Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Breakout Seminars A – 11:00 AM
- Sarah Arthur
- “Getting it Done: 10 Tips for Finishing What You Started”
- While many of us would like to wait for inspiration to hit, the truth is that writing is work. And we need to honor the process by bringing to it all our skills. Whether it’s organizing materials, narrowing your focus, setting goals and deadlines, pacing the process, or simply getting the words out, veteran writer Sarah Arthur will help you identify what’s keeping you from moving forward as well as some practical tools for pushing through.
- “Getting it Done: 10 Tips for Finishing What You Started”
- Dwight Baker
- “God, Books, and Business”
- Christian writers and their readers will connect with each other – with or without the assistance of traditional publishers. We will discuss what emerging writers should demand of their publishers, as the business landscape shifts around us all.
- “God, Books, and Business”
- Rachelle Gardner
- “Getting and Working with an Agent”
- Do all writers need agents? This workshop begins by discussing who needs an agent and why. You’ll learn how to decide whether you need an agent, how to research literary agents, and how to determine the right agent for you. We’ll discuss what to expect from an agent and what not to expect. Finally, we’ll talk about how to do your part in building and maintaining a successful long-term relationship with an agent. This workshop will dispel the mystique surrounding agents (no – we are not all sharks!) and help you make the best decision for your writing career.
- “Getting and Working with an Agent”
- Stephanie Smith
- “Telling It Slant: How to Craft an Angle that Will Catch an Editor’s Eye”
- In our content-saturated culture, how do you make your writing stand out? Stephanie Smith has had thousands of pitches cross her desk as acquisitions editor at Zondervan and former magazine editor at RELEVANT. And she has found the secret to standing out is this: if content is king, the angle is queen. The angle is the signature of great writing, providing a fresh frame for timeless truth beyond overdone, underdeveloped, dime-a-dozen concepts. Moving beyond the mechanics of creating a book proposal, this workshop will focus on the heart of the proposal itself. Learn how to discover and craft your angle, how to structure your content around this unique slant, and practical tips for pitching to agents and editors.
- “Telling It Slant: How to Craft an Angle that Will Catch an Editor’s Eye”
Breakout Seminars B – 1:30 PM
- Ami McConnell
- Loving Your Reader
- Good spiritual writing can take many forms—fiction or nonfiction, memoir or prescriptive, and anything in between. What distinguishes such writing is not form, but rather the author’s motivation.Good spiritual writing is motivated by love.If you’re a writer of faith, let this session encourage and inspire you to love readers in real and tangible ways. This focus will animate every aspect of your writing, from composition to publication.
- Loving Your Reader
- Elizabeth Palmer
- “Writing as an Act of Faith”
- The way we interpret texts matters for faith. It shapes the faith of the writer and, perhaps more importantly, the faith of the readers. Nobody demonstrates this phenomenon more clearly than Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard in their fascinating, troubling readings of Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac. The two thinkers, while producing vastly different readings of the Biblical text, share several strategies for interpretation. In this session, we will look at how two of those strategies—the collapse of time and creative embellishment of narrative—have the potential to express and transform faith. We will think together about how our own spiritual nonfiction writing might effectively utilize these strategies, as well as when it would be better to avoid them.
- “Writing as an Act of Faith”
- Patricia Raybon
- “Race, Grace & Forgiveness: Writing Our Way to Racial Healing”
- A candid exploration on how writers of every background can help heal racial wounds by writing truthfully about our personal racial journeys. But what’s required? How does one start? What narrative and spiritual elements make a “racial” story work for both writer and reader? Raybon, whose award-winning writing includes her memoir “My First White Friend”–a winner of a Christopher Award and a Books for a Better Life Award–shares personal and practical wisdom for courageous, reflective writers willing to take on the urgent conundrum of race.
- “Race, Grace & Forgiveness: Writing Our Way to Racial Healing”
- Jana Riess
- “Crafting Your Spiritual Memoir: Why and How to Tell Your Story”
- Many of us yearn to write a memoir—to record the most significant events and relationships that shaped us. And while the best memoirs make it seem easy, memoir is actually one of the most challenging genres to master because a writer is required to understand some elements of fiction (plot structure, character development, and dialogue) while also attending to inconvenient truths. In this session, we’ll explore the skills needed to write a memoir, whether it’s intended for publication or just for your family and friends, including how to identify your central conflict, address the most challenging events of your past, and cultivate a voice that readers will enjoy.
- “Crafting Your Spiritual Memoir: Why and How to Tell Your Story”
Breakout Seminars C – 3:30 PM
- Isaac Anderson
- “Writing as Pilgrimage”
- A pilgrimage, wrote the critic Paul Elie, is a journey undertaken in light of a story. This session will consider spiritual writing as an act of expression, cognition, and discovery—a process by which our stories can awaken and unsettle us as we seek to give them form.
- “Writing as Pilgrimage”
- Sarah Arthur
- “Getting it Done: 10 Tips for Finishing What You Started”
- While many of us would like to wait for inspiration to hit, the truth is that writing is work. And we need to honor the process by bringing to it all our skills. Whether it’s organizing materials, narrowing your focus, setting goals and deadlines, pacing the process, or simply getting the words out, veteran writer Sarah Arthur will help you identify what’s keeping you from moving forward as well as some practical tools for pushing through.
- “Getting it Done: 10 Tips for Finishing What You Started”
- Stephanie Smith
- “Telling It Slant: How to Craft an Angle that Will Catch an Editor’s Eye”
- In our content-saturated culture, how do you make your writing stand out? Stephanie Smith has had thousands of pitches cross her desk as acquisitions editor at Zondervan and former magazine editor at RELEVANT. And she has found the secret to standing out is this: if content is king, the angle is queen. The angle is the signature of great writing, providing a fresh frame for timeless truth beyond overdone, underdeveloped, dime-a-dozen concepts. Moving beyond the mechanics of creating a book proposal, this workshop will focus on the heart of the proposal itself. Learn how to discover and craft your angle, how to structure your content around this unique slant, and practical tips for pitching to agents and editors.
- “Telling It Slant: How to Craft an Angle that Will Catch an Editor’s Eye”
- Brian Keepers and Marijke Strong
- “Do Not Go Gentle: Reading and Writing for Spiritual Formation, Prophetic Imagination, and Cultural Change”
- Franz Kafka is famous for saying that we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. “If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? …A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” If this is true, it behooves us as Christian leaders and writers to read books and poetry that wake us up and shake us up, beautifully and dangerously. Brian Keepers and Marijke Strong discuss the kind of reading that disrupts and reconstructs our spiritual selves, our writing/preaching life and our congregation’s social consciousness.
- “Do Not Go Gentle: Reading and Writing for Spiritual Formation, Prophetic Imagination, and Cultural Change”
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Breakout Seminars D – 11:00 AM
- Isaac Anderson
- “Writing as Pilgrimage”
- A pilgrimage, wrote the critic Paul Elie, is a journey undertaken in light of a story. This session will consider spiritual writing as an act of expression, cognition, and discovery—a process by which our stories can awaken and unsettle us as we seek to give them form.
- “Writing as Pilgrimage”
- Rachelle Gardner
- “Getting and Working with an Agent”
- Do all writers need agents? This workshop begins by discussing who needs an agent and why. You’ll learn how to decide whether you need an agent, how to research literary agents, and how to determine the right agent for you. We’ll discuss what to expect from an agent and what not to expect. Finally, we’ll talk about how to do your part in building and maintaining a successful long-term relationship with an agent. This workshop will dispel the mystique surrounding agents (no – we are not all sharks!) and help you make the best decision for your writing career.
- “Getting and Working with an Agent”
- Elizabeth Palmer
- “Writing as an Act of Faith”
- The way we interpret texts matters for faith. It shapes the faith of the writer and, perhaps more importantly, the faith of the readers. Nobody demonstrates this phenomenon more clearly than Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard in their fascinating, troubling readings of Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac. The two thinkers, while producing vastly different readings of the Biblical text, share several strategies for interpretation. In this session, we will look at how two of those strategies—the collapse of time and creative embellishment of narrative—have the potential to express and transform faith. We will think together about how our own spiritual nonfiction writing might effectively utilize these strategies, as well as when it would be better to avoid them.
- “Writing as an Act of Faith”
- Patricia Raybon
- “Race, Grace & Forgiveness: Writing Our Way to Racial Healing”
- A candid exploration on how writers of every background can help heal racial wounds by writing truthfully about our personal racial journeys. But what’s required? How does one start? What narrative and spiritual elements make a “racial” story work for both writer and reader? Raybon, whose award-winning writing includes her memoir “My First White Friend”–a winner of a Christopher Award and a Books for a Better Life Award–shares personal and practical wisdom for courageous, reflective writers willing to take on the urgent conundrum of race.
- “Race, Grace & Forgiveness: Writing Our Way to Racial Healing”
Breakout Seminars E – 3 PM
- Dwight Baker
- “God, Books, and Business”
- Christian writers and their readers will connect with each other – with or without the assistance of traditional publishers. We will discuss what emerging writers should demand of their publishers, as the business landscape shifts around us all.
- “God, Books, and Business”
- Ami McConnell
- Loving Your Reader
- Good spiritual writing can take many forms—fiction or nonfiction, memoir or prescriptive, and anything in between. What distinguishes such writing is not form, but rather the author’s motivation.Good spiritual writing is motivated by love.If you’re a writer of faith, let this session encourage and inspire you to love readers in real and tangible ways. This focus will animate every aspect of your writing, from composition to publication.
- Loving Your Reader
- Jana Riess
- “Crafting Your Spiritual Memoir: Why and How to Tell Your Story”
- Many of us yearn to write a memoir—to record the most significant events and relationships that shaped us. And while the best memoirs make it seem easy, memoir is actually one of the most challenging genres to master because a writer is required to understand some elements of fiction (plot structure, character development, and dialogue) while also attending to inconvenient truths. In this session, we’ll explore the skills needed to write a memoir, whether it’s intended for publication or just for your family and friends, including how to identify your central conflict, address the most challenging events of your past, and cultivate a voice that readers will enjoy.
- “Crafting Your Spiritual Memoir: Why and How to Tell Your Story”
- Brian Keepers and Marijke Strong
- “Do Not Go Gentle: Reading and Writing for Spiritual Formation, Prophetic Imagination, and Cultural Change”
- Franz Kafka is famous for saying that we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. “If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? …A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” If this is true, it behooves us as Christian leaders and writers to read books and poetry that wake us up and shake us up, beautifully and dangerously. Brian Keepers and Marijke Strong discuss the kind of reading that disrupts and reconstructs our spiritual selves, our writing/preaching life and our congregation’s social consciousness.
- “Do Not Go Gentle: Reading and Writing for Spiritual Formation, Prophetic Imagination, and Cultural Change”