Sentences Conference meets in Mead Hall, on the campus of Drew University in Madison, NJ.

The conference fee includes lunch each day, and Friday evening reception.

The schedule includes daily lectures, workshops, optional manuscript consultation, writing sessions, and readings.

Individuals needing special assistance should contact the Residence Life, Housing, and Community Standards Office at 973.408.3394 at least five working days prior to the event to ensure appropriate arrangements.

 

Program

Kathryn Grant (CSGS, drama)

Talk: “Logan’s Law and Other Forays into Anagnorisis: How Maxwell Anderson, Aristotle and Sophocles Taught Me How to Get My Characters to See the Light”

Workshop: “Creating Narrative Fluency: Daring to be Dull”

Improv guru Keith Johnstone contends that writers and improvisers block impulses for three reasons: they don’t want their audience to think they are dull, crazy or perverse.  So we pick through the ideas that we perceive might be acceptable to a polite audience, and by the time we get through this winnowing process, anything that feels like an organic impulse is strangled.  In this workshop we will use some of the skills of improv and group composition to at least have a moment when we might experience what it might feel like to be free of all that.

William Giraldi

Talk: "The Memoir Now”: what the genre currently looks like in the era of constant online confessions. 

Workshop: "I Laughed, I Cried: the Merging of the Comic and Tragic in Fiction"

In the aftermath of the recent American massacres in Aurora, Newtown, and Orlando, how do fiction writers incorporate calamitous events into their fiction without resorting to cliché and bathos? Is it ever permissible to be comedic while dealing with the tragic? We'll look at scenes from some masterpieces of world literature -- Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Flannery O'Connor -- to understand how the greats handled the challenge of mingling the comic with the tragic. 

Mark Jacobs (CSGS, Fiction)

Talk: “The Congo without Conrad”

Workshop: “Dialogue: Wheels & Axes

One of the pleasures of reading an accomplished short story is recognizing the economy, spare or elegant, with which the writer achieves success. Sometimes dialogue can be the wheel on which the story turns. Sometimes it’s the axis. In this workshop, we’ll look at some of the ways writers use dialogue not just to reveal character but to advance the plot of a story.

Participants will develop a plot line, and characters, and the particulars of setting for a story. It can be a story idea they have already played with, or something entirely new. Working with a partner or in groups of three, they will flesh out the story line. Then each will write a draft of the story. Here’s the catch: the story will consist of dialogue only. No narrative, no description, no authorial intervention. Just dialogue. The satisfaction, the gratification, will be in seeing how each of us gets from Point A to Point B. Throughout the exercise we will provide the kind of helpful critique that is the Sentences hallmark. At the conclusion of the workshop, each participant will have the makings of a story in which dialogue is the axis on which the narrative turns.

Damon DiMarco (CLA, Non-Fiction)

Talk:”Uncommon Sense: The Backwards, One-Legged, Hula Hoop Watusi of Writing from Your Subconscious” 

Workshop: “Writing from the First Barrel”

The acting teacher Sanford Meisner once said: “All of us have two barrels inside us. The first barrel is the one that contains all the juices which are exuded by our troubles… but right next to it stands the second barrel, and by a process … that nobody fully understands, those juices have been transformed into the ability to paint, to compose, to write, to play music and the ability to act.” This exercise asks you to tap your first barrel, the deep well within your subconscious landscape from which leap symbols, characters, and your inimitable truth. It will ask you to stop writing and instead become a channel for what must be written.

Dale Peck (CLA, Fiction, Memoir) 

Talk: “Mirrors and Windows, or Novels That Show Us Ourselves v. Novels that Show Us the World"

Workshop: “The Three P’s: People, Plot, and Place”

The discussion will examine the three major structural elements of any story—people, plot, and place—but we’ll devote extra attention to the importance of a diverse cast of characters and cultures in contemporary fiction, and the challenges and rewards of writing outside of one’s own identity. Writers should pre-submit two pages of fiction, either a short-short or a complete scene, in which the central figure is as different from the writer as possible, in terms of race, sex, culture, etc. Identity need not be the subject of the story, but it should be present.

The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies

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