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Roger Rosenblatt will return to the Southampton Writers Conference in its 41st year to teach the Master Class, which provides attendees with an opportunity to learn about all styles and genres of writing from multiple perspectives—with no requirement that they enroll in the entire 12-day conference or earn graduate credits.
The Master Class, “Imagine What You Know: Five Ways of Looking at Writing,” will be held for five sessions and be led by the New York Times best-selling author and Quogue resident. Each session will focus on a different topic and welcome a different special guest.
The two-hour-45-minute class is divided into three sections: a lecture from Mr. Rosenblatt in which he will further the understanding of the topic by connecting multimedia elements such as recordings and clips to the discussion; the second part will feature a discussion with the day’s special guest; and in the last section attendees will practice their writing using a given prompt, which will then be analyzed by Mr. Rosenblatt and the class to find the most useful part of what each student writes.
The first class will be held on Thursday, July 13, with “You and the Night and the Music: On Cadence and Language,” featuring Sharon Olds, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, poet and professor for New York University’s graduate creative writing program, as the special guest. Ms. Olds will also be teaching poetry at the conference.
“Seeing the World as a Do-Over: On Matters of Consequence” will be held on Saturday, July 15, with writer Brit Bennett. The third session, “The Short Story in the Long Run: On the Core Moment,” will welcome novelist Frederic Tuten on Monday, July 17. On Wednesday, July 19, the session’s topic is “Now You See Me, Now You Don't: On Self-Recognition” with poet and language activist Natalie Diaz. Finally, “In My End Is My Beginning: On Structure and Timing,” will welcome writer Patricia Marx on Friday, July 21.
The fee to attend the Master Class is $650, but attendees will also be able to participate in almost all of the conference events—with the exception of graduate credit-bearing workshops.
All of Mr. Rosenblatt’s special guests will host an independent workshop of their own, which will meet four to five times throughout the conference. Graduate students will have the opportunity to take workshops for credit for an additional fee.
Other opportunities at the conference will include the chance to watch bestselling author Dani Shapiro and her agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh be interviewed about the agent-writer relationship by novelist and lifestyle author, Jessica Soffer. There will also be salons with readings by Rebecca Schiff, the author of “The Bed Moved: Short Stories.”
A celebration of literary journal “TSR: The Southampton Review” is scheduled Friday, July 14, at 7:30 p.m. at the Avram Theater on the campus hosted by “Selected Shorts,” a public radio show, and will feature stories, music and art with readings by Blythe Danner, Maulik Pancholy, Richard Kind and Betty Buckley.
Several mini-workshops will also be available, including one led by science writer Richard Panek, who has written for The New York Times and Smithsonian magazine.
The conference will begin Wednesday, July 12, and run through Sunday, July 23. The deadline for applying to the Master Class is Saturday, July 1. For more information, or to apply, visit stonybrook.edu/writers or email christian.mclean@stonybrook.edu.
on Jun 20, 2017