The 28th Napa Valley Writers’ Conference July 27—Aug 1, 2008

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, more deft, and fertile, more startling in richness. Jane Hirshfield

At a time when more attention is being paid to commercialism and marketing in the field of literature, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference has maintained its emphases on process and craft, featuring a faculty as renowned for the quality of their teaching as for their work. It has also remained small and personal, fostering an unusual rapport between faculty writers and conference participants, who find the Napa Valley experience nurturing and challenging. The conference is suited to writers who have had some training, but we also encourage enthusiastic beginners to apply.

Participants register for either the poetry or the fiction workshops, but panels and talks are open to all. Workshops meet for two hours daily over five days. The schedule also includes talks by faculty writers, panels featuring visiting editors and agents, and readings by the faculty at Napa Valley wineries.

The poetry session provides the opportunity to work both on generating new poems and on revising previously written ones. You will work exclusively with one faculty poet for the week in daily workshops that emphasize writing new poems — taking risks with new material and forms, pushing boundaries in the poetic process.

We are fortunate to have a gifted faculty again this year and hope that we will be able to schedule you with one of the workshop leaders you requested. If you are not matched with the faculty member who was your first choice, please remember that the informal nature of the conference lends itself to opportunities to meet and visit with the other faculty.

Poetry manuscripts & tutorial

You will also have the opportunity to meet once in a brief tutorial with your faculty poet to discuss a five-page manuscript of completed poems. We will forward to your workshop leader the five-page manuscript you sent with your application. If your manuscript ran longer, we will use the first five pages (though we do look at them and try to ensure we are not cutting off the end of a poem that runs onto a sixth page).

If you’d like to discuss a manuscript different from the one you submitted with your application, please make sure that we receive it by July 2. Please submit a clean copy with your name on each page.

You can email Nan at nvwcpoetry AT gmail DOT com with any questions about poetry workshops and manuscripts.

Book manuscript critiques

For those who have completed a full-length manuscript, the Conference offers, as an additional service, a limited number of Book Manuscript Critiques.