Cli-fi novelists of the world, weeklong writers' workshops June 10-16 next summer 2020, JUne 10-16, with stellar staff of writers and literary agents and literary critics OPEN FOR APPLICATIONS NOW! Don't miss this opportunity of a lifetime!
In rural, bucolic, quiet, Vermont / #clifi #BWC2020
http://www.middlebury.edu/bread-loaf-conferences/BLE
Applications to the conference will be accepted between November 1, 2019 and February 15, 2019 or until the spaces are filled. Acceptance is based on the strength and promise of the writing sample and on the Admissions Board's judgment that the applicant will benefit from the conference.
The application for Bread Loaf's Environmental Writers' Conference is live! Admissions are rolling & they expect this year to be competitive. Great people on the faculty: Lauren Groff, Dan Chiasson, Jennine Capo Crucet, J. Drew Lanham, Emily Raboteau, Ted Genoways, Kazim Ali, Amber Flora Thomas. Literary critic Amy Brady to be there, too.
BREADLOAF WRITERS CONFERENCE SUMMER 2020! (see related Associated Press news item from 2016)
HEADLINE: Colleges add ‘cli-fi’ — #climatefiction — to lit curriculums nationwide. lasvegassun.com/news/2016/mar/
IN 2016
Link is here: middlebury.edu/bread-loaf-con
http://www.middlebury.edu/bread-loaf-conferences/BLE
and remember that they have significant scholarship funds and want to broaden the understanding of what environmental writing looks like and whose stories are shared.
7th Annual Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference
photo credits: Todd Balfour and Jason Lamb
The 7th annual Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference is a week-long writers’ conference, based on the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference model, that’s designed to hone the skills of people interested in producing literary writing about the environment and the natural world. The conference is cosponsored by the Middlebury College Environmental Studies Program and the Franklin Environmental Center.
2020 DATES AND LOCATION
Wednesday, June 10 – Tuesday, June 16, 2020. The conference will take place at the Bread Loaf Campus of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont.
PROGRAM AND SCHEDULE
The conference will incorporate the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference model of small, focused workshops coupled with specialized classes centered on the craft of writing. Workshops will be limited to ten participants so that each manuscript will receive individual, focused attention and critique. All participants will also meet individually with their workshop leader to amplify and refine what was said in the workshop itself. Established editors, literary agents, and publishers will give presentations on placing work in magazines and navigating the environmental book publishing world.
To get a feel for what to expect during the session see this sample schedule from the 2019 conference. In addition to the lectures, workshops, classes, and readings listed, meetings with agents and editors take place in the afternoon, and faculty schedule an individual meeting with each contributor to take place during the week. The manuscript packet of student writing is made available to each workshop group in the weeks leading up to the session in order to allow time to read and prepare before arrival.
WHO SHOULD APPLY
This week-long conference of workshops, classes, lectures, readings, and discussions is for all writers of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction whose work engages with or advocates for nature and the environment.
The conference is also intended for environmental professionals, journalists, and teachers wanting to strengthen and explore their writing in a literary context. For those who are interested in learning more about environmental and nature writing but who do not wish to workshop their writing, there is also an auditing option available.
THE COMMUNITY
Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences create diverse and inclusive communities that give voice to writers of all ages and experience. The conferences are not retreats where writers work in solitude, but instead places where writers of all backgrounds and at all stages of their careers—unpublished and published—come together to test their assumptions regarding literature and to seek advice about their progress as writers. Built on a long history of gathering writers from all over the United States, and now from outside of the U.S. as well, to live and learn together during the intensive 7 days, Bread Loaf fosters communities where open-mindedness, respect, and appreciation are truly valued and where each person can thrive and benefit from their time on the mountain.
2020 FACULTY AND GUESTS
Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference will feature eight workshops with up to ten participants in each group. Faculty will include acclaimed nature and environmental writers including poets Dan Chiasson and Amber Flora Thomas; fiction writers Jennine Capó Crucet and Lauren Groff; and nonfiction writers Kazim Ali, Ted Genoways, J. Drew Lanham, and Emily Raboteau. In addition to their literary accomplishments, each faculty member has been specifically chosen for their skill at guiding developing writers.
CONFERENCE SPONSORS
The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is the oldest writers' conference in America. Since 1926 it has convened in mid-August at the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College. Envisioned by Robert Frost, the Conference has featured eminent writers such as Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Wallace Stegner, Eudora Welty, John Irving, Natasha Trethewey, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, Julia Alvarez, William Kittredge, Scott Russell Sanders, and Luis Alberto Urrea. The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference has a long legacy of commitment to the environment, dating back to early naturalist Joseph Battell who created the original Bread Loaf site as a mountain retreat in 1866.
Dating from 1965, the Middlebury College Environmental Studies Program is the oldest undergraduate environmental studies program in the United States and one of the College's largest majors. The Environmental Studies Program brings together a community of scholars and students engaged in the study of the human relationship to the environment. Students choose from foci across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. Ten core faculty members and forty affiliated faculty colleagues from 24 departments on campus together offer an interdisciplinary major and minor in which students learn to observe, explore, listen, analyze, question, discuss, and pursue answers through creative work, research, and problem-solving.
The mission of the Middlebury College Franklin Environmental Center is to shape a world in which humans, ecological communities, and economic systems can sustainably coexist. The Center nurtures partnerships that anticipate issues on campus and beyond, and addresses complex environmental challenges at local, regional, and global scales.
APPLICATION AND ACCEPTANCE
Applications to the conference will be accepted between November 1, 2019 and February 15, 2019 or until the spaces are filled. Acceptance is based on the strength and promise of the writing sample and on the Admissions Board's judgment that the applicant will benefit from the conference.
Acceptances will be made on a rolling basis and applicants will be notified whether they have been admitted approximately four to six weeks after they apply.
FINANCIAL AID
Thanks to support from the Katharine Bakeless Nason Endowment, the Michael Collier Endowment, and Middlebury College, the conference is making available a limited number of $500, $750, and $1,000 scholarships as well as at least three full scholarships.
MORE INFORMATION
See the BL Environmental pages for more details:
NOTES from a 2016 newspaper article by Wilson Ring of the AP about Breadloaf programs:
Universities add ‘cli-fi’ — ''climate fiction'' — to lit curriculums
March 6, 2016
MONTPELIER, Vermont. — Colleges and universities worldwide are incorporating into their curriculums the evolving genre of literature that focuses on the changes coming to Earth as the result of climate change — "cli-fi."
Some of the books and movies now being considered part of the genre are old classics, while others were written more recently in direct response to today's changing climate, according to Dan Bloom, editor of The Cli-Fi Report.
"It's a very, very energized time for this where people in literature have just as much to say as people who are in hard science fields, or technology and design fields, or various social-science approaches to these things," said Jennifer Wicke, an English professor at the University of Virginia taught a course in June 2016 on ''climate fiction'' at the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont.
The Bread Loaf School of English is mainly for elementary- and high school-level English teachers who can, in turn, take what they learn back to their classrooms to get their students to understand how literature can reflect current events.
"This course gives them a kind of model for helping to create and imagine English courses that will be particularly relevant to helping the young people whom they teach to understand that reading literature, looking at the arts, looking at film isn't something you do as an aside," said Bread Loaf school Director Emily Bartels in 2016, also a professor of English at New Jersey's Rutgers University. "It's something you do as you learn how to navigate your own moment in the 21st century."
Climate fiction, a term that emerged less than a decade ago, is now being discussed by academics across the nation and world as 2020 ramps up.
Some of the literature now being recognized as cli-fi was written decades, or even centuries, ago. Some of Shakespeare's works focus on humanity's relationship with nature. Works of fiction such as H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds" or "The Time Machine" also fit the profile of climate fiction, Bartels said.
Retired Hampshire College Professor Charlene D'Avanzo, a marine scientist who spends her summers in Yarmouth, Maine, has published a multi-volume series of what she describes as "cli-fi novels and amateur sleuth mystery novels" sparked by what she sees as the harassment of scientists studying climate change.
She said that there's much uncertainty in the scientific study of climate change and that readers are more willing to accept uncertainty in fiction. In her first book, the protagonist is an amateur sleuth who investigates the mysterious death of a colleague who was crushed to death by a buoy on a research vessel off Maine.
"You have to make people care," she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment