Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Dispatches from the 2014 West Virginia Writers' Workshop: Day 4

After four days of readings, writings, workshops, book launches, visits from campus dignitaries, and what turned in to over 200 live-tweets, the 2014 West Virginia Writer’s Workshop ended yesterday at noon, in Colson Hall.  


The last day’s event was a Panel on Publishing (one of the most popular events from the 2013 Writer’s Workshop last year, actually).  The lovely ladies from PageSpring, Lynn and Katherine came, as well as the fantastic poet, Renee Nicholson, (fresh from her Friday book-release of the book, Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center) our insanely prolific department chair, Jim Harms and the publishing power-couple, Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble, who match their exemplary poetry with tireless work for the Crab Orchard Review, and the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.  

Mark Brazaitis moderated the panel, and fielded excellent questions from the audience, such as


-I am a new writer.  Where should I start sending my work to?
-How do you organize a chapbook manuscript, or any manuscript for a book of poems?
-How do you deal with rejection as a professional author?


As you can imagine, everyone on the panel really brought their A-game.  For the answers they gave to these and other questions, take a look at my live-tweeting of the event, at:




Our writers and participants bid their sweet adieus after that, and we were left to reflect on the excellent weekend.  

Natalie counted out our Shann Palmer Memorial Scholarship Fund, and we realized that because of the generosity of the participants this weekend, we have an actual scholarship in place! Thank you to everyone who donated.  We know Shann would have been so delighted by our fundraiser.  I was walking around with my envelope, and lottery tickets on Saturday at the open mic, and everyone wanted to add something, and talk about Shann.  It was really wonderful. I will post details regarding the scholarship to our social media account in the coming months, so please stay tuned.  


You must forgive me for the late-ness of this post. I am back to my work-a-day routine, and while I will be posting to the workshop Twitter account regularly, there won’t be any more live-tweeting for a while.  More importantly though, I have been voyaging into the dark forest of Facebook for the first time in a couple of years, to set up an official Page for our Workshop.  While it is still very much a work in progress, you can find us (and please like us) here:




I expect to be posting to that page pretty regularly, and you can too, of course, because Facebook is a supernatural entity or something like that.  


Of course I must extend Mark’s thank yous to everyone who made this workshop possible, including all of you here in the English department and in the College of Arts and Sciences at large, who assisted our participants, attended (or read at) our readings, made everyone feel at home in Morgantown and at WVU, and generally gave us all a writing-weekend to remember.  Next year promises to be another great series of workshop events, so tune in to Facebook, Twitter, and this Blog to hear all about it, as the third week of July 2015 rolls around.  


Also, thank you dear reader(s), for reading my posts and reports on all of the happenings, and letting me be that obnoxious person with the camera, and the open laptop for four days straight.  


~Dominique 



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