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WRITERS' CONFERENCE in Fayence, FR
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June 14
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5:00 Arrival in Seillans.
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10:05 – 10:50 Craft lecture: Sheila Schwartz
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11:00 – 11:30 Reading: Ana Maria Spagna
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11:30 – 12:00 Reading: Stephanie Staal
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2:00 – 3:30 Agent: How to write a Query letter
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3:45 – 4:30 Craft lecture: Alexandra Fuller
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4:45 – 6:45 Panel: Rebecca Walker, Elizabeth Fuller, Anne LeClaire and Sheila Schwartz.
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7:00 – 7:55 An evening with Rebecca Walker followed by Q & A session. Rebecca is the daughter of famed novelist Alice Walker, she is a best-selling author and an acclaimed speaker and teacher, and an award-winning visionary and activist in the fields of intergenerational feminism, multi-cultural identity, enlightened masculinity, and transformational human awareness.
When she was just twenty-five, Time Magazine named her one of the fifty most influential future leaders of America an award which has since been followed by many others, including the Women Who Could Be President Award from the League of Women Voters, the Champion of Choice Award from CARAL, and the Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women.
Her books include To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, still in print after more than ten years and taught in Gender Studies programs around the world; the memoir Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, an international bestseller that won the Alex Award from the American Library Association and was selected by the Contra Costa Times Book Club as a city-wide read in 2002; and What Makes a Man: 22 Writers Imagine The Future, about which Booklist wrote: "Walker has done society at large a great service by bringing forth these voices, these views." Her new memoir, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence was published in March 2007.
Rebecca's essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Babble, Salon, Marie Claire, Glamour, Child, Plum, Essence, and Buddhadharma, and in many anthologies. She has taught the art of memoir in workshops and MFA programs around the world.
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June 16
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2:00 Scheduled meetings with authors or group instructors.
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3:00 If you don't have a meeting, depart for Seillans from Montauroux.
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3:35 – 4:15 Craft lecture: Gary Ferguson
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4:30 – 6:45 Workshop with authors: Gary Ferguson, Alexandra Fuller, Dan Chaon and
Michael Bishop; group instructors: Ana Maria Spagna, Sheila Bender and Susan Bono.
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7:00 – 8:00 An evening with "Alexandra Fuller" followed by Q & A session. Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. She moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with her family when she was two. After that country’s war of independence (1980) her family moved first to Malawi and then Zambia where she met her husband. In 1994, she came to the States. She lives now in Wyoming with her husband, two daughters and a son. Education: Fuller was educated in Scotland and Canada. She received a BA from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Memoir: DON’T LET’S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT: An African Childhood. Published by Random House in the USA December 2001. Also widely published in Europe, the Commonwealth and in Brazil and Israel. It has been translated into over a dozen languages. Winner: Booksense Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2003 Winner: Winifred Holtby Memorial 2003 New York Times Paperback Best Seller Los Angeles Times Best Seller Boston Globe Best Seller Memoir: SCRIBBLING THE CAT: Travels with an African Soldier Published by Penguin Press in the USA May 2004. Widely translated. Winner: of the LETTRE ULYSSES AWARD FOR THE ART OF REPORTAGE 2005.
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June 17
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Morning market in Montauroux
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2:00 Scheduled meetings with authors or group instructors.
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3:00 Late departure to Seillans from Montauroux.
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3:35 – 4:15 Craft lecture: Susan Vreeland
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4:30 – 6:45 Workshop with authors: Gary Ferguson, Alexandra Fuller, Dan Chaon and Michael Bishop; group instructors: Ana Maria Spagna, Sheila Bender and Susan Bono.
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7:00 – 7:55 Reading: Gary Ferguson followed by Q & A. Gary Ferguson first answered the call to adventure at age 12, loading up his purple sting-ray bike with camping gear and riding with his older brother through the central Midwest. By age 18, bicycles had given way to boxcars and backpacks, as he made his way across North America by rail and by thumb – as often than not heading west, and heading for mountains. At 25, Ferguson plunged full-time into the freelance writing life. Soon thereafter his work found a home in the national media – both his personal profiles of American nature, as well as a wide range of social and environmental stories from Europe, Africa and North America. Formerly an interpretive naturalist for the U.S. Forest Service, Gary is the author of 16 books on nature, science and history. His recent work, Hawks Rest (National Geographic), became the first book in history to win nonfiction Book of The Year from both the Pacific Northwest and Mountains and Plains booksellers associations. He was the 2002 Seigel Scholar at the School of Political Science at Washington University, St. Louis; in January 2007, he begins a five-month tenure as Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. Gary's nature and science-based essays can be heard on National Public Radio affiliates throughout the country. Over the past twenty years Gary has written for a wide variety of publications, including Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times, Outside and Men's Journal. • The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind (2005, W.W. Norton) • Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone (2005, Montana Book of the Year – Lyon's Press) • Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone (2005, National Geographic) • The Worlds Great Nature Myths (1996, Crown Publishing) • Shouting at the Sky (1999, St. Martin's Press) • Through the Woods (1998, St. Martin's Press) • Walking Down the Wild (1993, Simon & Schuster) • The Sylvan Path (1997, St. Martin's Press).
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June 19
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2:00 Scheduled meeting with instructors instructors.
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3:00 Seillans from Montauroux.
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3:35 – 4:15 Craft Lecture: Rebecca Walker
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4:30 – 6:45 Workshop with authors: Gary Ferguson, Alexandra Fuller, Dan Chaon and Michael Bishop; group instructors: Ana Maria Spagna, Sheila Bender and Susan Bono.
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7:00 – 7:55 An evening with Vikram Chandra. Vikram Chandra was born in New Delhi. He completed most of his secondary education at Mayo College, a boarding school in Ajmer, Rajasthan. After a short stay at St. Xavier's College in Mumbai, Vikram came to the United States as an undergraduate student. In 1984, he graduated from Pomona College (in Claremont, near Los Angeles) with a magna cum laude BA in English, with a concentration in creative writing. He then attended the Film School at Columbia University in New York. In the Columbia library, by chance, he happened upon the autobiography of Colonel James "Sikander" Skinner, a legendary nineteenth century soldier, born of an Indian mother and a British father. This book was to become the inspiration for Vikram's novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He left film school halfway to begin work on the novel. Red Earth and Pouring Rain was written over several years at the writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston. Vikram worked with John Barth at Johns Hopkins and with Donald Barthelme at the University of Houston; he obtained an MA at Johns Hopkins and an MFA at the University of Houston. While writing Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram taught literature and writing, and also worked independently as a computer programmer and software and hardware consultant. His clients included oil companies, non-profit organizations, and the Houston Zoo. Red Earth and Pouring Rain was published in 1995 by Penguin/India in India; by Faber and Faber in the UK; and by Little, Brown in the United States. The book was received with outstanding critical acclaim. It won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction. A collection of short stories, Love and Longing in Bombay, was published in 1997 by Penguin/India in India; by Faber and Faber in the UK; and by Little, Brown in the United States. Love and Longing in Bombay won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Eurasia region); was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize; and was included in "Notable Books of 1997" by the New York Times Book Review, in "Best Books of the Year" by the Independent (London), in "Best Books of the Year" by the Guardian (London), and in "The Ten Best Books of 1997" by Outlook magazine (New Delhi). Two of these stories have been formerly published in the Paris Review and The New Yorker. The story "Dharma" was awarded the Discovery Prize by the Paris Review, and was included in Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin's Press, 1998). A novel, Sacred Games, was published in 2006 by Penguin/India in India; and by Faber and Faber in the UK. It will be published in January 2007 in the United States by HarperCollins. In June 1997, Vikram was featured in the New Yorker photograph of "India's leading novelists." His work has been translated into eleven languages. He has co-written Mission Kashmir, an Indian feature film starring Sanjay Dutt, Hrithik Roshan, Preity Zinta, and Jackie Shroff, that was released internationally in late October, 2000. Vikram's mother, Kamna Chandra, is the writer of several Hindi films including Prem Rog and 1942: A Love Story; she has also written plays for All India Radio and Doordarshan. His sister, Tanuja Chandra, is a director and screenwriter, who has directed several films including Sur and Sangharsh. His other sister Anupama Chopra is a film critic and senior correspondent for India Today; she has written Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a BFI book about the hugely popular 1995 hit. Her first book, Sholay: The Making of a Classic, won the Swarn Kamal, a national award for the best Indian book on cinema in 1995. Vikram's father, Navin Chandra, is a retired executive. Vikram Chandra currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, California, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California. He lives with his wife Melanie Abrams, who is also a novelist.
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11:45 – 12:15 Reading: Sheila Bender
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9:05 – 11:35 Workshop with authors: Gary Ferguson, Dan Chaon and Rebecca Walker
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June 21
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1:00 Scheduled meeting with authors or group instructors in Seillans.
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2:35 – 3:15 Craft Lecture: Michele Roberts
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3:30 – 6:00 Workshop with authors: Gary Ferguson, Alexandra Fuller, Dan Chaon and Michael Bishop; group instructors: Ana Maria Spagal, Sheila Bender and Susan Bono.
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6:15 – 6:45 Reading: Sophie Powell
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7:00 – 7:55 An evening with Susan Vreeland, followed by a Q & A session. Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion. Never had history been more vibrant, its voices more resonating, its images more gripping. On this first trip to Europe, I felt myself a pilgrim: To me, even secular places such as museums and ruins were imbued with the sacred. Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, religious and social history--I was swept away with all of it, wanting to read more, to learn languages, to fill my mind with rich, glorious, long-established culture wrought by human desire, daring, and faith. I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart. My imagination exploded with the gaiety of the Montmartre dancers at Moulin de la Galette, the laborer whose last breath in his flattened chest was taken under the weight of a stone fallen from the Duomo under construction in Florence, the apprentice who cut himself preparing glass for the jeweled windows of Sainte Chapelle, the sweating quarry worker aching behind his crowbar at Carrara to release a marble that would become the Pietà. In a fashion I couldn't imagine then, I have been true to this pledge. I have brought to life the daughter of the Dutch painter Vermeer who secretly yearned to paint the Delft she loved. I've given voice to the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, raped at seventeen by her painting teacher, the first woman to paint large scale figures from history and scripture previously reserved for men. On my own continent, I've entered deep British Columbian forests with Emily Carr, whose love for native people took her to places proper white women didn't go. My imagination has followed Modigliani's daughter around Paris searching for shreds of information about the father she never knew. I've imagined myself a poor wetnurse, bereaved of her own baby so that a rich woman, Berthe Morisot, might paint. I've taken my seventeenth century Tuscan shoemaker to Rome to have his longed-for religious experience under the Sistine ceiling. I've followed Renoir's models to cabarets and boat races, to war and elopement, to the Folies-Bergère and luncheons by the Seine. Now some facts as to how I arrived there: After graduating from San Diego State University, I taught high school English in San Diego beginning in 1969 and retired in 2000 after a 30-year career. Concurrently, I began writing features for newspapers and magazines in 1980, taking up subjects in art and travel, and publishing 250 articles. I ventured into fiction in 1988 with What Love Sees, a biographical novel of a woman's unwavering determination to lead a full life despite blindness. The book was made into a CBS television movie starring Richard Thomas and Annabeth Gish. My short fiction has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Confrontation, Alaska Quarterly Review, Manoa, Connecticut Review, Calyx, Crescent Review, So To Speak and elsewhere. My art-related fiction, products of my pledge on Pont Neuf: Girl in Hyacinth Blue, 1999, and a Hallmark Hall of Fame production in 2003, tracing an alleged Vermeer painting through the centuries revealing its influence on those who possessed it. The Passion of Artemisia, 2002, disclosing the inner life of Artemisia Gentileschi, Italian Baroque painter who empowered her female heroines with her own courage. The Forest Lover, 2004, following the rebel Canadian painter, Emily Carr, seeking the spiritual content of her beloved British Columbia by painting its wild landscape and its native totemic carvings. Life Studies, 2005, stories revealing Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters from points of view of people who knew them, and showing that ordinary people can have profound encounters with art. Luncheon of the Boating Party, 2007, illuminating the vibrant, explosive Parisian world of la vie moderne surrounding Renoir as he creates his masterwork depicting the French art of living. Selected awards: New York Times Best Sellers: Girl in Hyacinth Blue, The Passion of Artemisia, Luncheon of the Boating Party. Book Sense Pick, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 2007. Book Sense Year's Favorites, for The Passion of Artemisia, 2002. Book Sense Book of the Year Finalist, Girl in Hyacinth Blue, 1999. International Dublin Literary Award, Nominee, for Girl in Hyacinth Blue, 2001. Independent Publisher Magazine, Storyteller of the Year, for Girl in Hyacinth Blue, 1999. Foreword Magazine's Best Novel of the Year, for Girl in Hyacinth Blue,1999. San Diego Book Awards' Theodor Geisel Award and Best Novel of the Year, 1999, for Girl; 2002 for Artemisia, and 2005 for Life Studies. My work has been translated into twenty-five languages.
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June 22
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2:00 Scheduled meeting with authors or group instructors in Seillans.
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3:35 – 4:15 Craft Lecture: Dan Chaon
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4:30 – 6:45 Workshops with: Authors--Rebecca Walker, Russell Celyn Jones and Anne LeClaire; group instructors--Ana Maria Spagnal, Stephanie Staal and Krista Madsen.
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7:00 – 7:55 An evening with Anne LeClaire. Anne's worked as a radio broadcaster, an actress, a journalist and a correspondent for The Boston Globe. Her work appeared in The New York Times, Redbook, and Yankee magazine, among others. In 1983 she began pursuing her long-held dream of becoming a novelist with her book, Land’s End, which was published by Bantam Books in 1985. Since then she has written seven other novels, including the critically acclaimed Entering Normal and Leaving Eden. Her essays have been included in a number of anthologies, among them I’ve Always Meant to Tell You, Letters to Our Mothers: An Anthology of Contemporary Women Writers; From Daughters and Sons to Fathers: What I’ve Never Said; and A Sense of Place: An Anthology of Cape Women Writers.
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June 23
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2:00 Scheduled meetings with authors or group instructors in Seillans.
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3:00 Seillans from Montauroux.
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3:35 – 4:15 Craft lecture: Vikram Chandra
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4:30 – 6:45 Workshops with: Authors--Rebecca Walker, Russell Celyn Jones and Anne Jones; group instructors--Ana Maria Spagna, Stephanie Staal and Krista Madsen.
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7:00 – 7:55 An evening with Russell Celyn Jones. Russell Celyn Jones is a novelist and critic, a Booker Prize Judge (2002), John Llewellyn Rhys Prize judge (1998) and is a staff reviewer for The Times. His novels are: Surface Tension, Little, Brown (2001), The Eros Hunter, Little, Brown (1998), An Interference of Light, Viking Penguin (1995), Small Times, Viking Penguin (1992), Soldiers and Innocents, Jonathan Cape (1990) and Little, Brown (1998). His short fiction has been anthologised in Summer Magic, Bloomsbury (2003), Time Out Book of London Short Stories, Penguin (2000), The Ex-Files, Quartet (1998), Time Out Book of New York Stories, Penguin (1997). Non-fiction: “Standards in Creative Writing Teaching”, The Creative Writing Coursebook, Macmillan (2001), “Dylan Thomas’s Wales”, The Atlas of Literature, Ed. Malcolm Bradbury, De Agostini (1996). He has been awarded the Society of Author’s Award (1997), Welsh Arts Council Fiction Prize (1991), David Higham Prize (1990).
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June 24
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2:00 Scheduled meeting with authors or group instructors in Seillans.
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3:00 Seillans from Montauroux.
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3:35 – 4:15 Craft lecture: Russell Celyn Jones
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4:30 – 6:45 Workshops with: Authors--Rebecca Walker, Russell Celyn Jones and Anne LeClaire; group instructors--Ana Maria Spagna, Stephanie Staal and Krista Madsen.
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7:00 – 7:55 An evening with Michael Bishop. Michael Lawson Bishop is an award-winning American writer. Over four decades and thirty books, he has created a body of work that stands among the most admired in modern science fiction and fantasy literature. Bishop received a bachelor's degree from the University of Georgia in 1967 before going on to complete a master's degree in English. He taught English at the United States Air Force Academy Preparatory School in Colorado Springs from 1968 to 1972, and later at the University of Georgia. Bishop left teaching in 1974 to become a full-time writer. Bishop has twice been awarded the Nebula: in 1981 for "The Quickening" (Best Novelette) and in 1982 for No Enemy But Time (Best Novel). He has also received four Locus Awards and his work has been nominated for numerous Hugo Awards. He and British author Ian Watson collaborated on a novel set in the universe of one of Bishop’s earlier works. He has also written two mystery novels with Paul Di Filippo, under the joint pseudonym Philip Lawson. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Bishop has published more than 125 pieces of short fiction which have been gathered in seven collections. His stories have appeared in such publications as Playboy, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Missouri Review, the Indiana Review, the Chattahoochee Review, the Georgia Review, Omni, and Interzone. In addition to his fiction, Bishop has published poetry (gathered in two collections) and won the 1979 Rhysling Award for his poem "For the Lady of a Physicist." He has also had essays and reviews published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Omni Magazine, and the New York Review of Science Fiction. A collection of his nonfiction, A Reverie for Mister Ray, was published in 2005 by PS Publishing. He has written introductions to books by Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., Pamela Sargent, Gardner Dozois, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Andy Duncan, Paul Di Filippo, Bruce Holland Rogers, and Rhys Hughes. He has edited six anthologies, including the Locus Award-winning Light Years and Dark and A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-five Imaginative Tales about the Christ, published by Thunder’s Mouth Press shortly before the company closed. In recent years, Bishop has returned to teaching and is writer-in-residence at LaGrange College located near his home in Pine Mountain, Georgia. He and his wife, Jeri, have a daughter and two grandchildren. His son, Christopher James ("Jamie") Bishop, was one of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre on April 16, 2007.
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June 26
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8:30 Seillans from Montauroux.
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9:05 – 11:30 Workshops with: Authors--Rebecca Walker, Russell Celyn Jones and Anne LeClaire; group instructors--Ana Maria Spagna, Stephanie Staal and Krista Madsen.
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11:45 – 12:15 Krista Madsen
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9:05 – 11:30 Workshops with: Authors--Rebecca Walker, Russell Celyn Jones and Anne LeClaire; group instructors--Ana Maria Spagna, Stephanie Staal and Krista Madsen.
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11:30 – 1:00 Scheduled Meeting with authors and group instructors.
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2:15 – 3:00 Craft lecture: Anne LeClaire
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3:15 – 4:30 Agent lecture: The Literary Business
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4:45 - 5:15 Reading: Susan Bono
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5:30 – 6:00 Reading: Tanya Gupta
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6:15 – 7:15 An evening with Dan Chaon. Dan Chaon (born 1964) is an American author. His best-selling first novel was You Remind Me of Me (2004). His short-story collections Fitting Ends (1996) and Among the Missing (2001) were both well-received; the latter was a finalist for a National Book Award, and was also named one of the year's ten best books by the American Library Association and The New York Times. Chaon's short stories have also won the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award, and have been included in the Best American Short Stories of 1996 and 2003. He was awarded the 2006 Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chaon was adopted, and grew up in Nebraska. He is married to the writer Sheila Schwartz and has two teenage sons. He lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio and teaches creative writing at Oberlin College.
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