Center for Fiction Conference SATURDAY

Make good on your New Year’s Resolution to write: come to the conference this Saturday at the Center for Fiction & get a month’s studio space!

We all need a room of our own to write in, but in New York, private space is tough. In our Jersey City apartment, I can write at the dining room table during school hours; in the evenings, when my husband isn’t working late, we’re often flipping: do you want the chilly but quiet downstairs bedroom or the spacious and distracting upstairs? My tiny closet of an office at school in midtown is subject to professional interruptions (for interruptions there will always be, as Woolf says) and has no windows. (Some of my colleagues have windows, but windows go by seniority. My best guess is that I’m about ten years out from a window.)

But, as you can hear, this blog post is really a pitch for you to consider coming along Saturday to the Center for Fiction Conference. The $170 fee entitles you to listen to a day’s worth of stimulating talk about the business and professional side of fiction writing AND a free month of studio space at the Center for Fiction.

I’ll be moderating a panel in the morning (10:45) on finding and creating community. On the panel will be Ken Chen of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Amanda Stern of Happy Endings, and Kamy Wicoff of SheWrites: three exciting writers each of whom has added to the community of writers in which we live. I am so looking forward to hearing what each has to say about how we as writers find the balance between sitting alone with our words and reaching out to others.

Other speakers are as luminous as my panelists: The day begins with a keynote by Daniel Menaker; Ron Hogan is organizing the whole thing and moderating a panel on publishing today; if you don’t want to listen to our panel, you can hear Liesl Schillinger moderate a panel on the importance of book reviews; Lauren Cerand will be on a panel about creating your own buzz (she should know!); Marlon James, Peter Ginna, and many more will be speaking. It sounds like fun to me! I hope to see you there.