Until Next Year

What a year! We have to thank you all for making the 16th annual Taos Summer Writers' Conference so incredible. It was such an honor to spend another beautiful week in Taos with all of you.

Among the highlights, of which there were many, was the launch of Rananim. If you still haven't watched this video, which was directed by Conference Assistant Director, Eva Lipton-Ormand, please do, and see what Sharon and Eva have been working on for the past few months. And for those of you who want to continue that momentum from the Conference, consider taking one of the classes.

Debra Monroe said during the week that each time she comes to the Conference it just gets better and better. We agree! And it is all because of you. We can't wait until next July!

Meet the Native Writer Award Winner: Matthew Skeets

Matthew Skeets of the Navajo Indian Reservation from Vanderwagen has been awarded the 2014 Native Writer Award. He is a recent graduate summa cum laude from the University of New Mexico with two Bachelor of art degrees in poetry and Native Studies. During his undergraduate career he worked closely with poets Luci Tapahonso, Lisa Chavez, and Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Currently he is an intern in communications and social media for American Indian Opportunity in Albuquerque.

Skeets began to write poetry when he first read Emily Dickinson. He spent nearly two years of high school emulating her style, line, and meter. Other poets that Skeets admires include Luci Tapahonso, Sherwin Bitsui, Orlando White, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Eduardo C. Corral, Rigoberto Gonzales, and Tomás Q. Morín. The Native Writer Award was created in memory of Native author and former colleague Louis Owens. It offers paid tuition for one weekend or weeklong workshop, as well paid lodging to any Native American who is a resident of New Mexico. The award recognizes excellence in fiction, poetry, or nonfiction.

When informed about his award Skeets responded, “It’s a small dream of mine to come to the Conference. Thank you.” Matthew will be attending the weeklong workshop with Tomas Q. Morin. In the past recipients like Chee Brossy, Coral Dawn Bernal and Christina M. Castro have been awarded the Native Writer Award, making Skeets even more honored to have been given the award. This will be his first time attending a writing conference and one of Skeets’ goals after this conference is to compile his best work to then apply to graduate creative writing programs in the fall. Skeets also hopes to gain some perspective on how to normalize his writing life, gaining precision in his writing style and learning to be an active writer outside the workshop setting. Finally, Skeets is thankful to the organizers of the conference for giving him this great opportunity.

Meet the Taos Resident Award Winner: Kate Crawford

While working on her memoir about being sexy in one’s sixties, Kate Crawford, the winner of this year’s Taos Resident Award reminds herself to “start looking for all the things she can do, and stop looking for those she couldn’t.”

The list of what Kate has been able to do just in the past year is impressive:  besides entering and winning this contest, she has nearly completed building her house in Taos.   She spent the winter working on “Second Coming” a memoir of “creating a new paradigm for sexy sixties,” and is attending TSWC to “hone her descriptive and humor skills” towards finding an agent and a publisher for her book.   Kate has already put into practice the best this conference has to offer.  She used skills learned in Priscilla Long’s class last year to immediately query her memoir to Allison Hunter and Alexis Hurley, literary agents, during the weekend class that followed.

Kate credits writing with helping her to have a life despite struggling with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia.  She began writing professionally after winning a travel writing competition that earned her a trip around the world in 2002 and renewed respect from her doctor, who wondered “how she could go around the world when she couldn’t go around the block.” Kate’s stories have appeared in the “Boston Globe,” the “San Francisco Chronicle,” the “Washington Post,” and “The Best Travel Writing of 2012.”

 “Second Coming”—pun intended—will be a mixture of vignettes and fantasies of Kate’s hilarious and often tragicomic experiences as she conducts hands on research on her subject.  Besides reading on everything there is to know about sex at a certain age, and taking Flamenco, “to get life back in her,”  Kate has practiced research on related subjects, from Kegel exercises to sexy underwear and other intimate accessoires,  to employing the services of a dating advisor.   “You have to get used to being embarrassed,” she says, as when the unthinkable happened while she was laughing hard during her second date.

Kate’s scholarship winning story, Elephant Driving 101, takes place in Anantara, an elephant camp in Thailand where she learned to bathe, mount, ride, and control her sixty five year old elephant.  Her piece is worth reading just for the description of how one catapults oneself onto the back of the twelve foot tall creature.

Kate promises to “tell it like it is” in her memoir, while escorting readers on a trip to interesting locales that include her own journey:  “I am the protagonist, my illness and my age are the antagonist.”   Kate is excited about being in Taos for this new chapter of her writing career, stating, “I have a life, I have a passion in my life—and I take Cymbalta.”

Meet Julia Thacker, Winner of the Leo Love Merit Scholarship for Prose

 Julia Thacker is a poet, fiction writer, private consultant, and teacher who could not think of a more suitable career. Driven by her love of storytelling and the fulfilling process of creating, she writes to “figure things out” and learn from her own stories. When interviewed, she paraphrased Flannery O’Connor by saying that if you don’t learn anything from your own stories, you can’t expect that anyone else will. Julia is also personally and professionally sustained by the works of Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Marilynne Robinson, as well as many others.

Her work as a graduate student at Brown University focused on how the precise language and imagery of poetry can inform prose. However, she has spent the past several years focused on writing fiction. Much of her fiction, as well as some of her poems, is colored by a rich family history. As a descendent of a coal miner from Harlan County, Kentucky, Julia has placed many of her stories in the context of Appalachian culture. Though she herself was raised in Dayton, Ohio, she spent a great deal of time visiting with her grandparents, aunts and uncles back in Kentucky. Her latest novel-in-progress, The Funeral of the Man Who Wasn’t Dead Yet, is set during the migration of Appalachians to the north at the end of World War II. It was an excerpt from this piece which won her the Leo Love Merit Scholarship in Prose.

This summer Julia will be attending her first Taos Summer Writers' Conference. She has chosen to take the week-long poetry workshop, “A Dark Star Passes Through It,” with Leslie Ullman. Julia admires Ullman’s work and looks forward to working with her. She is also particularly excited to be spending time in Taos, an area which she finds both strikingly beautiful and intriguing for its history as an artist colony.

Participant Accomplishment: Steve Fox's Memoir

Steve Fox began work on his memoir Odyssey: Love and Terror in Greece, 1969 in a nonfiction workshop at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference. After seven years of writing, and two trips to Paris and Athens for research, Steve's book, out from Nighthawk Press, is described by John Nichols as "part high drama, part fumbling comedy, sort of like Austin Powers meets Z, a Costa-Gavras political thriller about the rightwing military coup in Athens. The book is a great page turner, a fast-paced yarn with no yawns and written with a fine combination of innocence and moxie."

We certainly can't wait to get our hands on a copy. Congratulations Steve!

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.  

A Short History of Decay: Michael Maren's New Film

A Short History of Decay will have its theatrical premier on MAY 16, in New York City at the Village East Cinema. The film is a comedy from an original script by Michael Maren, about a failed Brooklyn writer, Nathan Fisher, played by Bryan Greenberg, who visits his ailing parents in Florida. Check out the newest trailer on their Facebook page. Congrats, Michael!

Michael Maren spent 17 years as a war correspondent in Africa and the Middle East before hanging up his flak jacket and taking a crack at Hollywood. He’s written screenplays for HBO, Sony and a number of independent projects, working with Chris Tucker, Reese Witherspoon and others. He recently completed production on A Short History of Decay which he wrote and directed. The film was executive produced by Milos Forman and stars Linda Lavin, Bryan Greenberg, Harris Yulin and Emmanuelle Chriqui. It just had its premier at the Hamptons International Film Festival. He is teaching a Weeklong Screenwriting Workshop at the Conference this summer.

Jane von Mehren and the Art of Rewriting

Jane von Mehren, a veteran editor and agent, will be offering a weeklong workshop that has everything to do with revision. Rewriting and revising a piece is often the most difficult part of a project, but also essential. In this workshop, Jane will address questions like: How do you begin to revise? How can you go back in with perspective? What kinds of techniques and strategies can you use to make your revisions more effective?

Over the course of this weeklong workshop Jane will share some of the strategies she's developed over the years as she helped many different kinds of authors through their revision processes. You will discuss how to read your own work critically so that you can diagnose the issues you may need to address in revision. And you'll address some of the topics that come up again and again: point of view, chronology, voice, and plot/pacing along with strategies for how to fix them. You will have a chance to workshop up to 50 pages of the manuscript that you need to revise.

In short, this class will be invaluable to those of you who are deep into a project and not sure what your next step should be. Jane's experience and expertise as a veteran of the publishing industry will be a great resource to you, as will the critical eyes of your fellow participants. For those of you on the verge on finishing something great, this class is sure to be productive.

Jane von Mehren is the founder and Editorial Director of Jane von Mehren Associates working with authors, thought leaders, experts, and publishers to bring ideas and stories to life. She identifies, shapes, and develops important ideas and stories that resonate, which she has done for nearly three decades as an editor, publisher, and writer. She is also a literary agent affiliated with Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. Previously, she held senior editorial and publishing roles at Penguin Books where she was VP, Editor in Chief and Associate Publisher, and Random House, where she was SVP, Publisher of Trade Paperbacks. Prior to that she held editorial positions at Crown Publishers and Ticknor & Fields (formerly an imprint of Houghton Mifflin). A voracious reader of all kinds of books, Jane’s list of authors and their work is equally broad. Among the bestselling and award-winning nonfiction authors she has worked with are William Pollack, author of Real Boys; Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson, authors of Kabul Beauty School; John Philip Santos, author of  National Book Award Finalist Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation; and many others.

Faculty Feature: Kristen-Paige Madonia

We had the pleasure of asking Kristen-Paige Madonia, who is teaching a YA workshop at the Conference this summer, a few questions about her interest in Young Adult Literature.

What are some of your favorite YA books?
This list is constantly in flux, but I always recommend John Green's work, particularly Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars. Other favorites include John Corey Whaley's Where Things Come Back and David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing. Claiming Georgia Tate by Gigi Amateau is wonderful, too, as is M.T. Anderson's Feed, Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story, and Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park.

What draws you to write YA?
It's funny, I don't actually believe writers always get to choose what they write -- often the work, the subject and the characters and themes, choose you. I didn't start out intending to write YA fiction; in fact, when my agent and I were preparing to submit Fingerprints of You to editors, we couldn't decide if it would be categorized as YA or adult lit, so we sent it to editors of both genres -- ultimately, it sold to Simon & Schuster's YA division, Books for Young Readers. But now, as I'm in the midst of collecting ideas for my third YA lit novel, I can easily say that it's the voice and urgency of story that draws me to write YA. I think I will always write for both teens and adults, but there is something so particularly honest and authentic about YA, something so relatable and powerful about that time period of coming-of-age. I've also found great inspiration in the community of readers. It's an amazing thing to connect with teens that have used your work to empower themselves in some way, to feel less alone and to gain confidence and strength.

YA seems to have a lot of cross-over appeal (both kids and adults seem to love it). Why do you think that is?
It's so easy to believe in the characters, to feel aligned with them and to become part of their worlds. On the one hand we can all remember that time in our life, no? When everything seemed so raw and  risky and transformative. And on the other hand, aren't we all still coming-of-age and changing, evolving and growing day by day?

Find out more about Kristen-Paige's Young Adult Literature workshop this summer at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference.

Kristen-Paige Madonia is the author of the Young Adult literary novel Fingerprints of You (Simon & Schuster BFYR, 2012); her short fiction has recently appeared in FiveChapters, New Orleans Review, Upstreet, and American Fiction: Best Previously Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers. She is the recipient of the 2012 Taos Writers’ Conference D.H. Lawrence Fellowship and was awarded the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Prize in 2010. She has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, the Hambidge Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Millay Colony for the Arts, the Key West Literary Seminar and the Studios of Key West. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach and teaches fiction at the University of Virginia and James Madison University.