AN ANNUAL COLLOQUIUM

October 22-23, 2004

For Li-Young Lee, this year’s keynote speaker, much of a writer’s work involves listening, opening, and receiving. Poetry, he says,  “is the locally inflected voice of the All.”  Part of the writer’s job, as he understands it, is to attend to those memories, moments, and explorations in which a wider word may reveal itself. Li-Young’s poetry and prose does that in a way that is at once humble, reverent, and playful.

Li-Young Lee grew up in a household steeped in poetry. In a memoir called The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, he recalls his youth and his family history. In the 1950s, his mother, daughter of Chinese royalty, and his father, who had been Mao-Tse Tung’s physician, fled the political turmoil in China. The Lee family found only temporary refuge in Indonesia, where Li-Young was born in 1957. Persecuted for their Christian beliefs, they were subsequently forced to leave Indonesia. Between 1959 and 1964, they lived in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, before arriving in the United States, where Li-Young’s father became pastor at a Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania.

Li-Young currently lives in Chicago with his wife Donna and their two children. His books of poetry include Book of My Nights, Rose (winner of the Delmore Shwarz Memorial Award from New York University), and The City in Which I Love You (the 1990 Lamont Poetry selection from the Academy of American Poets). His many awards and honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Poem as Paradigm for the Experience of God (afternoon only)
Led by Li-Young Lee

Conversation and Q&A on poetry and spirituality.

Li-Young Lee has published three books of poetry—Book of My Nights, Rose, and The City In Which I Love You—and a memoir called The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. He lives in Chicago with his wife Donna and their two children.

Religion in Publishing
Led by Phyllis Tickle

This workshop will emphasize the nuts and bolts of religion publishing, including: an overview of the religion book industry itself; specifics about electronic vs. print periodical markets; methods of finding and approaching agents and/or publishers; a suggested bibliography of useful lists and tools, etc.  There will be an ample Q & A period for dealing with participants' particular concerns.

Phyllis Tickle is a contributing editor in religion for Publisher’s Weekly.  An authority on religion in America, Phyllis is frequently quoted in publications like Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times. She is also the author of a dozen books, most of them on religion and spirituality.

Writing Wild: Inspiration and Renewal in Everyday Landscapes
Led by Susan Tweit

Seekers of all sorts have traditionally retreated to the wilderness to nurture their spiritual lives. We don’t have to go that far, however, to find a source of solace: it is all around us in nature wherever we are. In this workshop, we’ll explore the nature and spirit of everyday landscapes; we’ll learn simple tools to reconnect to the wild - both without and within - as a source of creativity and inspiration.

Susan J. Tweit began her career as a field biologist studying grizzly bear habitat, sagebrush ecology, and wildfires. Her eight books for kids and adults include Barren, Wild, and Worthless: Living in the Chihuahuan Desert and City Foxes.  Her commentaries are carried by Writers on the Range, an op-ed syndicate, and heard on community radio. 

The Soul Tells a Story
Led by Vinita Hampton Wright

This workshop will explore creativity as a spiritual process. Through writing exercises and discussion, participants will be invited to better understand the process and participate with it more thoughtfully, freely, and intentionally.

Vinita Hampton Wright is acquisitions editor with Loyal Press of Chicago. Vinita’s own novels--Grace at Bender Springs and Velma Still Cooks in Leeway—both received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly.

The Big 10.
Led by Lil Copan

Many first-time writers make the same mistakes (I call them the Big 10) in writing. This workshop offers tips for editing & revising your nonfiction work so that you have a stronger presentation of a manuscript for a publishing house or magazine.  No revision comes without sweat and tears, but knowing the Big 10 helps you attend to the biggest of the writerly boo-boos.  Materials:  Bring a red pen.

Lil Copan is acquisitions editor with Paraclete Press. Previously she worked as literary series editor with Shaw Publishers, followed by a short time with the small literary/arts Press David R. Godine.

Putting History and Mystery Together
Led by Doug Gwyn

This is an opportunity to explore the issues that arise when we write on historical subjects out of a sense of spiritual affinity or concern. How do we enter into a deeper dialogue with historical texts? How do we balance a spiritual reading of texts with the demand for responsible, “objective” scholarship.

Doug Gwyn serves as pastor at First Friends Meeting in Richmond. He has researched and written on early Friends for more than 25 years. His books on early Quakerism include: Apocalypse of the Word, The Covenant Crucified, and Seekers Found. 

Daily Bread: Writing In and About Everyday Life, led by Mary Lacey

All the best books and teachers say, "Write what you know," and this is good advice, meant to free us to acknowledge our own expertise in theme, style, and voice. But writing what we know-the material of daily lived experience, memory, and the stories we have inherited-is also a way to discover what we don't yet know. This workshop will invite you to write what you know, in search of openings into other, deeper experience of knowledge.

Mary Lacey is associate professor of English at Earlham College, where she teaches modern literature, poetry, and creative writing. She received her BA from Earlham and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Story as a Means of Grace
Led by Brent Bill

Do you wish to write in a way that touches readers—and yourself?  Then you will want to tell stories, whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction.  This workshop will look at the power and uses of story in spiritual writing.  Participants are asked to bring their own examples of effective short spiritual stories (non-fiction and fiction) to share in the workshop. 

Brent Bill is the author of fifteen books, including 40 Days and 40 Bytes: Computers and Your Congregation, Imagination and Spirit: A Contemporary Quaker Reader, and the forthcoming Holy Silence: The Quaker Gift of Spirituality.  He has written more than 100 fiction and non-fiction pieces and is a writing instructor and coach.

The Ministry of Writing Colloquium

Previous keynote speakers for the Colloquium have been: