This weekend, I’m attended the Steel Pen Conference in Indiana. I’m really excited about speaking in the panel “Historical (Re)tell: The Writing and Craft of Telling Retellings of the Historic” with Cat Dixon, Britny Cordera Doane, Lindsay Lusby, and P. Ivan Young. Here’s the details for the event, the proposal, presenters bios, and descriptions of their anticpated readings and talks. I hope you’ll consider attending. It should be great fun.
Historical (Re)tell: The Writing and Craft of Telling Retellings of the Historical
with Cat Dixon, Britny Cordera Doane, Lindsay Lusby, Laura Madeline Wiseman, and P. Ivan Young
Indiana Writers’ Consortium’s 2015 Steel Pen Creative Writers’ Conference
9-10 am, Saturday, October 10, 2015
Radisson at Star Plaza, 800 East 81st Avenue
Merrillville, Indiana
Historical (Re)tell: The Writing and Craft of Telling Retellings of the Historic
“Tell the truth but tell it slant,” writes Emily Dickinson. This panel of poets and writers presents work that engages with the historical past by telling retelling of the historic, tales that offer what wasn’t said but should’ve been, what wasn’t written down but likely happened, whose voices speak that didn’t speak because at the time there wasn’t a platform on which for them to stand. Panelists explore the craft aspect of myths and legends retold from other voices, new perspectives, and counterintuitive stances. Accurate, inaccurate, or close, this panel of authors will explore how facts become transformed into the tales, histories, and family stories that inform how we tell our worlds. Panelists will discuss the craft of such writings and read from their work as they engage with the questions: What is the process for writing poems based on research and pre-existing texts? What kind of research is required to (re)tell a historical kinship between historical luminaries? How does a poet navigate fact and (in)accuracy when writing about the past? How does the influence of the world outside the poet hinder or enrich the truth as it is conveyed in poetry of (re)telling? What are the strategies of other contemporary writers who do similar work on the historical record? At what points can a writer depart from fact in the service of the story that wants to be (re)told?
Cat Dixon
Cat Dixon is the author of Too Heavy to Carry (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014) and Our End Has Brought the Spring (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Her poetry and reviews have been published in Mid-American Review, Midwest Quarterly, and Sugar House Review. She volunteers with The Backwaters Press. www.catdix.com.
Cat Dixon will be speaking about her work with Eva Braun collected in her new chapbook Our End Has Brought the Spring (Finishing Line Press, 2015). She will address researching her subject, the time period, and Hitler’s reign as well as the few sources devoted to Braun’s life. She will address the question: Does the poet have the right to humanize what public opinion perceives as a monster? Dixon will also discuss her manuscript of work on Bob Levinson and her process that includes family interviews and research on hostage survival, hostages that have been released, and on her subject. Her talk will address the questions: Does the poet have the right to give voice to a man held in captivity? Should the poet contact the family of the person? Her presentation will address authors that have done similar retell work such as Alvin Greenberg, Angela Lambert, Zeina Hashem Beck, W.D. Snodgrass, and Frank Walker.
Britny Doane
Britny Cordera Doane is the youngest author to have a book published in the history of the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her poetry has been featured in UNO’s 13th Floor literary magazine, the Mythic Poetry Series by Silver Birch Press, the Women for Women international publication: Forget Me Not, and most recently in both the Fall 2014 and May 2015 Pinyon Reviews. Her maiden voyage, Wingmakers, was published by Pinyon Publishing in February 2015. Known locally as the Old Market Poet, she is often set up with her typewriter, in Omaha’s Old Market district, sharing her work with others.
Drawing from the work of Mircea Eliade, Technicians of the Sacred Edited by Jerome Rothenberg, and Joseph Brodsky, Britny Cordera Doane will discuss how mythology was used to give meaning to things that were at one time unexplainable and how writers use mythology to not only preserve the past, but also to explain the unexplainable within their own lives. Doane presentation will explore the importance of origin stories, and how every culture has a unique origin story for their myths, the connections and patterns found within mythology, cross-culturally, and intertextually, and the language of the sacred found in symbols, mythology, and poetry, to convey our everyday experiences and to connect with the mysteries of the universe. Her talk will also explore the phenomena of axis mundi within mythology and sacred traditions.
Lindsay Lusby
Lindsay Lusby is the author of Imago (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in Sugar House Review, The Lumberyard, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, serving as assistant editor for Literary House Press & managing editor for Cherry Tree.
Referencing the work of contemporary (re)tell writers such as Kate Bernheimer, A.S. Byatt, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman, and Jeanette Winterson and drawing upon her reading of the scholarly text Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale, by Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Lindsay Lusby’s talk will touch on the long tradition of (re)telling in the folk and fairy tale genre, how different versions play off one another to create new meaning through historical contrast, and how the (re)telling of fairy tales has traditionally leaned toward reframing the stories in a way that highlights the need for current social change.
Laura Madeline Wiseman
Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author over twenty books and chapbooks and the editor of Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). Her most recent book is Drink (BlazeVOX Books, 2015). She teaches creative writing, English, and women’s and gender studies in Nebraska. www.lauramadelinewiseman.com
Drawing from the work of contemporary (re)tell work such as that done by Carole Simmons Olds, Natasha Trethewey, and Margaret Atwood and the work of feminist scholars such as Elaine Scarry, Laura Madeline Wiseman will explore scholarly framework when approaching writing about family violence, the body, and girlhood as those stories challenge depictions of gendered expectations in fairy tales and myths such as those of mermaids, the wives of bluebeard, and the lady of death. Specifically, her work is interested in exploring the narrative quality of myths and troubling the plots such tales offer. Her presentation will also address researching a family ancestor and the craft of writing poems that seek to preserve a voice that might otherwise be lost from the historic record, as such work invokes the political, educational, and reformist landscape of the nineteenth century.
P. Ivan Young
Ivan Young is the author of Smell of Salt, Ghost of Rain (Brick House Books, 2015) and the chapbook A Shape in the Waves (Stepping Stones Press, 2009). He teaches Creative Writing at University of Nebraska Omaha and is Coordinator of The Center for Faculty Excellence.
Ivan Young presentation will explore classical mythology, biblical myth, and fairy tale as one method for retelling of self. His talk will build from Sir Philip Sidney’s notion of the poet as a combination of the philosopher and the historian (in the older context) and will transition into Mark Doty’s piece on the perspective box. His seeks to address the question: What are we accomplishing in retelling the past? Sidney suggests that the poet finds a greater truth in retelling, but Doty explores the possibility that we may be distorting the past. Young seeks to explore the space in between such positions, how both clarity and distortion are a way of shaping the self within the contexts of our own experience, education, and political foresight, and the ways retelling not only shapes current experience but also how it reshapes our perceptions of the past.