by Xin Tian Koh

The seventeenth annual West Virginia Writers’ Workshop kicked off on the 18th of July, gathering notable authors Sandra Meek, Elizabeth Graver, Jim Harms, Mark Brazaitis, Jeff Monahan, Renée Nicholson and Natalie Sypolt on our downtown campus. New and experienced participants of all ages attended craft talks, readings, and workshops, and even had the chance to pitch their manuscripts to publishers from Page Spring Publishing in one-on-one sessions.

The first reading on Thursday night starred Mark Brazaitis with a few poems—a rare treat—and his story about a girl, a ferocious dog named Black Heart, and a song that must not end or risk fatal consequences. Sandra Meek, the Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College, followed with poems from her four books of poetry, the latest of which is Road Scatter. She gave a craft talk on Saturday on the elegy, telling us about the interconnected forces of praise and loss that inform poetry, and how an elegy can be about something you experience as loss, besides normally being about an experience that happened to you.

In his craft talk, “The Scene as a Unit of Composition”, Jim Harms reminded us that the scene is a shared element that poets, fiction writers, and memoirists (he recommends Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala) have to tackle, but us poets often waste the opportunity to learn from writers in those other forms and have our characters interact with their settings. Jim added, “Let the poem teach you what it needs…don’t set out to do justice to a feeling. If you’ve got it, it’s there.”

Behind the scenes, our department staff and our graduate students Dominique Bruno, Bonnie Thibodeau, and Mari Casey helped set things up and assisted our visiting authors. Learn more about the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop here, and join us in 2014—there’s plenty of food and room for you.