SPINDALE (March 13, 2008) - Some of the region’s top authors and poets will share techniques and tips on becoming a better writer this spring.

The 5th Annual Isothermal Writers’ Workshop is set for Saturday, April 5, from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Isothermal Community College.

This year’s event will feature Joseph Bathanti, Vicki Lane, Ashley Warlick and Cathy Smith Bowers, organizers said.

The registration fee of $20 includes coffee, breakfast pastries and lunch. Space is limited, so act quickly. Pre-registration is required.

Dr. Kathy Ackerman and Tom Tucker, Isothermal’s writers-in-residence, are coordinating the event, which is open to writers of all experience levels.

“We’ve invited some exceptional talents in a wide range of genres this year,” said Tucker. “We are excited by the prospect of our participants having the chance to learn from these writers in this series of fun, hands-on sessions.”

Tucker, an instructor at Isothermal, is the author of Bolt of Fate: Benjamin Franklin and His Fabulous Kite. He wrote Brainstorm!: The Stories of Twenty American Kid Inventors, which has remained in print constantly since 1995. He has also written several other invention histories, including two commissioned by NASA. He reviews books in the Charlotte Observer.

Ackerman, Isothermal’s dean of Arts and Sciences, is the author of The Heart of Revolution: The Life and Novels of Olive Dargan. She has also written three poetry chapbooks, Knock Wood, Crossbones and Princess Lace and The Time It Takes. Her poetry has also appeared in several literary journals.

An agenda, brochure and registration form are available online at http://www.isothermal.edu/2008wwflyer.pdf.

For more information, contact Ackerman at 828-286-3636, ext. 306, or Tucker at ext. 360.

This year’s presenters and their workshops include:

Joseph Bathanti

Joseph Bathanti was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Penn. He has BA & MA degrees in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. He is Professor of Creative Writing, and Co-Director of the Visiting Writers Series, at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Bathanti is the author of four books of poetry: Communion Partners; Anson County; The Feast of All Saints; and This Metal, which was nominated for The National Book Award, and won the 1997 Oscar Arnold Young Award from The North Carolina Poetry Council for best book of poems by a North Carolina writer. His first novel, East Liberty, winner of the Carolina Novel Award, was published in 2001 by Banks Channel Books in Wilmington, NC. His latest novel, Coventry, winner of the 2006 Novello Literary Award, was published by Novello Festival Press in Charlotte, NC. They Changed the State: The Legacy of North Carolina’s Visiting Artists, 1971-1995, his book of nonfiction, was published in early 2007. Most recently, his collection of short stories, The High Heart, winner of the 2007 Spokane Prize, was published by Eastern Washington University Press in Fall 2007.

Bathanti’s workshop is called “Reimagining the Real: What Really Happened.” Geared for fiction writers and creative nonfiction writers as well (and certainly germane to poets also), this session will discuss strategies of uncovering and discovering the elusive ephemeral abstract known as truth. We’ll attempt to explore honestly the way we see things outside ourselves in relationship to ourselves and our writing. Even as writers acknowledge within their work the sources of its occasion, the work itself is being transformed through imagination and becomes frequently something outside the experience - more importantly termed, in this context, the memory - that prompted it. This session will examine problems (call them questions, variables, aspects, etc.) of writing autobiographically and how to walk the tightrope between what is real to the writing (the organism it becomes upon completion) and that which is real to the occasion (and/or memory) that spawned it.

Vicki Lane

Vicki Lane is the author of the Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries from Bantam Dell - Signs in the Blood (2005), Art’s Blood (2006), Old Wounds (2007), and In a Dark Season (coming May 20).

Lane moved with her family to their mountain farm in 1975 and thirty-odd years of hearing the stories and learning the ways of her adopted county have provided a wealth of fascinating material to explore.

Publishers Weekly wrote of her work: “The dialogue sparkles with authenticity, and Lane generates suspense without sacrificing the charm and mystique of her mountain community.”

She is at work on a standalone, The Day of Small Things, to be published in 2009.

Lane will discuss “Building Blocks of Fiction.” You may have a great idea for a story but unless you can bring it to life with believable people acting in, not against, a distinctive setting, it’s hard to engage the reader. Vicki will share strategies for making your characters and settings real and compelling. Then, in this incredibly ambitious and fast-moving workshop, you’ll be guided in creating your own realistic setting and three-dimensional characters. The next step will be writing a brief scene - putting your characters into your setting, to influence and be influenced by it. Finally, we’ll hear some of the scenes read aloud. This is a great way to get the creative juices flowing!

Ashley Warlick

Ashley Warlick is the author of three novels, The Distance From The Heart of Things (1996), The Summer After June (2000), and most recently Seek the Living (2005), which according to reviewer Pat Conroy “puts her in the front rank of American novelists.” She is the youngest winner of the distinguished Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Warlick is also a founding member of the advisory board for the Novello Festival Press and book columnist for several newspapers. In 2006, she received a fellowship in literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

Warlick’s session will focus on “Fiction from Fact, Black and White.” There’s a wonderful lie about (and sometimes perpetrated by) writers, that they must live dangerously in order to write about danger; that all good writing comes from experience. In fact, good writing comes from the ability to recognize experience when you see it, and the confidence to apply your imagination to what you find. In this workshop, we will examine the fictional promise of found stories, public artifacts, and other slivers of the everyday, and develop daily strategies for seeing real life through the lens of craft. Bring an interesting article from your local newspaper, paper and pen.

Cathy Smith Bowers

Cathy Smith Bowers teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte. She also does private consultation and teaches at writers’ conferences throughout the United States and in Canada. Her collections include The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, Texas Tech University Press, 1992; Traveling in Time of Danger, Iris Press, 1997; and A Book of Minutes, Iris Press, 2004. Her fourth collection of poems, The Candle I Hold Up to See You, is forthcoming in Spring 2008, also from Iris Press. Cathy hides out in the Appalachian foothill town of Tryon, NC, with her gifted and talented Border Collie, Manna.

“The Physiology of Sound” is the topic of Smith Bowers’ workshop. It is not news that the sounds of words - vowels, consonants, stresses, etc. - have an emotional effect on speaker and listener alike. But people are often surprised to learn that the sounds of words can also have a physical effect on the body. In this seminar we will take a writerly look at the physiology of sound so that we might begin to make more rational decisions in the diction and syntax of our own poems and prose.

Directions to campus are available at:
http://www.isothermal.edu/2008wwdirectionsSPINDALE.htm.