Faculty Feature: Lisa Lenard-Cook

This weekend workshop will be the perfect way to end your writing week in Taos this summer. In Lisa Lenard-Cook's class, Innovative Revision, you will be listening to the way words work in your peers' offerings and in your own work. "The not-so-secret secret of writing workshops is that, in the end, you’ll learn far more from critiquing others’ works-in-progress than you will from what others tell you about your own," says Lisa. And she's right.

This will be a weekend full of listening, and trying to understand sound, craft, technique, and tension. The class will leave you with the desire to push your prose to the very edge of greatness. As Lisa says, it will be a weekend of getting "down to the nitty-gritty of re-crafting and re-visioning so that, when you sit down at your desk post-conference, you’ll have specific tools to make what’s on the page match the picture in your head." And isn't that what we're all trying to do?

Lisa Lenard-Cook’s novels include Jim Sagel Prize-winning and PEN-shortlisted Dissonance (to be reissued in Fall 2014 by SFWP) and NMPW finalist Coyote Morning (UNM Press). She’s the author of the writing guides The Mind of Your Story (Writer’s Digest) and (with Lynn C. Miller) Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press), as well as numerous trade nonfiction and ghosted books. Her short fiction has appeared in Southwest Review, Rosebud, Puerto del Sol, and other journals. She is a faculty member at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and a 2014 featured writer at the National Undergraduate Literary Conference in Ogden. With Lynn C. Miller, Lisa co-founded ABQ Writers Co-op, bosque (the magazine), and the Bosque Fiction Prize.

Joy Harjo: 2014 Guggenheim Fellow

We are so happy that our friend, Joy Harjo, is a recipient of a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In its ninetieth annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 177 Fellowships (including one joint Fellowship) to a diverse group of 178 scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. Congratulations Joy!

Faculty Feature: Dan Mueller

"Dan brings a style, energy, and expectation to the class that is inspiring. He is a superb teacher." - 2013 Workshop Participant 

We are so pleased to welcome back Dan Mueller this year, who will be teaching a weekend workshop he's calling Memoir as Fiction. In this workshop, you will look to your own lives for the material of your fiction. You'll also look to memoir for the narrative and poetical strategies that lend credibility to your stories and induce a reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. Ultimately, you’ll amaze each other with the magic to be found in your own—at least, to us—humdrum lives.

Dan Mueller is the author of two collections of short stories, How Animals Mate (Overlook Press, 1999), which won the Sewanee Fiction Prize, and Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey (Outpost 19 Books, 2013). His work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Story Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Joyland Retro, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, CutBank, Surreal South, The Cincinnati Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Story, The Mississippi Review, The Crescent Review, Playboy, and other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Henfield Foundation, University of Virginia, and Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently directs the creative writing program at the University of New Mexico and teaches on the creative writing faculty of the Low-Residency MFA Program at Queens University of Charlotte.  

Les Standiford and Prose Structure

Les Standiford will be teaching a weeklong workshop that is all about how to make readers want to "turn the page." The class is designed for writers of fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction alike. Les has published in all three genres and says that learning how to drive tension through narrative structure has made all the difference in his career.

"As the author of twenty books and the founding director of two university creative writing programs, I think that an understanding of how to create and maintain narrative drive is the most important tool for a writer wishing to engage an audience," Les says.

This class will explore the techniques of compelling storytelling common to all the prose narrative forms. You will emphasize specific shaping and revising techniques, including identifying the "DNA" of the material, choice of the most effective jumping off point, pacing of the "dreaded middle," and the ultimate "closing of the circle."So, if you are looking for ways to up the tension in your narrative structure, this is the class for you.

Les Standiford is the author of Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction that Changed America, a 2011 New York Times bestseller and a #1 Wall Street Journal true-crime bestseller. He is the recipient of Fellowships in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Florida Arts Council as well as the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is Director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University in Miami, where he lives with his wife Kimberly, an artist and psychotherapist.