to our 2022 conference, we were delighted, but curious about how it came about. So we asked her to tell us the story behind it.

What motivated you to donate this scholarship?

Early in 2020, as hospital beds started to fill with Covid-19 patients, I was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I was 82, but with a good medical history. With my oncologist’s encouragement, I decided to fight the odds. After eight months of treatment with chemotherapy and other more experimental drugs, then over a year of follow-up, in and out of the cancer center, blood labs, and diagnostic radiology centers, I emerged cancer-free. During these two years, as I was being treated with such loving care by all the healthcare workers I encountered, I became aware of the pressures on their lives by the onslaught of Covid-19, even if they were not working directly with Covid patients. The scholarship is my way of saying I noticed, I sympathize, and I value their work.

Only one person will get the scholarship. How does that thank the huge numbers of workers in the healthcare field?

Good question. I’d like to thank each one of them with a gift they’d appreciate. But since that’s not possible, I hope people will recognize this scholarship as a symbolic gesture.

 Writing and healthcare are very different professions. What makes you think a nursing aide, say, or an anesthetist, might be interested?

Very few writers make a living from their craft. The rest of us have other sources of income such as paid jobs in every field you can think of.

How will people who are not linked in to the literary world find out about this scholarship?

The best way will be word of mouth. I hope everyone who reads this blog will pass on the information to people in their community who might be interested.

The scholarship deadline is February 15. Click here for details on how to apply.

Maureen’s most recent poetry collection is Horizon Line, published by Main Street Rag Books

Celebrate the Noyo Review's Winter Issue with us

On January 30, 2022, at 16.00, join us on Zoom to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of the MCWC’s online literary journal, the Noyo Review. The Winter edition features wonderful writing by particpants of MCWC 2021 including:

• Ron Morita

• Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios

• Molly Montgomery

• Cindy Teruya

• Christina Berke

• Maria Alejandra Barrios

• Emily Weber

• Alicia Londa

• Sofia Garner

• Jane Armbruster

• Brenda Yeager

• Chital Mehta

• Jack Foraker

• Monya Baker

• Amy Patterson

• Sharon Lin

• Griffin Deary

Register for this event on Zoom.

“The genre must serve a purpose” — a Q&A with Mystery Workshop faculty Naomi Hirahara

Our faculty Q&A series begins with chatting to Naomi Hirahara, the Edgar Award-winning author of multiple traditional mystery series and noir short stories who will be teaching our first ever Mystery Workshop at MCWC 2022.

Naomi’s Mas Arai mysteries feature a Los Angeles gardener and Hiroshima survivor who solves crimes and have been published in Japanese, Korean and French. The seventh and final Mas Arai mystery is Hiroshima Boy, which was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. Her first historical mystery is Clark and Division, which follows a Japanese American family’s move to Chicago in 1944 after being released from a California wartime detention center. Her second Leilani Santiago Hawai‘i mystery, An Eternal Lei, is scheduled to be released in 2022. A former journalist with The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, Naomi has also written numerous non-fiction history books and curated exhibitions.

What are the tools/tips/techniques you use to make your historical fiction as authentic—or grounded in the ‘real’—as possible?

Historical fiction and mysteries both require the writer to select the best and most effective concrete  details. You don't want to carpet your novel with too many time period specifics, especially those which are overused. Invaluable is that one piece of research that can clearly transport the reader to a different world. 

The mystery genre has captivated readers from the 19th Century to the present day. Why are we so hooked on whodunits, and what are the key ingredients to crafting a compelling one?

When a dead body enters a story, we understand that we need to pay attention and that we can no longer be in denial about the unpleasantness in our lives. The truth teller, our sleuth, strips away deception. In what ways are the abilities of our protagonist compromised or weak? What needs to be learned? The selection of clues and the crime should reflect the theme of the story.

What are your writing’s biggest influences or inspirations?

I've probably been influenced the most from my years spent as a journalist for a small ethnic newspaper in downtown Los Angeles, next to Skid Row. That experience was life changing. The gathering of stories was active, requiring me to travel to places I've never been before. As a result, I'm drawn to movement in the stories I write.

Do you ever get writer’s block? If so, how do you overcome this?

I never had problems sitting down and writing -- until the pandemic. Doing sprints with a friend over Twitter DMs saved me. I even got serious about Nanowrimo; I didn't pressure myself to make the total word count of 50,000 words in one month, but the program certainly helped me dive into and begin my new novel after engaging in some heavy-duty research.

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

Why are they writing a mystery in the first place? The genre must serve a purpose. If they gain insight of what that can be, character development and plot will fall into place.

Find out more: 

• Listen to Naomi on NPR

• Visit her website

Pablo Cartaya to teach Middle Grade/Young Adult Workshop at MCWC 2022!

Image credit: Zoe Milenkovic

We’re proud to announce that award-winning author Pablo Cartaya will teach the Middle Grade/Young Adult Workshop at our 2022 Conference! Cartaya is the author of the critically acclaimed middle-grade novels The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora (a 2018 Pura Belpre Honor Book) and Marcus Vega Doesn’t Speak Spanish (currently in development as a feature film adaptation). His most recent novel, Each Tiny Spark, was honored with the 2020 Schneider Family Book Award for its portrayal of the disability experience and published by the Kokila Penguin Random House Imprint, which focuses on publishing diverse books for children and young adults. We’re excited to welcome Pablo to MCWC and look forward to learning from him in 2022.

Faith Adiele to teach Memoir Workshop at MCWC 2022!

We are thrilled to announce that distinguished writer and teacher Faith Adiele is joining the faculty of the 2022 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, where she will teach the memoir workshop. Adiele is the author of the memoir Meeting Faith, which follows her journey from Harvard to becoming Thailand’s first ordained Black female buddhist nun, and founded the nation’s first workshop for travel writers of color at the Bay Area organization VONA/Voices. Learn more about her at her website, and watch this space for an interview with Faith Adiele, coming soon!

Edgar Award-winning author Naomi Hirahara will teach our first-ever Mystery Workshop

Announcing our first-ever mystery workshop for MCWC 2022!

Photo credit: Mayumi Hirahara

We are delighted to welcome Edgar Award-winning author Naomi Hirahara to the 2022 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference as faculty to teach our first-ever Mystery Workshop. Learn more about Naomi at her website and by listening to her NPR interview, and watch this space for an interview with her about her plans for her MCWC workshop, coming soon!

What to read over the Thanksgiving weekend

Our board and staff share their favourites

Photo by 2Photo Pots on Unsplash

While Thanksgiving is traditionally a time when families big and small get together, the holiday weekend is also an opportunity to catch up on reading. Diving head first into a great book offers you an escape when you need it most—respite from an overbearing in-law, or your uncle’s politically incorrect “jokes”. Once the plates are stacked in the dishwasher, a few hours curled up reading will aid the digestion of too much turkey too!

If you can’t decide on what to read, fear not. We’ve asked the MCWC’s board and staff for a few suggestions of books they’ve loved:

Board member Georgina Marie says: “As a poet, I spend much of my reading time diving into collections of contemporary poetry and the occasional classic. However, over the past few years I have found a new love for memoir and creative non-fiction. Here are two of my top recommendations: 

• Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch: In 2018, my sister passed away and I thought I’d never read another book or write another poem. Both made me sick to my stomach when I tried. Then I found myself in a bookstore in San Diego and this book caught my eye. When I read the back cover, it was almost as if my sister had picked this out for me. It held me in my grief and motivated me to embrace words again.

• I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place by Howard Norman: My second recommendation was a toss-up between The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and this book by Howard Norman. Both, again, found their way to me in a time of grief. I met Howard Norman in 2019 at a writers’ conference. He was down-to-earth, autographed my copy of this book, and complimented a bird poem I read at an open mic. After reading this book, I can see why the bird poem stood out to him, among the many birds of Point Reyes he wrote about in this memoir of life, exploration, and unexpected events.”

Board member Anna Levy writes: “It's hard to recommend books for others—it feels like such a risk—but one that has really stuck with me is How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones. It's an intense book—about racism, sexuality, identity development, trauma, and so much more—that really impacted me; I think about it often. If you're in the mood to dive deep this holiday, this might be the one for you.”

Board Vice-President Laura Welter says: “For you fans of biographies, I highly recommend The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone. Elizebeth Friedman was a brilliant woman, but due to the secrecy surrounding her work during both World Wars, her stunning accomplishments weren't widely recognized during her lifetime.”

Board President Kara Vernor shares: “For those in strained, blended families, I would recommend Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog. It's a brutal portrait of family dynamics in 1920s Montana that is so harsh, it's bound to make you feel better about your own struggles with family. Now is a great time to read it, both with Thanksgiving approaching and with the movie’s impending release. Directed by Jane Campion (my favorite director), the movie adaptation will be released on Netflix on December 1.”

Executive Director Lisa Locascio Nighthawk says: “I'd like to recommend The Round House by Louise Erdrich, White Magic by Elissa Washuta, and Heart Berries by Therese Marie Mailhot. Thanksgiving is an important time of year to read Native writers, listen to their stories, and challenge mainstream narratives about American history.”

Find out more about the MCWC’s board and staff on our website.
Got Thanksgiving reading recs of your own? Share them with us on Twitter.

"Wonderful": Our scholarship winners on what MCWC 2021 has meant to them

MCWC 2021, our second all-online conference, was a smashing success! Although we are all eager to be back in person together, the 32nd annual Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference was a lively and fun three days of workshops, seminars, open mics, and readings that carried on great MCWC traditions and brought many new writers and friends into our inclusive writing community. 

Thanks to the generosity of our donors, MCWC was able to fund a record 30 participants at this year’s conference, which was held online from August 5 - 7. We were delighted to be able to offer three new scholarships this year, endowed in memory of  Dana Winn and James I. Garner, and by friend of MCWC Susan Lundgren. As in 2020, the online format allowed MCWC to expand its reach, and we were happy to welcome writers from all over the USA, the United Kingdom, and Australia to the conference this year!

Ariana Benson, a poet from the American South who was awarded the Susan Lundgren Scholarship, says: “I was particularly excited to work with Saretta Morgan, because she is a Black ecopoet whose work I admire deeply. I was also encouraged by the breadth of scholarship opportunities offered. I hoped to workshop a few poems, and to draft some that I could use for my manuscript-in-progress.”

She describes her conference experience as “wonderful.”

“Saretta is just as skilled a workshop facilitator as she is a poet,” Ariana says. “She created a safe space for everyone to share and learn from each other. I also found the lecture and panel discussions quite helpful, especially the ones that provided practical publishing advice. Overall, I thought the conference was very well done.This experience meant a lot to me as a writer who has only been deeply invested in and submitting poems/attending conferences for about a year. I felt comfortable working with and welcomed by the more experienced poets in my class. I would certainly recommend MCWC to other emerging writers.”

Saretta Morgan giving a reading.

Jack Foraker, a writer based in Los Angeles who won a Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers, says: “I had never shown anyone my novel before. The project was a private world I got to explore, and I was thrilled at that privacy initially, but because it was so private I started to feel isolated and a little stir-crazy about the whole thing. I went into MCWC 2021 really looking forward to finally getting eyes on the novel.” 

“This conference not only gave me insight into where to revise my novel and a treasure trove of notes from the conference's speakers, but also wonderful connections to other writers in California and across the world,” Jack said. “It made me feel like part of a larger community of writers, which I didn't even know was something that I was missing. I genuinely loved MCWC and have already recommended it to other writers. Lillian Li deserves a special shout-out for being such an amazing workshop leader (I'm still thinking about her insights into novel set pieces). Also, Torrey Peters' talk made me think of audience in an entirely new (and soul-nourishing) framework.”

Lillian Li with her novel workshop.

Gowri Koneswaran, a writer based in Washington, DC who received the Nella Larsen Scholarship, says: “I absolutely devoured my time during the conference and could not believe how so many hours ‘alone’ at my computer felt so connective, generative, and educational. During our workshops, I learned so much from my fellow participants as well as our instructor.”

She adds, “I could not be more thankful for this donor's generosity in making these funds available to me. Without them, I would not have been able to attend. And given how long we have been enduring this pandemic, the ability to connect with writers and learn from afar was absolutely invaluable.”

Robin Michel, a writer based in San Francisco, CA who was awarded the Anne G. Locascio Scholarship says, “I have found MCWC to be such a warm and generous community. It's exciting to work with such a diverse group of writers. Working on a manuscript that examines  intergenerational trauma, the impacts of disability, mental illness, and poverty, and an oppressive religious environment, often becomes a dance of courage and cowardice. At MCWC, writers are encouraged to speak their truth and go deeper in understanding what their experiences mean. I was unfamiliar with Krys Malcolm Belc prior to the conference, and found him to be such an outstanding and thoughtful instructor. He is very gifted, challenging one to do their very best, and holding space for writers to be vulnerable.”

She adds: “Receiving the scholarship provided validation and support I very much needed at this time, and has helped me believe in my ability to tell this story. Helped me to be kinder to myself.I am so grateful to have received the Anne G. Locascio Scholarship, and was greatly moved when Lisa shared a bit of her mother's story with me (and I remember her grieving the loss of her mother in 2020). I am committed to telling my  own mother's story with deep compassion (even the hard parts), and to receive a scholarship given in a mother's honor becomes a double blessing.”

Designed to make our Conference accessible to writers from diverse backgrounds and to reward writing of outstanding merit, our scholarships are largely funded by generous individual donors. If you would like to fund one, please do get in touch! Want to make a general donation to the MCWC instead? Details on how to do that can be found here.

It’s Almost Here: MCWC 2021 Online

by Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

The 2020 Conference was moved online out of necessity, and we approached our first-ever virtual event with no small amount of anxiety and concern. But after the incredible success of MCWC 2020, we are heading into this year’s online event full of excitement, now well-acquainted with the benefits of the virtual format, which makes it possible for us to bring MCWC to a community of writers stretching across the country and around the world.

We are kicking off MCWC 2021 with the launch of our new online magazine, the Noyo Review. This magazine features writers from MCWC 2020, including Keynote Speaker Elissa Washuta’s incredible essay “Why Though?”, which she delivered as the closing address at MCWC 2020. We are thrilled to offer these great pieces of writing in a new online format and will be celebrating the magazine with a launch party this Sunday, July 25, at 3pm PDT. We hope you all will join us! Register here for the Noyo Review Launch Party.

Flyer credit: Georgina Marie

This month’s blogpost will focus on how you can get the most out of a virtual MCWC, whether you’re attending as a registered participant or joining as a community member for our public events.

If you’re not registered for MCWC:

Our faculty readings on Thursday and Friday evenings are open to the public. These readings have always been popular with Mendocino locals. Now they are available to anyone, anywhere! We hope you will join us for a medley of readings from the MCWC 2021 faculty.

Thursday, August 5, 5:30 PM PDT

Enjoy readings presented by emerging writers’ workshop instructor Sam Krowchenko, novelist Lillian Li, memoirist Krys Malcolm Belc, middle grade/young adult novelist Alex Sanchez, and nonfiction workshop instructor Susan Rivecca.

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwsce2rrTgsHNcdlRA4iLDKo0VYMNSNHsk5

Friday August 6, 5:30 PM PDT

Enjoy readings presented by speculative fiction novelist Alaya Dawn Johnson, short fiction instructor Chris Dennis, poet Saretta Morgan, novelist Torrey Peters, and keynote speaker Wendy C. Ortiz.

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwsce2rrTgsHNcdlRA4iLDKo0VYMNSNHsk5

Looking for more? Check out the recordings from our Winter Publishing Series or our Spring Generative Series. Recordings can be purchased for individual events, as well as discounted bundles of three or five events of your choice.

mcwc.org/seminar-recordings

If you’re registered for MCWC 2021:

This year promises to be another weekend packed full of writing craft and community. Here’s some tips for making the most of MCWC offerings:

• Sign up for afternoon events. When you receive the program the week before the conference, you’ll receive a link to sign up for the Blind Critique, the Pitch Panel, and the Open Mics. We encourage you to put your name in the hat for any events that interest you. 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. For the Pitch Panel, you will have two minutes to speak to the panel of agents. Watch your inbox for the signup form for these events!

• Don’t forget to take breaks. The program will list which events are recorded, so make a note of the times you can spend some time away from your computer and plan to watch the recording later.

• Add a twenty-minute, one-on-one consultation with one of our faculty members to complete your conference experience. We are allowing consultations to be booked during the conference this year, pending faculty availability. If you enjoy a particular speaker or panelists during the conference, see if they have open consultation spots and register here: mcwc.org/2021-consultations

• 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 immensely grateful for the outpouring of support we received throughout the difficulties of the last year. MCWC 2021 would not be possible without the generosity of our donors. We hope we will be able to gather on the Coast next year to thank everyone properly. Keep an eye on our website and newsletter for updates on MCWC 2022!

Composing Memory in Memoir with Krys Malcolm Belc

By Mair Allen, 2021 Conference Assistant

We are thrilled that Krys Malcolm Belc will be leading our Memoir workshop at MCWC 2021! His upcoming memoir, The Natural Mother of the Child, which chronicles Belc’s experiences as a nonbinary transmasculine gestational parent, will be released by Counterpoint Press on June 15, 2021. Belc’s 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.

His workshop will explore how writers position themselves in their work, focusing on the construction of character in memoir. Spots are still available, so be sure to register for MCWC by June 30th. Belc talked to us about what was central to him in creating his memoir, his creative process, and the potential of fragmentation.

The Natural Mother of the Child is being released very soon! How are you feeling?  

It’s a lot. As we joke in my house, the book is my formerly private thoughts available to anyone! But I also feel really lucky that my agent and editor saw the book, like really really saw it and saw me, and my work has been treated with a lot of dignity and care. We need more trans voices on everything and I feel grateful to be living in this moment when people were ready to let me join the conversation.

I’m interested in your citations of non-linear meaning-making in texts like Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. The Natural Mother of the Child is shaped around your experience of nonbinary parenting. How do non-linear constructions of time connect to your work?

Every memoirist has to make decisions about how to work with time, and I do think that ultimately we all play with and even bend time in our work. If a writer sits down in their fifties to write about their experience of early childhood, they’re going to make just as many decisions about how to approach, compress, and stretch time as a more experimental memoirist might. The act of putting things in a logical order, in which we paint events in a narrative arc to appease our very human desire to consume them that way and to make meaning out of temporal order, that’s a formal choice as well, vs. a default way of storytelling.

All of this is to say that I don’t think non-linear forms are any more of a radical choice than any other form of storytelling. I consume and love all sorts of memoir and life writing. But when I read writers like Rankine and Nelson (and so many others) there’s a level of excitement in the work I have to do as a reader to follow the threads and to construct my own meaning out of their ideas, words, images, etc. I wanted to create that and for my readers to have that.

When I think about the “what happened” of my life—I had a pretty humdrum upbringing, got pregnant and had a baby in the context of a partnership, and trained and work as a K-12 teacher, the story there is not something that excited me. But circling around what that all means in the context of a trans childhood and the experience of trans parenting, that was more exciting. It lent itself to examining one idea—trans gestational parenthood—from multiple angles. I think of the book as having the question of what making another human means at the center, and each section is sort of like a new game I played to try to figure out what it means.

Your workshop focuses on character development in memoir, which is ultimately the development of the self as a speaker. What challenges have you had developing the speaker's voice in your writing?

So many! Because of the subject of this memoir I wanted to have the most intimate voice possible. That’s really hard. It’s tricky to want to write about an experience that is so personal and not talked about much and not to get explain-y, to put too much distance between me and the readers and lapse into being didactic. That was always my primary goal, not to turn this book into some queer family FAQ. Those are needed and great, they’re just not my project. I used a lot of strategies personally to work on my voice: writing about the same events from different points of view, writing in direct address, using visual elements, using formal experimentation to heighten the playfulness of my voice. A lot of the experiments stayed in. Writing in direct address has been the most meaningful for me in trying to nail down the voice I wanted: earnest, full of heat, able to express regret and confusion, etc. The last thing I will say about this is that reading work aloud helps. If I don’t really feel it when I read it, in my actual voice, it’s not done.

In your interview with SmokeLong Quarterly, you describe your memoir as a “trans-archive,” a compilation of essays, flash, photos, and legal documents. Can you speak to the process of this compilation and the editing process?

I think of putting essays into a memoir-in-essays like the decision to take family papers and photos out of a box and put them in a scrapbook: you’re composing an experience of memory. I didn’t want to tell the story of having a baby. I wanted to tell the story of my working out what having a baby means in my life. It was important for me to start with and trouble the image of the ultrasound; destabilizing the idea that humans in 2021 seem to take great comfort in that we can tell a lot about what parenting someone is going to be like by getting an ultrasound was almost like an opening act for questioning everything I thought I knew about what being a parent was going to mean for me before I did it.

On a practical level I abandoned Microsoft Word extremely early in the process. I taught myself the very (very) basics of Adobe InDesign and Photoshop so I could have total page control and there wasn’t some disastrous consequence to hitting enter incorrectly or swapping out one image for another. I read it over and over again in slightly different orders because I know that there’s a risk of a very fragmented work feeling slapped together. I am sure what I turned in to professionals was kind of a nightmare, but as a writing exercise if you have access to tools that allow you to really think about what a page as a unit is and can do, it’s fun to at least test it out!

Most writers have to balance several obligations, especially those marginalized by capitalist systems. I’m thinking about how creating something “fragmented” challenges dominant modes of storytelling through accessibility and by breaking the traditional narrative arc. I’m wondering what, if any, potential for disruption you see in short form?

I think there can be a bit of a false idea (not saying you’re saying this, just sort of responding to the world here) that writing fragmented work is what people engaged in care work do because of divided attention. Also sometimes this is talked about as a side effect of Our Contemporary World. And yes, I have divided attention because I engage in care work (as a parent and also working in a 9-5 that is a form of care work). For me at least I don’t write fragmented memoir because I only have time to dash off a few sentences at a time. Though that’s true! For me in my writing fragmentation on the page is more about creating a reading experience. My mind works in an associative way, where memories trigger other memories and then loop back to the original thought or image or scene. I’ve diagramed some of the sections of my memoir to try to understand how in revision I’m creating arcs-within-arcs. I think a lot about what is happening to readers, or what I hope might happen to them, since I don’t actually control their experience, if they’re in a scene and get pulled into the past or future. I really like the word disruption you’ve chosen. In a way my book is about how ambivalence and the push and pull I feel toward and against motherhood. Ambivalence for me is intrusive and often interrupts my ideas and memories as I weigh the other side of everything.

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To learn more about Krys Malcolm Belc, visit his website at www.krysmalcolmbelc.com.

General registration closes June 30th! To register for the workshop of your choice, visit mcwc.org/2021-registration. There is no application required to attend MCWC and registration includes the morning workshop and all afternoon and evening events. All events will be held over Zoom this year.

Interrogate Your Point of View with Chris Dennis at MCWC 2021

By Mair Allen, 2021 Conference Assistant

This year MCWC welcomes Chris Dennis as the instructor of our 2021 Short Fiction workshop. Dennis’s short story collection, Here is What You Do, was published in 2019 by SoHo Press. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, Playgirl, McSweeney’s, Granta, Lit Hub, and Guernica.

In Dennis’s workshop writers can expect to explore the construction of a unique narrative voice in the context of their own point of view and style. By studying prominent authors and recognizing their subject positions, Dennis says, writers in this workshop will have the opportunity to “stand directly before the lens of your own individuality, look out on an original world, and tell us what you see.” Dennis took the time to talk to MCWC about how his own positionality frames his writing, allowing questions to lead to more questions, and how revising can shift patterns into purpose.

In your essay “Eldorado, Illinois,” which was published in The Paris Review, you write about your life in a rural area and about your experience of incarceration, an event which paralleled the plot of the title story in Here Is What You Do—a decade after the story was written. Although these are common narratives in the United States today, they are often absent or erased from contemporary literature. Can you speak on the connections between place, queerness, and class in your writing?

Recently I purchased a little, regional nature almanac. It’s yellow, printed on rough, recycled paper, with a pencil drawing of a striped bass on the cover. It’s organized by months of the year, and so for instance you could open up to the month of May and learn that brown bats begin having their babies this time of year, that box turtles begin waking up, and that twayblade orchids have started blooming in sunny clearings of the forest. What I mean to say, is that I have to find a good way to be gay here, to stay connected, to have purpose. I have to search for small, queer ways to enjoy this backwards place where so many people have giant rubber testicles hanging from the hitches of their trucks, and stiff, new confederate flags nailed to the sides of their garages. It’s hard sometimes to make a place gay that doesn’t want to be gay. It’s hard to stay sober in a place where meth and Milwaukee’s Best feel like a prerequisite for survival. But I’m doing my best, and writing is one way of doing that, of making a spot for myself in a poor, conservative town where Christianity or drugs are still the primary source of comfort when something confusing or uncomfortable appears in the news or in one’s life.

I often wonder if people from lower classes think more about the construct of class? That’s almost certainly not true. My parents were what you might call “working poor.” We lived in public housing in a very rural midwestern town, and this of course defined my identity in many ways. As a young person growing up in the 80s and 90s I often thought that money, that status maybe, might be the thing that saved me from the discomfort of being gay in a county that is still ranked as one of the poorest in the state. I longed to have power over my life, and saw that class was one way of having it. It’s an interesting predicament though, being poor and queer in the middle of nowhere, because it means you have to find other resources to feel relevant, and for me that was books, and creativity.

Have you read much about the lawsuit in California in the 1970s over racial and cultural bias in standardized testing? It really stuck with me because one of the things that attorneys point to when establishing bias is word choice. They argued over things like the use of the word, “ruby” or “chartreuse” so of course many marginalized people in communities with fewer resources were like, “Our children have never seen a precious gemstone” or “How can we name a color we’ve never seen?” This resonated so much with me. Part of having access to power means having access to information, and that bridge so often gets built with money. I’m always trying to write about that problem, in particular how this problem of naming the world is even more complicated when one’s community is afraid of naming things—like queerness—because they know that naming something gives it power, and they’d just, you know, rather not.

In an interview with Emily Robbins in The Rumpus you say your stories start with questions, that “some questions just elicit a vast kind of wonderment that can only be addressed with a thought experiment—a story.” What questions are you holding and are you finding ways to work towards answers in your work lately?

I desperately want to surprise myself when I write, but I rarely do. So many obvious, boring things have to be said before I ever get to the really good stuff. For example, I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions about punishment and why as a society we’ve been so historically obsessed with punishing people. This question only really leads to more questions. I think writing towards the hope of a good answer is a useful way to work, even if you only end up with better questions.

Your workshop at MCWC focuses on how point of view, voice, and style lend purpose to writing. Your short story collection Here Is What You Do has viewpoints from many positionalities outside your own. How do you approach the complexity of writing different subjectivities? Conversely, how do you approach teaching others to access their own authentic voices in their writing?

Oh it’s just terrifying trying to write what you don’t know, but of course you begin because you can’t help it. As someone who knows very little, I think writing to discover is the most interesting work—or maybe the only work? One must be willing to fail many, many times, and to look back over those accidents for a clue, for a pattern, for a habit of thinking that might be revealing—because it’s there, among our ticks and idiosyncrasies, that a more personal, original voice can emerge. It’s interesting to look for the things that a narrator seems fixated on, and to try and understand how they’re in service of the story. I find that if I’m able to locate the particulars of someone’s vision, I can begin to understand what their motives are, and revise withmore intention, until the accidents become intentional. Kathryn Davis once told me to think of this Yeats line when revising, and I’ve found it to be very useful: “Cast a cold eye / on life, on death.”

In an essay for Guernica you write about being seen by your father when he gives you a cassette of Dolly Parton’s greatest hits and the tension of peers recognizing a part of your identity when you play it on the bus to school. Can you speak about the risks and rewards of making oneself visible through writing?

I’ve only recently begun writing nonfiction, but it’s only in my attempts to write in this new way that I can look back at the fiction I’ve written and realize how very transparent I was even when I thought I was telling a story about someone else. You know how they say that you’re everyone in your dreams? I think in most ways we are also every character in the stories we tell. I think the risks and rewards are probably the same. The risk is, people will see you, and perhaps they’ll see a you that you didn’t mean to show them. And so the reward is similar, that you might see a version of yourself you haven’t seen before.

You currently work in Public Health. Are there specific ways you balance your work and writing life or ways they inform each other?

Other than sometimes writing a few sentences while I’m at work, it’s hard to balance. I try to sneak a little writing in early in the morning, but also for a few months now my friend calls me each night and forces me to sit quietly on the phone with her for 22 minutes while we both write. I’m always uncomfortable and grouchy about it at first, but those minutes get my brain going, and I can usually eke out something that will sustain me later on. I’ve definitely found that social work, and the world of public health have kind of infected my point of view as a writer. There’s a way of looking at the world that happens because of the work we do outside of writing. We have to fight against it sometimes. I find that it’s important to resist, just a little, the point of view that the world is trying to thrust upon us, and not succumb to the very easy impulse of just writing about the things that our environment bends us toward.

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To learn more about Chris Dennis, you can find him on Twitter @ChrisDnns.

General registration is now open! To register for the workshop of your choice, visit mcwc.org/2021-registration. There is no application required to attend MCWC and registration includes the morning workshop and all afternoon and evening events. All events will be held over Zoom this year.

Explore New Worlds with Alaya Dawn Johnson at MCWC 2021

By Mair Allen, MCWC 2021 Conference Assistant

Award-winning speculative fiction author Alaya Dawn Johnson will teach “The Liminal Heart of Speculative Fiction” at MCWC 2021, and we’re thrilled to welcome her!

Johnson is a prolific and acclaimed writer. Her most recent novel, Trouble the Saints, was published in July 2020 by Tor and in January 2021 her short story collection, Reconstruction, was released by Small Beer Press. In 2015 she won the Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction Nebula Award for her novel Love is the Drug and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for her short story “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i.”

Johnson took some time to discuss with us how research informs her worldbuilding, leaving New York City for Oaxaca, Mexico, and how the speculative elements of storytelling reveal that which otherwise goes unnoticed. 

You have said in interviews that you were inspired by a Discovery Channel show on engineering. In your entry for The Reading List you mention reading theoretical texts by Claude Levi Strauss. In “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i”, a character reads Mishima. Your academic background is in Mesoamerican studies. How do you think broad ranges of interest affect your writing?

I always liken my writing process to a compost heap, where you get the best compost from a wide variety of scraps. So to me, those completely disparate sources are precisely what, in the long term, allows me to synthesize a lot of different kinds of information and create vivid worlds—in order to, hopefully, say something interesting and useful about the world we’re living in now. To me it’s always vital to go beyond the limits of what I would encounter in my daily life—there will always be so much I don’t know, but I try to at least always expand the quantity and scope of what I do know. As a speculative fiction writer this strikes me as fundamental because what we’re engaged in what you might call active worldbuilding (any writer, of course, is always going to be engaged in worldbuilding, but not all of us are actively trying to create fictitious or fabulist worlds). In active worldbuilding, I’m trying to create a construct that has a range and a feeling of a real lived-in place. But how can I possibly do that if my own understanding of my real lived-in place is hopelessly constrained by the narrowness of my own single point of view? The only way to get beyond that is to research, learn, grow. It’s about trying to jolt myself out of my comfort zone again and again. That’s where my (good) ideas come from.

Your novel Trouble the Saints is an historical fantasy set in 1940’s New York. What was your research process like?

I had already done some research on the adjacent time period, the 1920s in New York, for a series of fantasy novels I’d written several years before, so that definitely helped ground me. I also read novels from the time period and a bit earlier, with the idea of beginning with the feel of a place and time, not just its historical events and personages. I went through several drafts of the novel, one of which was a total overhaul. At that point I had the characters and the three-part story structure, but I needed some element that would tie them together. That was when I started asking around and reading, and I started learning more about a huge element of black urban life for most of the 20th century: the numbers racket, or policy (a bet on three random numbers generated daily, first by horse racing stats and then by the Dow Jones Industrial Average). Playing the numbers was a particularly big deal in the twenties, thirties and forties, and it was an important driver of black social mobility in that time period. The big players in the numbers racket also heavily supported the NAACP and other civil rights organizations. So when I started reading about that, I knew that I’d found the kernel that would tie the whole novel together. Playing the numbers tied into traditional forms of divination and conjure in the black community, which then led to my development of Tamara’s system of reading the cards. When I hit that seam of history I honestly felt as though my novel just re-wrote itself. It was one of those perfect moments in research that you live for—but of course, it only happens after months or years of work!

You’ve lived in Mexico since 2014, can you talk a little about being a working writer outside of the United States?

It’s definitely been an experience. Mexico has truly changed my life for the better. At the moment, living in rural Oaxaca, I exclusively use English for writing and interacting online, not for living my daily life out loud. In a weird way, the internalization of my English has given it a private, intimate quality that I think has helped me develop my writing voice in interesting ways. I’ve also enjoyed having distance from the sometimes hothouse atmosphere of the US publishing scene. I lived in NYC before, the center of the US publishing world, and while I love the city and my friends there, it could sometimes be very intense as a writer to be swimming in publishing and professional writing day in and day out. Here I’ve had a chance to deepen and broaden my view of the world, of writing, of living. I learned Spanish fluently and wrote a 300-page Master’s thesis in it! I don’t know how much of my experiences here will make it directly into my books, but I do know that they have enriched my writing incalculably.

Your book Love is the Drug uses the background of a pandemic to highlight characters’ social positioning. Trouble the Saints has white supremacy and constructions of race as central themes. Can you speak about how speculative fiction and historical fiction lend themselves to challenging systemic power structures?

I adore speculative fiction for its ability to highlight certain aspects of the real world and bring them to the forefront of the narrative, both as text and as a concretized metaphor. Historical fiction has a similar ability to pinpoint a historical moment that is important to you as a writer for whatever reason. In my case, I was drawn to the forties as a moment that is exactly as distant from the civil war as the present day, a moment before the paradigm-shifting civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, but that still said very important things about what came before and what would come after. I also set it right before the US entry into WWII, so to me it was about a certain liminal space in history that mirrors the liminal spaces that my main characters have found for themselves within the white power structure. And then I add the speculative element: a kind of power that comes from their ancestors, the ones who have gone before, and want to give their descendants a small chance to make a better life for themselves. I think of it like that classic fantasy novel trick of throwing sand on the invisible bridge or what have you to make its dimensions visible. I use the speculative element, the magic, the tech to help make visible an element of our social systems that normally passes unnoticed. The same was true, as you note, with the pandemic device in Love Is the Drug, though reality has more than trumped (ugh) even the worst of what I imagined back then.

You won a Nebula award for your YA novel Love is the Drug. Another of your works, The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Can you talk about what draws you to YA as a genre?

A friend of mine once said to me that YA is like taking all the backstory from an adult novel about why your character is the (messed up) way they are and making that the main story. I love that framing so much because it zeroes in on precisely why I find YA as a genre so freeing and dynamic as a writer. Of course you can have flashbacks in YA and of course people’s early childhood experiences mark them, but there is a certain immediacy, a freshness and urgency in the adolescent experience that can never be captured again after those formative moments. I have another writer friend who says that we all have an inner child at various ages inside of us, and the age of that child (or children) tells us what genre we can write in. In my friend’s case, she has an inner twelve-year-old and an inner twenty-four-year-old, so she can write middle grade and new adult, but she can’t get her head around YA at all. In my case, I have an inner seventeen-year-old and she is always full of stories. (I just turned in my next YA novel and I am SO EXCITED about this one, but I still can’t say anything quite yet).

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To find out more about Alaya Dawn Johnson, visit her website at www.alayadawnjohnson.com.

General registration is now open! To register for the workshop of your choice, visit mcwc.org/2021-registration. There is no application required to attend MCWC and registration includes the morning workshop and all afternoon and evening events. All events will be held over Zoom this year.

Congratulations to the MCWC 2021 Scholarship Winners

By Amy Lutz, MCWC Operations Manager

We are thrilled to welcome this year’s scholarship winners to MCWC 2021! We received our largest pool of scholarship applications to date and the following writers were selected out of a highly competitive field. We asked them to tell us a little about their current project and/or what they hope to get out of their conference experience. If you would like to join these writers at MCWC, be sure to register for the workshop of your choice by June 30.

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!

James I. Garner Scholarship

María Alejandra Barrios is a Pushcart nominated writer born in Barranquilla, Colombia. She has lived in Bogotá and Manchester where in 2016 she completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester. Her stories have been published in Hobart Pulp, Reservoir Journal, Bandit Fiction, Cosmonauts Avenue, Jellyfish Review, Lost Balloon, Shenandoah Literary, Vol.1 Brooklyn and El Malpensante. Her work is forthcoming in Fractured Lit and Moon City Review. She was the 2020 SmokeLong Flash Fiction Fellow and her work has been supported by organizations such as Vermont Studio Center, Caldera Arts Center and the New Orleans Writing Residency. She’s currently at work revising her debut novel. 

Maria writes: “I’m working on revising my first novel, A Cilantro Wedding Bouquet, set in Barranquilla, Colombia and New York. My novel deals with the themes of intergenerational trauma, food, desire and ghosts. Despite working on a long project, short stories about magic and agency are always on my mind. I love the freedom, experimentation and focus short fiction requires and in Alaya Dawn Johnson’s workshop, I’m looking forward to deepening my knowledge of worldbuilding and fracturing reality.  I’m excited to learn from my peers and to discover new work.”

Susan Lundgren Scholarship

Ariana Benson is from Chesapeake, Virginia. She was awarded the 2021 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Prize, and her poems appear or are forthcoming in West Branch, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Lunch Ticket, Great River Review and elsewhere.

Ariana writes: “I look forward to workshopping poems about the natural world, particularly African Diasporic peoples' relationships to the land and the anthropocene. I’m very excited to see how my poems and ideas develop through communing with other writers at MCWC.”

Norma Watkins Memoir Scholarship

Christina Berke is a teacher and a Libra. Previous work appears or is forthcoming in NPR’s Desert Companion, The Hunger, Literary Orphans, Cleaver Magazine, and Ed Surge.

Christina writes: I’m thrilled to join the community at MCWC! I’m currently working on an intergenerational, intercontinental familial memoir that revolves around the lives of three women. It explores my Chilean heritage, including the 1973 coup, through the lens of body image, interpersonal violence, and self worth.

Hether Ludwick First Taste Scholarship

Kimberly Bliss is a Philippine-born, Buffalo-bred and Brooklyn-boroughed writer. Her work has appeared in Hobart, Dime Show Review, and many other magazines, and she was a 2020 resident at the New Orleans Writers’ Residency. She is a Writing Workshop Leader at NY Writers Coalition. She has also been a resident at both Hedgebrook and Denniston Hill. She’s currently a Fiction Editor at Hobart. You can find her procrastinating on Twitter @blisster.

Kimberly writes: “I am working on a novel where literary fiction meets Asian cinematic violence on steroids, shattering the American Dream and its imperialism in the process. I’m very excited to meet everyone and be part of the MCWC community.”

Frances Andrews Scholarship

Celeste Chan is a San Francisco-based writer and teaching artist. Co-founder of Queer Rebels and Sister Spit tour alumna, she serves on the board of Foglifter Journal. She’s published in AWAY, cream city review, The Rumpus, and beyond.

Celeste writes: “I look forward to MCWC's energizing conference, full of craft teachings and community. Just what I need to make progress on my memoir!”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Cristina Cortez is a first-generation Latin-American poet born to immigrant parents. She holds a BA in English, Creative Writing & Literature, and History with Minors in Latin American & Caribbean Studies with Honors & Distinction, from Hofstra University (2015), and a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing & Poetics, from the University of Washington Bothell (2018). Her thesis Un-bound is a cross-genre memoir about living life with a disability. Her first bilingual poetry collection Tawantinsuyu: Poems of the Time of the Inca (Books&Smith Editors, 2020), is a celebration of the history of Peru and its indigenous people.

Cristina writes: “At the conference and workshop, I am looking forward to working on developing the narrative structure in my memoir. I look forward to meeting instructors and attendees.”

Ginny Rorby MG/YA Scholarship

Jamie Ericson is a writer and copy editor, and now she can add “pandemic kindergarten teacher” to her resume. She splits her writing time between middle grade fiction and product descriptions for a home furnishings retailer. She recently moved from the Bay Area to Oak Park, Illinois with her husband and 5-year-old son.

Jamie writes: “I’m working on a middle grade novel about an 8-year-old girl, her beloved pet hedgehog, and an elaborate plan to sneak him along when her family moves across the country. I’m having fun unraveling her plan, and MCWC will give me a good push to tackle the ending.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Jack Foraker is a writer from Yolo County. He graduated from the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine and was a 2020 grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation.

Jack writes: “I’m working on an anti-historical novel about kinship, changelings, theology, and plague times. I’m excited for the workshop, the inspiration, and the brilliance of everyone's work.”

Norma Watkins Memoir Scholarship

Czaerra Galicinao Ucol is a queer Filipino writer from Chicago. They hold a B.A. in Asian/Pacific/American Studies from New York University and are the Program and Communications Director of Luya, a grassroots poetry organization centering people of color in Chicago. They are a 2021 Best New Poets nominee and VONA writer. In their free time, they like listening to Lake Michigan’s waves crashing, basking in gardens, and trying out new recipes.

Czaerra writes: I plan to workshop a few personal essay ideas I have surrounding growing up queer and Filipino in Chicago during the 2000s and 2010s, having unmonitored internet access as a child, and managing my first year post-college amidst a pandemic. I have a lot of stories I want to tell, and I’m excited to learn more about creative nonfiction as someone that works primarily in poetry.

Dana Winn Scholarship

Sofia García Garner grew up in Corvallis, Oregon. She is a senior at the University of Oregon and will be graduating this spring with a B.A. in Spanish Literature. She is part of the Kidd Tutorial, a Creative Writing program at her university. Starting in fall 2021, she will be teaching abroad in Madrid.

Sofia writes: “I’m excited for the opportunity to learn from the other writers in the short fiction workshop and receive valuable feedback on my own work.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Rachel A.G. Gilman’s work has been published in journals throughout the US, UK, and Australia, including Touchstone, JMWW, and The London Reader. She is also the Creator/Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Creature and a columnist for No Contact Mag. She holds a BA from NYU where she managed WNYU-FM and won both Intercollegiate Broadcasting System and Pinnacle Media awards for her talk show “The Write Stuff”; an MFA from Columbia University where she served as Editor-in-Chief of Columbia Journal, Issue 58; and an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford. Originally from Hurley, New York, Rachel now lives in Manhattan’s Kips Bay neighborhood with a hoard of festively dressed stuffed pigeons and works in book publishing.

Rachel writes: “I am working on a third-person nonfiction collection entitled Who the F*ck is Naomi, which captures moments at the intersection of horniness and depression while reflecting on the impacts of the Internet on unrequited love—with humor, I hope.”

Anne G. Locascio Scholarship

Melissa Hung is a writer and journalist who grew up in Texas, the daughter of immigrants. She is the founding editor of Hyphen and the former director of San Francisco WritersCorps. Her writing has appeared in NPR, Vogue, Jellyfish Review, Longreads, and Catapult. 

Melissa writes: “I’m working on creative nonfiction about Asian American girlhood and am looking forward to connecting with the writing community at MCWC.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Si Yon Kim is a writer from Korea. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Syracuse University, where they serve as Fiction Editor of Salt Hill Journal.

Si Yon writes: “I’m working on a cli-fi novel inspired by a Korean folktale. It features erotic descriptions of plants, queer love, and popular K-drama tropes.”

Nella Larsen Memorial Scholarship

Gowri Koneswaran is a queer Tamil writer, performing artist, teacher, and lawyer. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Environmental Health Perspectives, Adi Magazine, Lantern Review, Split This Rock’s The Quarry, and The Margins. She previously served as senior poetry editor at Jaggery and co-editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She is a senior legal officer with PEARL, a copyeditor for The Abolitionist, poetry coordinator at the nonprofit arts organization BloomBars, and a fellow of the Asian American literary organization Kundiman.  

Gowri writes: “I am working on my first poetry manuscript, which leverages poetry and hybrid texts to explore personal, intergenerational, and transnational trauma. As a writer and lawyer whose community suffered genocide as the world watched, I frequently appropriate the sanitized language of state entities and mainstream media to re-verse it into palpable modalities of grief and resilience. I am especially excited to learn from Saretta Morgan during the conference.”

Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship for Speculative Fiction

Winona León is a writer and artist from Far West Texas. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and Joyland, where she's now a West Editor. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wyoming.

Winona writes: “I’ll be working on a magical realist story involving a persnickety Paso Fino. As a writer new to speculative fiction, I’m excited to hone my skills and find inspiration from the MCWC community!”

Dana Winn Scholarship

Sharon Lin is an essayist and poet. Her work appears in The New York Review of Books, The Offing, and is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. She lives in New York City.

Sharon writes: “My latest project is inspired by Buddhist mythology and explores how selfhood has evolved over time. I look forward to connecting with the community at MCWC.”

Doug Fortier Short Fiction Scholarship

Christopher Linforth is the author of the forthcoming story collection The Distortions, winner of the Orison Books Fiction Prize, and an experimental collection of flash, Directory (Otis Books, 2020).

Christopher writes: “I am working on a novel set at the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia and a new collection of stories. At the conference, I will be workshopping some short fiction.”

Ginny Rorby MG/YA Scholarship

Wendy Lu is an editor at HuffPost and a middle-grade fiction writer. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Bustle, Quartz and more. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Wendy writes: “I’m working on a contemporary middle-grade novel about a talented disabled girl who loves all things Broadway. I’m so excited to workshop a chapter of my book with Alex Sanchez, and I look forward to attending the rest of the conference and meeting other writers!”

James I. Garner Scholarship

Attracted to words at an early age, Rod Martinez ’s first book was created in grade school. His teacher used it to encourage creativity in her students. His high school English teacher told him to try short story writing, he listened, and the rest – as they say, is history.

Rod writes: “I am always working on a new manuscript, but currently I am doing final edits on the YA novel that garnered me this scholarship (thank you!), Unforgiven: The Grayson Pact. Two biracial siblings, one black, one white, struggle for acceptance and status in a family dynasty on the verge of collapse. With building tension consuming the family and town, an unsolved kidnapping and a secret legend literally hidden within the family house walls, will their dying rich grandfather choose honor or the favorite?”

James I. Garner Scholarship

Aurora Masum-Javed is a poet, writing coach, and educator. A former public school teacher, she received her MFA from Cornell University, where she also served as a lecturer. Her work can be found in Aster(ix), Frontier, Winter Tangerine, and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships from MacDowell, Caldera, and Kundiman among others. A former Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing and Hub City Writer in Residence, she is currently working on her first book and teaching in SC.

Aurora writes: “I’m revising poems for my first collection, which focuses on the challenges and longings of daughterhood. I’m so excited to write into and think more deeply about the relationships between daughter, mother, and land with Saretta Morgan, whose work I so deeply admire.”

Anne G. Locascio Scholarship

Robin Michel was born and raised in Utah but has lived most of her life in Northern California. She has received recognition and awards, including support from the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference and the Soul-Making Keats Literary Awards. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Mountain Review, Comstock Review, Lindenwood Review, The New Guard, Northampton Poetry Review, South 85, Toho Journal, and elsewhere. She has an M.Ed. from Mills College and is editor of How to Begin: Poems, Prompts, Tips and Writing Exercises from the Fresh Ink Collective (Raven & Wren Press, 2020).

Robin writes: “I am working on a hybrid poetry-prose memoir examining intergenerational trauma and an oppressive religious environment, as well as the impacts of disability, mental illness, and poverty. I am very excited to be part of the 2021 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference community, to build connections with other writers, and to have the time and space to go deeper into our work—getting closer to the truths we want to uncover.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Paula Mirando is a queer Filipina American writer from Hayward, California. She is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami. Her writing has been supported by the Kearny Street Workshop Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Philippine American Writers and Artists.

Paula writes: “I will be working on a collection of linked short stories about a group of Filipino American youth in their last year of middle school.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Ijeoma Nwabudike was born in Lagos and raised in Abuja, Nigeria. She enjoys reading, writing, historical research, and exploring old buildings.

Ijeoma writes: “I am currently working on a personal essay that explores how my early life was shaped by representations of gender within the Nigerian cultural context - from popular 90s/2000s Nollywood movies to novels by foremost Nigerian women authors and currently airing reality tv shows. I cannot wait to work with Suzanne Rivecca and other personal essay writers this summer!”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Tochukwu Okafor is a Nigerian writer whose work has appeared in the 2018 Best of the Net, the 2019 Best Small Fictions, The Guardian, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. A 2018 Rhodes Scholar finalist and a 2018 Kathy Fish Fellow, he has won the 2017 Short Story Day Africa Prize for Short Fiction. He is a 2021 Jack Straw Writing Fellow, a 2021 Frank Conley Memorial Scholar, an alumnus of the 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He holds a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University and has received scholarships from Etisalat (now 9mobile), the MTN Foundation, Grub Street, Fishtrap, and Exxon Mobil. He lives in Worcester, MA, and is at work on a novel and a short story collection.

Tochukwu writes: “I hope to be in communion with other writers at the conference, learning from them and building lasting friendships. These relationships will help me stay motivated and continue expanding my growth as a writer.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Sidney Regelbrugge is a freshman at Point Arena High School. She is a multi-sport athlete, as well as a pianist and saxophonist.

Sidney writes: “I hope to learn how to give depth to my characters in my storytelling, and better understand how to tell an event from multiple perspectives. As well, I want to learn how to keep a consistent style and voice throughout my writing.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and an MFA candidate in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Ruben writes: “I’m currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories about the Salvadoran diaspora. I’m excited to dive into all the weird and wonderful possibilities of speculative fiction in Alaya Dawn Johnson's workshop.”

Ginny Rorby MG/YA Scholarship

Lisa Ryan lives in Philadelphia and writes contemporary young adult fiction. She was a 2021 Tin House Scholar. Lisa’s work has appeared in Autostraddle, and her investigative story “The Mystery of Margaret Fox” won a New Jersey Press Association award in 2017.

Lisa writes: “I’m working on a YA novel about a teenage girl, Ash, who is training for the 1,000-mile Iditarod dog sledding race; she’s hoping to outrun grief by fulfilling the lifelong dream of her now-deceased brother, Dawson. When she finds herself falling for her new dog handler – who also happens to be Dawson’s ex-girlfriend – Ash grows increasingly torn between her obligation to the race and her own desires.”

Anne G. Locascio Scholarship

Elodie Saint-Louis is a writer and filmmaker currently living in Los Angeles, California. She is a graduate of Harvard University and a 2021 Periplus Fellow.

Elodie writes: “I look forward to working with Chris Dennis on a speculative short story about a young woman grappling with her mother’s illness and the unspoken legacy of trauma that has been passed down to her.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Tessa Strickland is a Ukiah High School student.

Tessa writes: “I’m currently working on a lot of poetry and writing in verse. I hope to learn a lot from this workshop.”

Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholarship for Young Writers

Justine Teu was born in New York City, where she grew up in Flushing, Queens. Her writing has appeared in The VIDA Review, Pigeon Pages, and more. Additionally, her work has received recognition from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She’s a graduate of Binghamton University with a BA in History and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at The New School.

Justine writes: “I will be working on a series of magical-realist short stories that contend with friend breakups, diaspora, and the ever-liminal experience of growing up in a big city. I’m looking forward to getting to know new writers in this vast community!”

Teresa Connelly First Taste Scholarship

April Yee is a writer and translator published in Newsweek, Ambit, and Ploughshares online. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to London, where she reads for TriQuarterly and mentors for the Refugee Journalism Project at University of the Arts London.

April writes: “Meeting other writers is a gift. I’m delighted to be alongside them as I work on a novel about inheritance, culpability, and the movement of minorities from diverse cities to suffocating suburbs.”

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If you would like to join the scholarship winners at this year’s virtual conference, 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.

Join Lillian Li at MCWC 2021—Registration IS Now Open!

by Mair Allen, MCWC 2021 Conference Assistant

MCWC is excited to welcome Lillian Li to the conference as the 2021 Novel Workshop instructor. Li is the author of Number One Chinese Restaurant. This multi-voiced book was described as “darkly funny and heartbreaking” by the Wall Street Journal. It was an NPR Best Book of 2018 and longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Li’s essays can be found in the New York Times, Granta, One Story, Bon Appetit, Travel & Leisure, The Guardian, and Jezebel. Li’s MCWC 2021 workshop will focus on the set piece in the novel, a self contained portion of writing that can elevate underlying aspects of the narrative. Li answered a few questions for MCWC about her process, her parents, and how characters can shape a book, but not write it for you.

Your novel Number One Chinese Restaurant came out in 2019 and started out as a short story.  Can you talk about how you worked through the expansion?

Transitioning from a short story to a novel was tricky at first because I assumed I could take the plot from the short story and retrofit it onto something novel-length. I had never written a novel before, and clearly hadn’t thought very critically about how someone does write a novel. You can sometimes take shortcuts in your writing, but this wasn’t one. Luckily a teacher diagnosed the problem and helped me find the right scale of events, which altered everything that the short story was, even the questions I was interested in asking. From there, the novel quickly became its own thing.

Two pieces on your website are candid portraits of your parents.  How do you approach writing about people you have close relationships with?

Besides my parents, I actually don’t write about people I am close to. Maybe because it’s not only that I’m close to my parents…My mom likes to joke that I’m “obsessed” with them. I write about anything that I think about a lot, anything that I’m invested in trying to understand for years on end. With novels especially, which take so long to write—sometimes it’s less about sustaining your interest and curiosity in a subject over the years than having a prodigious, and even unhealthy level of it to begin with. So I guess my approach is to only write about people I am or have been obsessed with.

You wrote your book in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.  How has your writing process changed outside of that environment?

I’ve had to learn the hard truth that I do need to be disciplined to be a writer. With a student’s schedule, I could afford to write when I wanted to and stay up all night writing a short story from start to finish. I’ve also learned how to write more in a vacuum, without workshops and other readers easily available.

In your interview in Midwest Gothic you were asked about upcoming projects and said, “There’s no plot, but the characters are feeling realer every day.”  You have also mentioned in several interviews that you kept all the characters from the draft of Number One Chinese Restaurant.  What does your character building process look like and how does it shape your narrative?

I’m not good at tricking myself. Which means, even if I know that my writing process requires that I go through multiple aimless drafts in order to understand what my characters would or would not do, who they are and who they are to each other, I can’t set out and plan to write plot-less drafts in order to find my characters. I’m not writing hundreds of pages of glorified character sketches on purpose. I have to honestly think that I have a plot, a reason for these characters to exist and move around. I had to unlearn the fact that my first drafts are for exploring and building character when I started my second book because I ended up with aimless characters who had no purpose because their only purpose was to tell me who they were. Now I write every draft very earnestly, but also flexibly. I let the characters change what the book is about, but I don’t rely on them to build the book for me.

In your interview with Vivian Ludford in Mythos you say, you “wanted to expand the landscape of Asian American writing” and talk about the writer as a prism for experience. Can you speak on how you see personal narratives working as challenges to dominant narratives? 

I can only speak to my own experience, which was growing up in a town where my background was unremarkable even though, a few towns over, I would have been seen as different from the norm. Being Chinese American with well-educated immigrant parents was a dominant narrative in my hometown, and so what I’m often interested in is challenging that dominant narrative, the one I belong to and the one that I can sometimes be blind to. There are many dominant narratives outside the one of white America, outside the ones that dominate each of us, and I think that personal narratives can challenge what’s dominant because they are a challenge to ourselves.

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To find out more about Lillian Li, visit her website at www.lillianliauthor.com.

General registration is now open! To register for the workshop of your choice, visit mcwc.org/2021-registration. There is no application required to attend MCWC and registration includes the morning workshop and all afternoon and evening events. All events will be held over Zoom this year. Workshops are limited to ten participants and all spots are first come, first served.