2019 Accepted Proposals
Proposals Accepted for 2019
Uncanny Activisms: Poems as Spells, Curses, Prayers, and Blessings
Lesley Wheeler, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Anna Maria Hong, Ashley M. Jones, Hyejung Kook, and Jane Satterfield
Protest poetry informs us about crisis, attempting to inspire change among human beings. This roundtable, however, addresses an increasingly common variety of protest poetry that delivers its petitions for change to the more-than-human world. Participants—poets, editors, critics, and reviewers—will discuss who and what influenced them to experiment with this mode; what or whom poetic prayers and spells try to reach; what stylistic and structural elements help focus such a poem’s energy; and what social, environmental, and personal transformations the authors of such poems seek.
Women and Publishing
Erin Wood, Eliza Borné, Jo McDougall, Crystal C. Mercer, and Katy Henriksen
Small press leadership and publishing, New York publishing houses, academic presses, book and textile arts, magazine publishing, manuscript editing, and writing—these women have done it all and have each shared their stories in Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives by Erin Wood (Et Alia Press, 2019Ari). The five will discuss how to land internships and jobs in publishing, how to break through barriers, self-publishing versus large press versus small press, tips to keep publishing and editing jobs from killing your own writing, and how to avoid potential pitfalls along the way.
Finding the River, Building the Bridge: Navigating Nontraditional Paths to Writing Careers
Erin Adair-Hodges, Jennifer Jordán Schaller, Rebecca Aronson, Jenny Browne, and Anna V. Q. Ross
This panel seeks to explore the challenges writers face when attempting to build their writing lives in ways that deviate from the traditional track of degree/advanced degree/academic job/book. Panelists will discuss their own paths as a way to engage in a larger conversation about the importance of providing alternate narratives for how one becomes a writer. The group will also focus on strategies for negotiating a road for which they’ve not been given a map.
"Bitches Get Stuff Done:” The Costs of Emotional Labor on Academic Women Writers
Louise Krug, Jen Colatosti, and Nicole Emmelhainz
Professorships seem like the holy grail: discussing writing and mentoring students, plus plenty of time left to write. But what happens when the demands of teaching, professional development, and service combine with the social expectations placed on women to serve as caretakers and take on additional, often invisible work in their home lives? Three women who are writers and full-time professors discuss the impact the emotional and mental demands of academic jobs have had on their writing lives.
From Silence to Canon: Women Writing from Cancer Land
Anna Leahy
Feminist scholar and cancer thriver Susan Gubar claims, “we reside in the midst of the development of the cancer canon.” Women writers, particularly memoirists and poets, are actively extending and shaping this canon and, in doing so, (re)defining the ways we think about and talk about illness and grief. Drawing from writers such as Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, and Lucille Clifton, this presentation looks at more recent cancer writing by Nina Riggs, Anya Silver, Julie Yip-Williams, and others. In addition, women are more likely to be caregivers of family members with cancer, adding another layer to the cancer canon.
“Woman Must Write Herself”: Exploring the Value of Visceral and Confessional Writing in Publication
Erin Slaughter and Lena Ziegler
This presentation will focus on the importance of creating space in the literary world for traditionally devalued forms of writing by women: writing that is emotional, bodily in nature, viscerally confessional, or overtly feminine in style or content. Presenters will dissect the gendered expectations of what it means to write “literary” poetry and prose, and explore work from The Hunger, a literary journal founded by the presenters, which focuses on showcasing this type of writing. Presenters and attendees will have the opportunity to share their own experiences with writing and publishing, and how this approach can help enact social change.
Fight Club 2.0: YA Women Pull No Punches
Zoë Russell
The young adult genre, a relatively new kid on the block, has resonated with teens in powerful ways. This panel will discuss the pricelessness of the presence of “rebellious” literature that teaches young adults that their voice is necessary, valued, and capable of changing the world. It will also analyze the vital presence of women writers in the genre, and their overall effect on YA's rise to fame in the modern generation, as well as explore the themes that leave lasting impressions on young adults, both good and bad, especially upon empowered women, who are often the protagonists of the literature.
The Ethics of Engagement: Poetic Practice Toward Imagined Community in C.D. Wright’s One Big Self and One With Others
Elizabeth Ratzlaff
My project seeks to analyze Wright’s poetic practice in terms of its ethics and its ability to responsibly bear witness to those oppressed and shut out by society. I argue that, in both One Big Self and One With Others, Wright puts poetry to the test in an attempt to restore society’s image of the “outsider” to an imagined space of community with the “insider.” Ultimately, my project suggests that Wright’s poetic practice is most ethical in the moments when it simultaneously uses the documentary to include traces of forgotten or silenced voices and histories while also calling into question the trustworthiness of the very documentary practice being employed.
What are We Teaching When We Ask Students to Read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"?
Vida Cross
In the Call and Response moments of the MeToo Movement, what are we asking of students who are presented with Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper”? Is it reasonable to ask students to feel and identify with a situation that was presented 100 years ago? A situation they may not understand. Or is this a challenging moment that allows for greater expression, more in-depth presentations and a challenging request that students look beyond the cliché of simply seeing the female character in "The Yellow Wallpaper" as mentally ill? How can we ask students to respond to the writers call for action? What are some of the many ways in which students can respond as a way of feeling and understanding?
What's in a Pronoun? Examination of Non-Binary Gender in the works of Ursula K. LeGuin
Jill E. Crosby
Common critiques of Ursula K. LeGuin’s thought experiment speculating what a civilization without notions of gender would be like in her novel THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS point out the author’s use of masculine pronouns when referencing the otherwise genderless protagonist of her story. In addition to offering my own critique of these works, I examine other common criticisms of this pronoun problem in her book, including LeGuin’s own criticism of her word choice, and compare it to her later short story “Coming of Age in Karhide”, which takes place in the same setting as her novel.
Across Species Lines: Women Writing Animals
Kate McIntyre, Anne Barngrover, Trudy Lewis, Leanna Petronella, and Wendy Oleson
From the surrealist provocation of Leonora Carrington’s hyena to Marianne Moore’s prickly array of creatures to the minutely observed weasels of Annie Dillard or the strange symbiosis of insect-like aliens and humans in Octavia Butler, women writers have long been probing the intricacies of human-animal relations. Five women writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction discuss the pressing need for more animals on the page in these times of ecological crisis, the role of animals in their own work, and why the inclusion of animal and nonhuman characters in creative works can be viewed as a feminist act.
The Interview
Lacey Thacker, Sara Mitchell, and Deana Hamby Nall
Interviewing skills can make or break a writing project that requires input from outside sources, but few people are born interviewers. Learn tips on interviewing, including why two interviewers can be better than one, overcoming interview anxiety, the rules of recording, and how to (ethically) get the information you really want.
Outside/Inside: Women Writers Navigating Archival Research and Copyright
Lizzy Petersen, Robin Wheeler, and Allison Schein Holmes
Traditionally, archivists are seen as “gatekeepers” to research, an institution characterized by dated technologies and incomplete systems. In truth, navigating archives is a “lived process” (Kirsch & Rohan, 2008), where the point-of-view and experiences of researchers can impact the process and final product. In this panel, poet Lizzy Petersen and non-fiction writer Robin Wheeler will discuss their writing projects and how archival research played a part in their work, as well as their experiences with copyrighted materials. Audio archivist Allison Schein Holmes will discuss her work as a female archivist and how she is changing the notion from “gatekeeper” to “facilitator.”
Poetics of Gender and Labor (Creative Reading)
Taneum Bambrick, Dorothy Chan, Jos Charles, Jenny Molberg, and Claire Meuschke
Our five panelists are interested in the labor of identifying the ways in which gender becomes a tool to order bodies, how the erasure of indigenous experiences can fragment a sense of family identity, the ways that being a child of immigrants means also being the child of labor, the danger of working alongside men in the isolation of various parks and maintenance job sites, and what it means to attempt to generate poetry about our perpetrators, especially when they are active in and have influence over the very community where we seek to promote ourselves and our work.
Matriarchs in Triptych and across Cultures (Creative Reading)
Gina Ferrara, Julie Kane, and Melinda Palacio
Anne Sexton famously wrote, "A woman is her mother. That's the main thing." Female poets have a long tradition of presenting mothers in their poetry. How does the frequent presence and recollection of mothers define who we are? Across cultures, specifically Hispanic, Irish, and Sicilian, what similarities do mothers share and what differences? Must daughters look back at their matriarchal predecessors before crossing any kind of threshold? This reading will respond to these questions in triptych, via three cultures.
Blood Lines: Writing and Uniting Reproductive Experiences (Creative Reading)
Abby Minor, Jane V. Blunschi, and Natalie Giarratano
Too often reproductive experiences are depicted as fixed, isolated dots: Images of joyful birth over here, of sad abortion over there, and of menstruation, menopause, and more scattered around the edges of a blank page. And yet the truth is that our reproductive lives more closely resemble embroideries that are multidimensional and intertwined. This reading brings three writers together to share works about a range of complex reproductive experiences, and to highlight connections between reproductive lives and identities such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class. Bring your own stories and questions so that we can connect the dots together.
Strange Horizons: A Feminist Speculative Poetry Reading (Creative Reading)
Amie Whittemore, Amelia Martens, Rochelle Hurt, and Maya James
“When women speak truly they speak subversively,” Ursula K. Le Guin noted. In the spirit of subversion, panelists will read from their poetry and discuss how speculative poetry is especially well-suited for women as it provides a space to interrogate social and environmental issues and to envision feminist alternatives to today’s problems. They will read from their work and share why they apply speculative tropes to their poetry and how envisioning the marvelous can console and direct us toward horizons of greater truth.
Shout about It: Promotion Basics for Writers (75-minute Workshop)
Caitlin Hamilton Summie
Nowadays, agents want authors to have “platforms.” Once accepted for publication, authors are expected to assist with publicity. What’s a writer to do? Veteran book publicist and marketing expert Hamilton Summie walks writers through the basics of book publicity—such as understanding the publication landscape, learning what a platform is, defining your audience, understanding timelines, and more—so that you can help to create and celebrate your writing successes. Hamilton Summie encourages participation and uses exercises to move all workshops past lectures into a dynamic dialogue.
Women's Work (and Play): Creating Community through Poetic Collaboration (75-minute Workshop)
Amy Ash and Callista Buchen
Collaborative poetry has experienced a recent resurgence, challenging the inaccurate (and gendered) stereotype of the poet as solitary genius. In this workshop and discussion, participants will be invited to explore and experiment with writing collaborative poetry, exploring different ways to engage in collaborative conversations and discover what can that bring to our work. We'll discover not only how collaboration might shape and enhance our own poetic voices, but more importantly, the ways in which poetic collaboration can create an atmosphere of women’s solidarity, support, and empowerment so necessary in our world today.
Uncanny Activisms: Poems as Spells, Curses, Prayers, and Blessings
Lesley Wheeler, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Anna Maria Hong, Ashley M. Jones, Hyejung Kook, and Jane Satterfield
Protest poetry informs us about crisis, attempting to inspire change among human beings. This roundtable, however, addresses an increasingly common variety of protest poetry that delivers its petitions for change to the more-than-human world. Participants—poets, editors, critics, and reviewers—will discuss who and what influenced them to experiment with this mode; what or whom poetic prayers and spells try to reach; what stylistic and structural elements help focus such a poem’s energy; and what social, environmental, and personal transformations the authors of such poems seek.
Women and Publishing
Erin Wood, Eliza Borné, Jo McDougall, Crystal C. Mercer, and Katy Henriksen
Small press leadership and publishing, New York publishing houses, academic presses, book and textile arts, magazine publishing, manuscript editing, and writing—these women have done it all and have each shared their stories in Women Make Arkansas: Conversations with 50 Creatives by Erin Wood (Et Alia Press, 2019Ari). The five will discuss how to land internships and jobs in publishing, how to break through barriers, self-publishing versus large press versus small press, tips to keep publishing and editing jobs from killing your own writing, and how to avoid potential pitfalls along the way.
Finding the River, Building the Bridge: Navigating Nontraditional Paths to Writing Careers
Erin Adair-Hodges, Jennifer Jordán Schaller, Rebecca Aronson, Jenny Browne, and Anna V. Q. Ross
This panel seeks to explore the challenges writers face when attempting to build their writing lives in ways that deviate from the traditional track of degree/advanced degree/academic job/book. Panelists will discuss their own paths as a way to engage in a larger conversation about the importance of providing alternate narratives for how one becomes a writer. The group will also focus on strategies for negotiating a road for which they’ve not been given a map.
"Bitches Get Stuff Done:” The Costs of Emotional Labor on Academic Women Writers
Louise Krug, Jen Colatosti, and Nicole Emmelhainz
Professorships seem like the holy grail: discussing writing and mentoring students, plus plenty of time left to write. But what happens when the demands of teaching, professional development, and service combine with the social expectations placed on women to serve as caretakers and take on additional, often invisible work in their home lives? Three women who are writers and full-time professors discuss the impact the emotional and mental demands of academic jobs have had on their writing lives.
From Silence to Canon: Women Writing from Cancer Land
Anna Leahy
Feminist scholar and cancer thriver Susan Gubar claims, “we reside in the midst of the development of the cancer canon.” Women writers, particularly memoirists and poets, are actively extending and shaping this canon and, in doing so, (re)defining the ways we think about and talk about illness and grief. Drawing from writers such as Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, and Lucille Clifton, this presentation looks at more recent cancer writing by Nina Riggs, Anya Silver, Julie Yip-Williams, and others. In addition, women are more likely to be caregivers of family members with cancer, adding another layer to the cancer canon.
“Woman Must Write Herself”: Exploring the Value of Visceral and Confessional Writing in Publication
Erin Slaughter and Lena Ziegler
This presentation will focus on the importance of creating space in the literary world for traditionally devalued forms of writing by women: writing that is emotional, bodily in nature, viscerally confessional, or overtly feminine in style or content. Presenters will dissect the gendered expectations of what it means to write “literary” poetry and prose, and explore work from The Hunger, a literary journal founded by the presenters, which focuses on showcasing this type of writing. Presenters and attendees will have the opportunity to share their own experiences with writing and publishing, and how this approach can help enact social change.
Fight Club 2.0: YA Women Pull No Punches
Zoë Russell
The young adult genre, a relatively new kid on the block, has resonated with teens in powerful ways. This panel will discuss the pricelessness of the presence of “rebellious” literature that teaches young adults that their voice is necessary, valued, and capable of changing the world. It will also analyze the vital presence of women writers in the genre, and their overall effect on YA's rise to fame in the modern generation, as well as explore the themes that leave lasting impressions on young adults, both good and bad, especially upon empowered women, who are often the protagonists of the literature.
The Ethics of Engagement: Poetic Practice Toward Imagined Community in C.D. Wright’s One Big Self and One With Others
Elizabeth Ratzlaff
My project seeks to analyze Wright’s poetic practice in terms of its ethics and its ability to responsibly bear witness to those oppressed and shut out by society. I argue that, in both One Big Self and One With Others, Wright puts poetry to the test in an attempt to restore society’s image of the “outsider” to an imagined space of community with the “insider.” Ultimately, my project suggests that Wright’s poetic practice is most ethical in the moments when it simultaneously uses the documentary to include traces of forgotten or silenced voices and histories while also calling into question the trustworthiness of the very documentary practice being employed.
What are We Teaching When We Ask Students to Read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"?
Vida Cross
In the Call and Response moments of the MeToo Movement, what are we asking of students who are presented with Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper”? Is it reasonable to ask students to feel and identify with a situation that was presented 100 years ago? A situation they may not understand. Or is this a challenging moment that allows for greater expression, more in-depth presentations and a challenging request that students look beyond the cliché of simply seeing the female character in "The Yellow Wallpaper" as mentally ill? How can we ask students to respond to the writers call for action? What are some of the many ways in which students can respond as a way of feeling and understanding?
What's in a Pronoun? Examination of Non-Binary Gender in the works of Ursula K. LeGuin
Jill E. Crosby
Common critiques of Ursula K. LeGuin’s thought experiment speculating what a civilization without notions of gender would be like in her novel THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS point out the author’s use of masculine pronouns when referencing the otherwise genderless protagonist of her story. In addition to offering my own critique of these works, I examine other common criticisms of this pronoun problem in her book, including LeGuin’s own criticism of her word choice, and compare it to her later short story “Coming of Age in Karhide”, which takes place in the same setting as her novel.
Across Species Lines: Women Writing Animals
Kate McIntyre, Anne Barngrover, Trudy Lewis, Leanna Petronella, and Wendy Oleson
From the surrealist provocation of Leonora Carrington’s hyena to Marianne Moore’s prickly array of creatures to the minutely observed weasels of Annie Dillard or the strange symbiosis of insect-like aliens and humans in Octavia Butler, women writers have long been probing the intricacies of human-animal relations. Five women writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction discuss the pressing need for more animals on the page in these times of ecological crisis, the role of animals in their own work, and why the inclusion of animal and nonhuman characters in creative works can be viewed as a feminist act.
The Interview
Lacey Thacker, Sara Mitchell, and Deana Hamby Nall
Interviewing skills can make or break a writing project that requires input from outside sources, but few people are born interviewers. Learn tips on interviewing, including why two interviewers can be better than one, overcoming interview anxiety, the rules of recording, and how to (ethically) get the information you really want.
Outside/Inside: Women Writers Navigating Archival Research and Copyright
Lizzy Petersen, Robin Wheeler, and Allison Schein Holmes
Traditionally, archivists are seen as “gatekeepers” to research, an institution characterized by dated technologies and incomplete systems. In truth, navigating archives is a “lived process” (Kirsch & Rohan, 2008), where the point-of-view and experiences of researchers can impact the process and final product. In this panel, poet Lizzy Petersen and non-fiction writer Robin Wheeler will discuss their writing projects and how archival research played a part in their work, as well as their experiences with copyrighted materials. Audio archivist Allison Schein Holmes will discuss her work as a female archivist and how she is changing the notion from “gatekeeper” to “facilitator.”
Poetics of Gender and Labor (Creative Reading)
Taneum Bambrick, Dorothy Chan, Jos Charles, Jenny Molberg, and Claire Meuschke
Our five panelists are interested in the labor of identifying the ways in which gender becomes a tool to order bodies, how the erasure of indigenous experiences can fragment a sense of family identity, the ways that being a child of immigrants means also being the child of labor, the danger of working alongside men in the isolation of various parks and maintenance job sites, and what it means to attempt to generate poetry about our perpetrators, especially when they are active in and have influence over the very community where we seek to promote ourselves and our work.
Matriarchs in Triptych and across Cultures (Creative Reading)
Gina Ferrara, Julie Kane, and Melinda Palacio
Anne Sexton famously wrote, "A woman is her mother. That's the main thing." Female poets have a long tradition of presenting mothers in their poetry. How does the frequent presence and recollection of mothers define who we are? Across cultures, specifically Hispanic, Irish, and Sicilian, what similarities do mothers share and what differences? Must daughters look back at their matriarchal predecessors before crossing any kind of threshold? This reading will respond to these questions in triptych, via three cultures.
Blood Lines: Writing and Uniting Reproductive Experiences (Creative Reading)
Abby Minor, Jane V. Blunschi, and Natalie Giarratano
Too often reproductive experiences are depicted as fixed, isolated dots: Images of joyful birth over here, of sad abortion over there, and of menstruation, menopause, and more scattered around the edges of a blank page. And yet the truth is that our reproductive lives more closely resemble embroideries that are multidimensional and intertwined. This reading brings three writers together to share works about a range of complex reproductive experiences, and to highlight connections between reproductive lives and identities such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class. Bring your own stories and questions so that we can connect the dots together.
Strange Horizons: A Feminist Speculative Poetry Reading (Creative Reading)
Amie Whittemore, Amelia Martens, Rochelle Hurt, and Maya James
“When women speak truly they speak subversively,” Ursula K. Le Guin noted. In the spirit of subversion, panelists will read from their poetry and discuss how speculative poetry is especially well-suited for women as it provides a space to interrogate social and environmental issues and to envision feminist alternatives to today’s problems. They will read from their work and share why they apply speculative tropes to their poetry and how envisioning the marvelous can console and direct us toward horizons of greater truth.
Shout about It: Promotion Basics for Writers (75-minute Workshop)
Caitlin Hamilton Summie
Nowadays, agents want authors to have “platforms.” Once accepted for publication, authors are expected to assist with publicity. What’s a writer to do? Veteran book publicist and marketing expert Hamilton Summie walks writers through the basics of book publicity—such as understanding the publication landscape, learning what a platform is, defining your audience, understanding timelines, and more—so that you can help to create and celebrate your writing successes. Hamilton Summie encourages participation and uses exercises to move all workshops past lectures into a dynamic dialogue.
Women's Work (and Play): Creating Community through Poetic Collaboration (75-minute Workshop)
Amy Ash and Callista Buchen
Collaborative poetry has experienced a recent resurgence, challenging the inaccurate (and gendered) stereotype of the poet as solitary genius. In this workshop and discussion, participants will be invited to explore and experiment with writing collaborative poetry, exploring different ways to engage in collaborative conversations and discover what can that bring to our work. We'll discover not only how collaboration might shape and enhance our own poetic voices, but more importantly, the ways in which poetic collaboration can create an atmosphere of women’s solidarity, support, and empowerment so necessary in our world today.
