Jumpstart! Mixes Up the Arts at Writers Festival

Jumpstart! Classes: Hybrid Forms with Nance Van Winckel   panels and evening event  still open

The Orcas Island Writers Festival is fast approaching — it’s third annual festival will take place September 17-19, 2010. The Festival was born in 2008, the brainchild of writer Barbara Lewis, as “a way to enrich and connect readers and writers through classes, lectures, workshops, and the natural beauty of Orcas Island,” says Lewis, who continues as the Festival Director.

It is distinguished among writers festivals as one that focuses on the art and craft of writing, rather than the process and techniques of publishing. “Our festival creates an environment for focus and energy, designed to bring the writer – whether a novice writer or experienced author – to deeper, more effective, and more fulfilling expression,” says Lewis

Festival events will again take place in Eastsound venues. This year the Writers Festival  faculty is from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, which Poets and Writers Magazine called the top low-residency writing program in the country. David Jauss and Sue Silverman teach the workshops (which had one opening as of this week)  and Nance Van Winckel, will again teach the Jumpstart! classes, as she did last year.

David Jauss’s recent works include Black Maps and Crimes of Passion. The recipient of the AWP Award for Short Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among other awards, he teaches at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Sue Silverman is the author of two memoirs and Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Nance Van Winckel teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Eastern Washington  University and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program. This year’s Jumpstart! will focus on mixed-genre forms: flash fiction, prose poetry, and beyond-the-page visual/verbal art. Each day covers essential elements of the writing craft, leading writers to focus and enliven their poetry and prose.

The Jumpstart! writing classes teach writers how to focus and enliven their writing, whether poetry or prose. The Jumpstart! classes are taught by Nance Van Winckel. Nance is an accomplished writer of both prose and poetry; her works include After a Spell, which was awarded the Washington State Governor’s Award for Poetry, and Quake, which received the 1998 Paterson Fiction Prize.

This year, the Jumpstart! classes will give particular attention to mixed-genre forms, a particularly lively area of writing today, Lewis explains. ” In particular, we’ll discuss prose poems, flash fiction, and beyond-the-page visual/verbal genres. We will engage in writing exercises, as well, using the different forms, and sharing our work with the group.

“On day one, we’ll study and draft prose poems, primarily. On day two, we’ll examine flash fiction (very, very short stories) and get started on some of our own. On the last day, we will look at examples of off-the-page visual/verbal art and experiment with mixing text and objects or other art media.”

Nance’s recent works include No Starling, After a Spell, and Curtain Creek Farm. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships and a Pushcart Prize, among others. (An interview with Nance Van Winckel follows the festival schedule below.)

Each day’s class pinpoints and exercises different essential elements of writing. One class can be taken as a stand-alone class, or you can come for all three, as a three-day series. If you purchase a Jumpstart! ticket, you have admission to the lectures and panels for that day, as well. The Jumpstart! classes can be taken instead of a workshop, but not in addition to the workshop.

Festival attendees are coming from all across the country, but islanders can attend the festival without leaving home. Panels are open Friday morning and Sunday afternoon, lectures will be held for the public on Saturday afternoon, and the Saturday night faculty reading at the Madrona Room is open to the public, from 7 to 9 pm. Gene Nery will open the evening with music and readings from Sue Silverman, Nance Van Winckel, and David Jauss will follow.

For more information or to register visit orcasislandwritersfestival.com, or contact Festival Director Barbara Lewis at 360-317-4383.

2010 Festival Schedule

Friday, September 17, 2010

8:00 –  8:30	Check-in
8:30 – 9:45	Orientation (Barbara Lewis, Festival Director)
10:00 – 12:00	Faculty Panel: “Publishing and the Writing Life” (Faculty)
12:00 – 2:00	Lunch break
2:00 – 4:00	Jumpstart! class – Day 1, Prose Poems (Nance Van Winckel)
2:00 – 5:00	Fiction and Nonfiction Workshops (David Jauss, Sue Silverman)

Saturday, September 18, 2010

8:00 – 8:30	Check-in
9:00 – 12:00	Fiction and Nonfiction Workshops (David Jauss, Sue Silverman)
10:00 – 12:00	Jumpstart! class – Day 2, Flash Fiction (Nance Van Winckel)
12:00 – 2:00	Lunch break
2:00 – 3:30	Lecture: “Savory Metaphors” (Sue Silverman)
3:30 – 5:00	Lecture: “Go in Fear of Abstractions: Conveying Emotion in Writing” (David Jauss)
7:00 – 9:00	Faculty Evening Reading with opening music by Gene Nery

Sunday, September 19, 2010

9:00 – 12:00	Fiction and Nonfiction Workshops (David Jauss, Sue Silverman)
10:00 – 12:00	Jumpstart! class – Day 3, Writing Off the Page (Nance Van Winckel)
12:00 – 2:00	Lunch break
2:00 – 3:30	Lecture: “Poetry and Prose: Writing off the Page” (Nance Van Winckel)
3:30 – 5:00	Panel: The Road to Publication – Regional Authors Share Their Stories (Coordinated by Iris Graville, Lopez publisher)
5:00 – 7:00	Send-off Buffet

(Find the following interview at https://www.caffeinedestiny.com/poetry/nancebio.html)CAFFEINE DESTINY: Why do you write?
NANCE VAN WINCKEL: Partly because it seems like my job. It’s 7 a.m.: I’m supposed to be at my desk. Something feels amiss if I’m not. And partly because what is lifted out and drops down to the page surprises me. It has come from me, but then again, it hasn’t, not entirely. It’s come through me. I’m a conduit. I take that part of the job seriously. I try to keep in shape. Sitting there at my desk. Straightening the pens. Closing my eyes if I feel something begin to bubble up. What I didn’t know I knew. I think it’s important to find that out. And then to see– to think about it and think about it and discern if it might be important to anyone else. If so, perhaps after it’s properly arranged and ordered, after its music is tuned up and tuned in, it might be a poem.

CD: Does poetry have a purpose?

NANCE: A good poem, I think, serves as a bridge between one’s most private inner life and something outside oneself: another inner life, the natural world, the mysteries of society, culture, politics. The poem forges connections, allows what we don’t quite understand to somehow be more clearly realized, even if still not quite understood.

And . . . empathy. This is an important purpose for all the arts, I believe. Poetry, and fiction too, help us to enter, imaginatively, other lives– lives sometimes very different from our own. We stand inside another consciousness and feel our way around in another world. I think this helps us live our everyday lives, tuning in to the plight of others, broadening our awareness of differences and diversities.

CD: Who are some of your favorite writers?
NANCE: Oh, many, many. I go in bouts of an internse passion for this author, then someone another. Over the years some of those people have included: Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Tomas Transtromer, Rainer Rilke, Elizabeth Bishop. Lately I’ve been keen on poems by Yannis Ritsos, Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Li-Young Lee, Dorothy Barresi, Norman Dubie, Tess Gallagher, and Malena Morling.

CD: What do you like most about living in the Northwest?
NANCE: Buying superb salmon at $2.99 a lb. at the grocery. The smell of pine and cedar when I walk. The views of my mountains when I walk. All the drama of the seasons. Laid-back, kind people. (Maybe they’re everywhere, but they’re definitely here.) Hot springs and cold glacial lakes. Wildflowers. Hummingbird Hawk Moths. Marmots. The Spokane River in May. May.

Here’s Nance talking about how her art pieces connect to her writing. For more go to https://www.nancevanwinckel.com

“My visual art pieces, crafted digital photographs, draw from the traditions of urban landscape photography, collage, mural, and graffiti art. I call these works “pho-toems.” I begin with a digital photo I’ve taken. Then, via Photoshop, I add other images I have created, e.g., black & white images I’ve Xeroxed out of 1930’s sixth-grade textbooks, hand-colored, and scanned back in. Then, I add small bits of my own text— mini-poems, if you will.

“My intent is to have the word elements function first as visual components and secondarily as language. I also aim, overall, to create a synergy whereby the whole pho-toem may be greater than the sum of its parts. I try to make the fusion of elements invisible so that the pho-toem’s reality is its own credible edifice, inviting the viewer to enter, explore, and discover.

“Especially in the tradition of graffiti-artists, I am interested in the urban landscape as a kind of frontier and the graffer as pioneer. The graffer is staking claims to boarded-up buildings that others perceive as wasteland. This is a kind of reclaiming of unclaimed space.

“I’ve published five books of poetry and three collections of short stories. But the page is a by-invitation-only art. The wall is in your face. I’m fascinated by the many ways poetic language may intersect with graffiti. Both are messages, but there’s a primacy I appreciate about graffiti. Graffiti is a message that MUST be conveyed. It’s all about emotions and ideas that are uncontainable.

“Another thing that I’m attempting to “capture” in these pieces is a world that is quickly passing. Many of the buildings I’m photographing are from small towns in Eastern Washington. There’s still a feel of the old west about these buildings. Many were associated with the former financial “engine” of my region: silver mines and lumbering, industries whose demise is reflected in the now dilapidated state of these formerly lovely buildings.

“I’m interested too in how the abandoned building, no longer having a life of “use,” may now open itself to a new stature, albeit one that exists outside the confines of everyday life. Via these pieces, buildings are renewed, but, perhaps paradoxically, only in a dimension that stands at the extreme other end of their former early 20th Century grandeur; they live now just in a digital dimension. Still, released from the bonds of “use,” the buildings—with their new murals (made to look “old”) and their text— completely defy the world of commerce and use and have become, I hope, something entirely “else.”