LBF WordShopsThe WordShop component of the Louisiana Book Festival offers writing WordShops emphasizing craft. Faculty, local and national, are highly credentialed and have a commitment to teaching. WordShops are serious educational experiences, presented in a supportive, informal environment, appropriate for both novice and advanced writers, as well as anyone who enjoys books and good conversation. Equally important is the development of the Louisiana community of students and teachers who support art in literature as well as one another’s pursuits. The Louisiana Book Festival WordShops function under the assumption that everyone is creative and anyone can write. We offer the tools to craft your work. We respect you and your writing, and whatever your writing background, we treat you like a professional and strive to boost your confidence to create. The varied backgrounds that students can bring to the classroom enrich the creative process for everyone; we welcome a diverse mix of participants. |
2009 Schedule
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Writing in Color
Rick Bragg is the bestselling author of All Over but the Shoutin’, Somebody Told Me, Ava’s Man and I Am a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story and The Prince of Frogtown, for which he has received the 2009 SIBA Award for Nonfiction. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996 and is the recipient of the 2009 Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year. |
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The Illustrated Story
Manhattan native Alex Beard is a painter, writer, and traveler and has emerged as one of his generation's most creative and successful artists. Alex's work has been shown in one-man exhibitions in New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong, and many places in between. His drawings and paintings are scattered in private collections from Japan to the West Indies and are in museum permanent collections and on public and private walls around the world. Born in 1970, Alex was influenced to think creatively from a young age by his uncle, noted photographer Peter Beard, and his mother Patricia Beard, an author and former editor for Town & Country, Elle, and Mirabella magazines. In 1984 at the age of 14, Alex kicked off his unorthodox travels which included shark fishing in Panama, bush driving in Africa, diving in Australia, bone fishing in Belize, hiking the Great Wall of China through the Yan Mountains, spying humpback whales in Alaska, stalking tigers in India, hobnobbing at Basil's Bar in Mustique, and diving the cenotes in Tulum. In 2008, Alex launched the Alex Beard Impossible Puzzles line, which is sold in major retailers around the country. Alex currently lives in New Orleans and Manhattan with his family. | |
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If I Can, You Can
Sonny founded Over the Transom Bookstore in Fairhope and its annual literary conference, Southern Writers Reading. He is also founder of the non-profit Fairhope Center for Writing Arts. He is the author of the novels, The Poet of Tolstoy Park, A Sound Like Thunder, Cormac - The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, and this fall's The Widow and the Tree. Sonny edits the anthology series Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe. |
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Writing Poetry's Landscape of Memory and Place
“Writing Poetry’s Landscape of Memory and Place” is a hands-on workshop in which poet Jeanie Thompson will take participants of all levels through a series of guided writing exercises, using poems by poets as diverse as Stanley Plumly, William Matthews, Elizabeth Bishop, Natasha Trethewey, Patricia Smith, and others. Participants will write in the workshop, share work as they are comfortable with doing so, and receive feedback from peers and the instructor. With luck and dedication, people will leave with drafts of poems started, and with a sense of how to continue to mine the richest of fields --- our own landscape of memory. Thompson is the author of four poetry collections and several chapbooks, including the recently published The Seasons Bear Us. Previous works included White for Harvest: New and Selected Poems, Witness, How to Enter the River, and Litany for a Vanishing Landscape. She co-edited The Remember Gate: Memoirs by Alabama Writers with Jay Lamar. While at the University of Alabama Thompson was founding editor of Black Warrior Review literary journal, and she has received fellowships from the Louisiana Arts Council and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. In 2003 she was named University of Alabama Alumni Artist of the year for her work as a writer and arts educator. Thompson is founding director of the award-winning Alabama Writers’ Forum and teaches with the poetry faculty in the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Writing Program in Louisville, KY. She blogs at http://jeaniethompson.blogspot.com. |
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Freelance Journalism for Fun and Profit
Dan Baum is the author of Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, and Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty. Born in New Jersey, Baum has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, where he covered the military, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. He’s been a reporter for the Anchorage Times, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and The Wall Street Journal. Since 1987, he has worked as a freelance journalist along with his wife, Margaret L. Knox; first in Africa, and later in Montana, Mexico, California, and Colorado. All their work is collaborative; together they have written for Smithsonian, Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and other publications. Baum and Knox live Boulder, Colorado, with their sixteen-year-old daughter, Rosa. | |
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Screenwriting 101
Toni McGee Causey is the author of the critically acclaimed “Bobbie Faye” novels—an action/caper series set in south Louisiana; the series was released this summer in back-to-back publications, beginning with Charmed and Dangerous, Girls Just Wanna Have Guns, and When a Man Loves a Weapon -- which is out August 4th and has just received 4 stars from Romantic Times. As an MFA in Screenwriting, Toni had scripts optioned as well has having just this year produced an indie film, LA-308, which she and the rest of the producers will be submitting to festivals. Previously, Toni wrote non-fiction for the local newspapers, edited Baton Rouge Magazine, sold articles to national magazines, was a contributor to the anthology Do You Know What It Means as well as Killer Year: Stories to Die For. She has had several of her blogs syndicated nationally from her group blog, “Murderati” – (www.murderati.com) Participants are encouraged to write a logline for any well-known film as practice for how to write a logline. (That logline should be in the loose format of: The [name the protagonist, give us one defining phrase to describe him or her] has to [name the task the protagonist has to accomplish] in order to [name the goal]. For example: Indiana Jones, an archeologist who tries to keep antiquities out of the hands of thieves, has to find the Ark of the Covenant first in order to keep Hitler and his army from using its phenomenal power for evil. Another example: Danny Ocean, an extraordinary conman with a penchant for bad luck, assembles the best team he can find so that he can create the heist of the century—to take down his nemesis and win back his ex-wife.) Participants are encouraged (but not required) to then create a logline for their own work-in-progress or their own original movie idea. Those who wish to can volunteer their logline for that part of the discussion to help them hone their pitch. |
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Rick Bragg presents "Writing in Color," a full-day workshop on making writing come to life. Having won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, written best selling non-fictional works, and currently working on his first novel, Rick comes well equipped to address from several perspectives how writers can make their work live and breathe. 
Artist and author Alex Beard will lead a workshop in how to write and illustrate a picture book as a single artwork using The Jungle Grapevine as an example. The workshop will include a thorough investigation into how to craft an illustrated book from beginning to end. Focus will be paid to character, theme, and place, as well as to the rhythm of language and how that rhythm can both dictate illustration and be led by it. During the workshop a new story will be written, designed, and sketched out with the help of the attendees.
Sonny Brewer will engage in give-and-take with writers, offering frank answers to questions about everything from style to deadlines.
Poetry emerges from our personal landscape of memory, grounded in the places our childhood as well as our adult experience. Having the tools ready to sketch this landscape as it re-emerges in the present is the poet’s task. Developing our own palette of memory is also vital to writing poetry that helps us understand our present experience – loves and losses, obsessions and conundrums.
Journalist and author Dan Baum presents hardheaded advice about researching, pitching, writing and -- most important -- getting paid for magazine-length journalism and non- fiction books. How to win editors over to a story idea, convince them you can do the job, and negotiate pay.
Want to learn how to write a script? Screenwriter / Author Toni McGee Causey will teach the fundamentals of screenwriting. She will cover developing solid film premises, creating loglines (a one-line sentence that encapsulates the story—and the essence of what you need to pitch to a producer). She will then teach basic script structure, plotting techniques, story arcs, and tricks the pros use to create that “must read” script. Resource handouts will be given to all participants and will include examples from successful scripts that will illustrate the techniques she’ll cover, as well as additional highly recommended reading materials and websites.