Poetry — Tuesdays, 12:15 p.m.
Prose — Fridays, 12:15 p.m.
Literary Arts Center porch (Ballroom in inclement weather)

Week One

Joan Murray – Tuesday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Disaster Relief: Why Poets Respond to Tragedies

Poets have always been moved to write about disasters. The Great Lisbon Earthquake inspired Voltaire to pen an angry poem in response. A disaster at sea inspired Felicia Dorothea Hemans’ “Casabianca,” better known to generations of schoolchildren as “The boy stood on the burning deck.” More recently, British Laureate, Andrew Motion memorialized a train wreck. This talk will explore disaster poems that arise in grief, injustice, or self-interest – plus a few that are disasters themselves!

David Lazar – Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
The Essay as Queer Genre

The essay is a form that resists categorization. It transgresses genre, just as queer theory identifies queerness as a transgression of the traditional binary of gender. The etymological roots of genre and gender provide an interesting lens through which to view the defiant nature of the essay. Work from Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, and James Baldwin will be considered.

Week Two

James Armstrong – Tuesday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Informed Voters Need to Know – About Poetry

Is poetry sometimes a better political guide than the news? How can poetry help us to be informed in a world awash with “information”?  What can poetry teach us about being a citizen?   Poet James Armstrong looks at how poets report the news and how poetry can help us get beyond the political gridlock and information overload of our time.   

Ann Hood – Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Once Upon A Time

The first lines of a story or novel are arguably the most important. What techniques do writers turn to when they consider how to begin? Through examples from literature and the author’s own mis-steps and successes, this talk considers the many ways in which a story takes flight.

Week Three

Marjorie Maddox - Tuesday 12:15 p.m., LAC
The Power to Inspire: Bringing Poetry to the People

In these times when some label creativity “impractical,” how can we inspire children, adults, and entire communities through the power of the written word? Author and editor Marjorie Maddox discusses motivating children through school author visits, uniting audiences with place-themed anthologies, and bringing members of a community – young and old, from secondary schools, the university, and the community at large – together in conversations with contemporary authors.

Josh Rolnick - Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
The Tug of Stories

Did you ever read a line of a story and think: “Yes!” Have you put down a book and felt a powerful sense of connection to something bigger? Richard Ford says writers write to “commit an effect” on people – to “reach them.” What happens to us when a book breaks through? How do writers achieve this effect? Can books spur us to act? This talk examines the tug of stories, their warp and woof, and asks: can reading make us braver?

Week Four

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley - Tuesday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Writing as a Tool in Healing: A Living Experience

The 20th Century American Confessional poets were the first to explore their personal, traumatic feelings through poetry, thus influencing generations of poets. Despite its troubled roots, writing pain empowers us to set our flawed, traumatic, real worlds against the imagined and the unreal. This empowerment heals and restores. This talk explores snapshots of the author’s life as a poet and war survivor who uses writing as a tool in healing.

Joe Kita - Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Have a Regret-Free Life

Crossroads. Every life has them, and everyone wonders what waits in the other direction. Whether it’s decisions of love, family, education, career, relocation or something else altogether, the second thoughts and regrets we carry often prevent us from living fully. When Joe Kita turned 40 he decided to revisit the biggest regrets in his life to see how things might have played out differently. His journey became the basis for the memoir, Another Shot, which was featured on Oprah. In this talk, Joe shares his adventures, his lessons and, most important, the answer to that age-old question: is a regret-free life really possible?

Week Five

Kashmira Sheth - Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Cultural Writing

There exist many challenges in melding multiple cultural, linguistic, and historical backgrounds into one cohesive work. The author, a native of India, uses writings of other authors as well as her own stories to explore writing from multiple cultures. She also discusses her own process and solutions she employs to meet these challenges and create a story that resonates with readers.

Week Six

Gregory Donovan – Tuesday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Quantum Leaps: The Growth of Blackbird and Other Online Journals

Gregory Donovan, Senior Editor of one of America’s premier online journals of literature and the arts, Blackbird, will discuss ongoing developments in the world of online literary publications. What do they offer readers and writers? What changes are being brought about by digital journals? Will the flash of the electronic page be a way of preserving the lasting luxury of the printed word?

Jonathan Eig - Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Googling Your Way to Good Writing

The internet can be a great time-suck, distracting you from real work, or it can be a powerful tool, adding depth, passion, and color to your writing. Whether you're researching a biography set 100 years ago or inventing a modern love story, here are some tips for using the internet to spark creativity.

Week Seven

Julia Kasdorf - Tuesday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Metaphor, the Artful Lie

Can something be both false and profoundly true at the same time?  In a week when Chautauqua considers the ethics of cheating, we explore metaphor, the most fundamental of all poetic techniques. Drawing on ideas as old as Aristotle, observations of human language acquisition, and readings from contemporary poetry, this talk demonstrates ways that metaphoric thinking structures thought and animates poetic imagination.

Matthew Goodman - Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
From Plate to Page: Food as History, Food as Literature

You may not be able to read the future in tea leaves or coffee grounds, but you can certainly read the past in food. Just as a culture's history can be seen in the dishes passed down from generation to generation, so too an individual's past is always wrapped up in memories of food, in family meals and dishes loved (or hated!). How has food helped writers to understand their lives? We'll take at how Ruth Reichl, M.F.K. Fisher, Charles Simic, and other writers have used food to explore love, family, happiness, and hunger.

Week Eight

Gabriel Welsch - Tuesday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Finding the Net: The Urge for Order in Contemporary Poetry  

In the post-postmodern era, poets agree on the line as the distinguishing feature of poetry, and little else. The title of this talk plays with two aphorisms from major Modernist poets (Robert Frost's admonition that free verse is like "tennis without a net," and Wallace Stevens' Key West-inspired "rage for order"), each on the compulsion of writers to find a scaffold for ideas. Exploring the contemporary borders used by those who write what Tony Hoagland calls, “the skittery poem of our moment,” the speaker describes the contemporary landscape and recommends reading, randomly gives away tiny notebooks, and makes at least one terrible joke.

J. David Stevens – Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Literary Radicalism: How Far Have We Really Come in 200 Years?

There can be no doubt that America has made historical progress capitalizing on the promises of freedom and equality enshrined in its founding.  But how radically have we reinvented ourselves in the last 200-plus years?  This lecture will address how cultural conversations in 2012 both differ from and parallel those occurring in American fiction in the 1800s.  And it will consider what lessons contemporary writers might draw from literary history as they produce art that – implicitly or explicitly – advocates for change.

Week Nine

Rick Hilles
On Poetry and Sustainability

Ezra Pound once defined poetry as "news that stays news." But, as his college and lifelong friend, poet William Carlos Williams, reminds us (in a poem): "...It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there." This talk articulates and makes more readily available what might sustain us in our most enduring poems across the ages – the essential nutrient for the human experience found only in poems.

Susan Choi – Friday 12:15 p.m., LAC
Raising Independent-Minded, Passionate Readers in the Digital Age

Few ideas are less controversial than the one which holds reading to be crucial to the development of children. Yet few activities are harder for parents to inculcate in this digital age. Books are even increasingly overshadowed by book-like products – printed commercial tie-ins featuring characters from the movies or the toy store, marketed aggressively to children. Why does such a disjunction exist between our stated values and the reality our children face every day, in which books are marginal?  Is there a regulatory role for government, or would such an idea impinge on free speech?  In the past, first lady Laura Bush made reading one of her particular concerns – did her efforts have positive impact?  If so how can we learn from them, and what more can we do?