LECTURES & EVENTS
COMMUNITY EVENTS
The "Bookclubs"
Sentence Club, Paragraph Club, Silent Bookclub (shhh...) ...
Mostly self-explanatory in their names, the annual [Text] Clubs began in 2024 as the vision of former staffer Jack Bachmann. They continue to recreate themselves over time. Stay tuned!
Publishing Roundtable
On Submitting & Publishing
A family tradition: an informal gathering to share advice about ways of approaching publishing & submitting work, pathways to placing pieces, and other aspects of the literary industry in the current landscape.
This event began as one that happened organically at several conferences past, and eventually became a regularly scheduled event once we noticed it was bound to happen every year anyway.
All levels and genres are generally welcome, though some years it has taken a genre-specific approach (typically poetry, in those cases) as other industry events on our schedule and interest have determined its direction. Always open to input and pitches from our residents & faculty on the tradition, both in advance and on the ground, as it continues to evolve.
Reception at Blum
Midweek Party!
Join conference staff and faculty at home for a reception and party midweek.
The Salon & [The Prompt]
Friday Evenings at Every Kettle Pond
Many have tried to explain it, even more have experienced it... tl;dr it's fun!
​
Check back for more details.
FACULTY LECTURES
Lectures by our faculty and visiting writers start all our our days at Kettle Pond, and some of our afternoons as well.
Below is a (non-exhaustive) list of lecture descriptions from conferences past.* We're perennially fine-tuning the Next Summer's schedule, but have posted these with the intent of giving applicants a better idea of what a week at Kettle Pond will be like. Each conference's offerings will be distributed to all admitted writers, and posted here as we are able.
​
*Please note that, in most cases, Kettle Pond has retained copies of handouts for our past lectures. Attending and alumni writers should feel free to inquire about physical or digital copies for any of the below lectures -- we're more than happy to supply them if we are able!
Kevin Bertolero
Devotional Acts: Locating Transcendence in Poetry and the Cinema of the Avant-Garde
Using filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky's 2003 monograph Devotional Cinema as a jumping-off point, we'll consider the ways in which the work of various 20th and 21st-century avant-garde filmmakers functions as the artistic endeavor closest to poetry, and we'll examine how the two forms are in conversation with one another, striving for similar results. Through understanding the writings of film historial P. Adams Sitney and filmmaker Paul Schrader, we will try to locate the balance of the "devotional state" that Dorsky describes, ad consider ways in which we can approximate this in our own writing.
Kevin Bertolero
In Suffering / With Joy: On Time, Place & the AIDS Crisis
In looking at the work of various poets, essayists, novelists, filmmakers, and visual artists, we’ll piece together a history of the AIDS crisis in relation to both space and (ecstatic) time. We will begin with a theoretical framing of memory and queer futurism before looking at numerous examples of the gay experience as reflected through work about private, personal, and public moments of both joy and grief. Together we will discuss the work of writers and artists such as Ron Schreiber, Tim Dlugos, James Merrill, Derek Jarman, Kenneth Anger, David Wojnarowicz, Félix González-Torres, and others.
Kevin Bertolero
Poetry & the Time-Image
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the second volume of Gilles Deluze's influential work on film theory, he provides a philosophical framework for understanding modern and contemporary cinema. Using this framework, along with various film examples, we'll investigate how each of the "time-images" Deluze identifies could possibly be used in poems to explore the direct representation of time through fragmented images, memory, and the collapse of the sensory-motor schema.
Chen Chen
The Art of Telling
Typically, the principle of "show, don't tell" is sound advice for poets -- we should aim to evoke and enact emotion, to surprise through imagery and sensory detail. In this talk, however, we will explore how we might use "telling" in beautiful, unexpected, and politically engaged ways. By closely reading Rankine, and others, we will examine modes and moods of "telling", like the discursive, the aphoristic, the argumentative, the bold remembering, the conversationally witty, the necessarily strange challenge to the normative. Let's consider how it is often a fresh combination of the abstract and the concrete that engenders a new, starling connection to the reader's mind.
Chen Chen
Poems About Love, Poems in Love with Poetry
A queer Filipino American writer, Rick Barot is considered by many to be one of the finest lyric poets working today, known especially for his precise imagery, devoid of sentiment and full of feeling. While illuminating everyday experience, Barot's poetry cuts through the noise of habitual thinking and speech. This talk will trace the evolution of Barot's work across his five books, focusing on poems that express and examine love, primarily romantic and erotic love, but also platonic, familiar, and linguistic. Some of these poems' most exquisite moments arise out of a deep love for language.
Chen Chen
The Unsaid, the Unsayable, the Ungovernable:Poems of Queer Love & Desire
How can we, as poets and writers, respond to the ongoing and increasing attacks on LGBTQ people, life, history, and culture? The popular way is to fall back on the myth of respectability -- that is, by assimilating into the dominant narrative and heteronormative norms, one believes one will be rewarded with safety. In actuality, one is erasing autonomy and imagination, while also failing to support those for whom such assimilation is not possible. Another way (that is truly) forward is to boldly embrace a diversity and complexity of LGBTQ experience and art. In this talk I'll discuss urgent, subversive, playful, sensual, and political work by a range of poets, including Randall Mann, Muriel Leung, Charif Shanahan, Joseph O. Legaspi, Donika Kelly, Jenny George, and C.P. Cavafy.
Christopher Citro
Aloysius Bertrand & The Origins of Prose Poetry
Spend the morning in an interactive literary history class on the origins of the prose poem in France. With lots of engaging audio and video, we'll learn about Aloysius Bertrand, the poet who invented the form, and Charles Beaudelaire, the poet who popularized the form, alongside other early prose poets such as Ivan Turgenev, St*e*phane Mallarm*e*, Arthur Rimbaud, and Comte de Lautr*e*amont. By the end, you'll know more about the origin of the prose poem than most prose poets do! And you'll take away a packet with lots more poems, historical notes, and supplemental material. Never fear -- you don't need to know any French, as everything will be in English translation. Tr*e*s bon!
Christopher Citro
Architecture of a Poetry Book: Assembling a Manuscript
This session will present a step-by-step walk-though of the joyful process of putting together your poetry book manuscript for publication: things to think about before you begin, tips to help you gather your poems together, strategies for ordering poems, and suggestions for how to listen to your book talk back to you as it comes to life. We'll explore how to tinker with your finished manuscript as it continues to grow, and we'll discuss strategies to help your book reach the ultimate goal of publication. You'll hear from a variety of voices, both poets and publishers, and we'll have a hands-on exercise about ordering poems for a book.
Christopher Citro
On Giving Up: Its Uses & Benefits in the Writing Life
This craft talk will present an essay on one process of beginning, continuing, and finishing writing. With audio and video, we’ll explore the uses of giving up before we begin to write, when we’re writing in midstream, and just before we’re done. We’ll enjoy a little inspiration from a range of poets, plus fiction writer George Saunders, and playwright/theater director George C. Wolfe. A handout of the text of the talk will be provided. And yes, there will be a cat video.
Jaed Coffin
Something Someone Said: Developing Narrative from Murky Memories
In this generative seminar, we'll discuss how the smallest recollection of an utterance can blossom into a fully realized essay. Suggested reading: “My Father, Out to Sea” by Jaed Coffin, The New York Times.
Cecilia Corrigan
Body Work, Art Work
Working a playful exploration of somatic expression, considering the space of the "workout class" as a space of pedagogic and performative potential. This class is part of a developing project in process, stemming from my interest in investigating the "work" we are doing when we "work out". This hour will be an opportunity to explore these ideas together. Participants will be welcome to participate fluidly, with a range of options for engagement, from actively working out to observing as an audience member. This is an opportunity to expand our experience of expression beyond the writer's voice, developing a vocabulary through and of the weird magic of somatic movement.
Brandon Courtney
Poetry, the Thing-in-Itself & Ready-to-Hand: An Examination of the Lyric Through Kant & Heidegger's Philosophy
By speculating both on representational objects and the thing-in-itself, Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)—as Plato accomplished with his notion of materiality and the Ideal in ancient Greece—managed to bifurcate the accessible with the inaccessible, the existential with the transcendental. And although Kant maintained the obscuration of the noumena, this lecture aims to show how poetry and its creation is nothing short of attempting to access the noumena sui generis. Similarly, in §13 of Being and Time, Heidegger argues that our everyday actions and interactions are precognitive and primordial, meaning, simply, an engaged familiarity with the world. Instead of cognitively focusing on each “dealing” or task, Dasein encounters and uses the entities which surround it; however, we rarely “observe” the world. Circumspection, for Heidegger, is our ability to familiarize both our environment and its paraphernalia through skills, abilities, and competencies, rather than through cognition. For example, I am able to drive a nail with a hammer without first calculating the angle of my swing. Because these competencies are precognitive, I can hone my attention on the task to which I have set myself; I pay attention, then, to the level by which I’m challenged, or what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand. It is when equipment (Heidegger’s name for the objects in the world) experiences a breakdown, or un-readiness-to-hand that our being-in-the-world is in some way frustrated, thus making prominent or alerting us to qualities which, until the malfunction occurred, were ready-to-hand, equipment in-order-to. These qualities become more salient and seemingly surface from the object in-itself: the color, shape, weight, and texture become present-at-hand, allowing me to experience the equipment as I previously have not. Once the object is fully restored as ready-to-hand, these same characteristics which surfaced, simply recede back to the in-order-to. Taken together, these two modalities of poetic philosophy aim to explain the poet’s labor in accessing both the equipment of language and the noumena. In other words, poetry, with only an aim to accurately describe or project onto the world a phenomenal reality without also interrogating the noumena, is a poetry bound to fail.
Deirdre Coyle
How to Sell Out
If you want to pay rent with your writing skills, but don't want to teach, what are your options? With advice from a professional sellout with years of experience in writing-adjacent fields -- from publishing, to fashion, to librianship, to the corporate world -- this lecture will explore different ways to monetize your writing skills without teaching anyone anything.
Ana*i*s Duplan
Decolonizing Your Creative Voice
Language carries violence. How do writers, coming from all professions, develop an ethic in language's teaching, construction, and connotation? This discussion will challenge participants to unpack the language and form that structure their pieces, considering how they might loosen any tendencies to conform.
Jaclyn Gilbert
Navigating the Indie Landscape & Defying Genre
Join Jaclyn Gilbert of Drift(less) Literary for a discussion of alternative routes to representation in publishing.
Brian Hall
Against Lyricism
What makes writing lyrical? How do you decide what works, and what doesn't? To achieve good lyrical writing -- writing that is supple, surprising, and intelligent -- requires a specific authorial focus. This talk will examine different kinds of "lyrical" writing, including examples of what works well, and the pitfalls of thoughtless construction. We'll look closely at the openings of two novels: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham's The Hours. As Cunningham channels Woolf in his work, we will be able to draw specific comparisons between the texts, analyzing their strategies to address the various expressive effects and possibilities of lyricism.
Brian Hall
Close Third vs. First Person: Strategies & Effects
What is the difference between first person point-of-view and the closest forms of third? What can close third offer that first person cannot, and vice versa? When might a switch in point of view help us reframe or rescue our work?
Brian Hall
Dialogue: Are You Really Going to Do It Like That?
What are the markers of effective dialogue? How do you decide what works, and waht doesn't? How can you craft the conversation so a reader experiences it as you intended? To write "good" dialogue -- talk that advances a goal, or reveals something about a character -- requires specific authorial intent. this talk will examine different approaches to dialogue writing, including examples of what works well, and how things can fall short. Together, we'll analyze strategies to address the various effects and possibilities of dialogue.
Brian Hall
Novel Openings
How much can a novelist accomplish, and in how little space, in their first paragraph? In this talk, we'll look at selected examples -- as well as any suggestions offered in the moment -- to discuss the stylistic choices each author made as well as how the openings function.
Brian Hall
Writing From Reality
How can writers use the world around them to inspire their work? How much information is required to communicate ideas to a reader, and how much of that information actually has to appear on the page? This talk will address the benefits (and necessities) of learning from life–whether by observation, research, or otherwise–while developing ideas, regardless of genre. We’ll think about our approaches to adding realism to stories, and what kinds of questions we might need to answer in order to conceptualize and represent our worlds. We’ll also look at some examples of the research and reference process from The Stone Loves the World. The latter portion of our time together will be devoted to Q&A.
Chelsea Hodson
The Body as a Writing Tool
So often we begin a piece of writing by sitting at our computers and staring at a blank page, but what would our writing look like if it began somewhere more physical? What if, instead of looking to other books for inspiration, we occasionally looked to dance and performance art for ideas about structure and form?
Naomi Jackson
Building Books / Building Essays
A craft talk by the author on the process of writing and researching her first coming-of-age novel as well as a series of essays on the intersections of race and the health care system. The lecture will focus in particular on the layered technique of revision (approaching thematically through multiple revisions) as well as a generative process for essay writing termed “scratching” through which the themes, ideas, and stories of a piece make themselves known.
Naomi Jackson
Steps on the Road to Making a Novel
A discussion of the process of making and editing a novel.
Sylvia Jones
On Sustaining Hope
How can creators maintain risilience, authenticity, and meanintful artistic production today? This talk will address approaching longevity and sustaining equalibrium in your craft and today's publishing world, attention economy, and anti-intellectual climate. We'll be tackling pressing challenges with innovative, actionable strategies.
Sandra Lim
Remarks on Endings
See how many ends this stick has!
- Montaigne
How does one end a poem? This talk considers the various expressive effects of modes of closure (and anti-closure) in a range of poems. How do poets decide upon, and mean through, an ending? What kinds of conceptual work do endings perform? We will look at some ways in which a few different poems set up their various finales.
Ashley Mayne
Un-Lecture: Silent Forest Walk
Let's experience the freedom of simply existing together in our senses in the Adirondack woods, in a walking meditation with no distractions or devices. Come dressed for the outdoors.
Darin Patterson
Humor Writing Roundtable: Comedy in the World
Join Darin Patterson for a roundtable discussion about humor in writing, comedy in the media & today's world at large, and any other questions folks may have.
Darin Patterson
Quips & Giggles: How to Use Humor to Get Your Point Across
People have used humor to express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings to audiences; from stand-up comedy and sitcoms, to sketch comedy and satirical essays, comedy has been a conduit to establish connections with others and convey emotions that can leave a long-lasting impression. In this lecture, we'll delve into the different forms of humor, why it has such a strong effect on people, and how best to use humor to emphasize your writing.
Mark Pawlak
The Poetic Line: Theory & Praxis
Drawing on My Deniversity, a Denise Levertov memoir, and on Levertov's craft essays: "On the Function of the Line", "Line-breaks, Stanza Spaces, and the Inner Voice", and "Technique and Tune-up".
Caroline Rayner
Keeping Everything
What is it for a form to be maximal? How can keeping and listening to everything accumulate; how do the events of our lives, road trips, and friendships inform that accumulation; and how can that be filtered and reordered?
David Ryan
Anecdote, Story & Experience
What is the difference between an anecdote and a story? I mean, in practical terms: why do certain pieces of writing seem to transcend the anecdotal and feel like they are happening to the reader? What is it that opens the words up to an immediacy beyond words—into something more like pure experience? How do we take an anecdote and turn it into that experience?
Michael Seidlinger
Ego Death
A heart-to-heart talk about the craft of writing across a career, including the various hurdles and harms that can cause one's ego to inflate or deflate, which can result in losing your purpose.
Michael Seidlinger
How to Find Your Own Perfect Days
In Wim Wenders’s masterful film Perfect Days (2023), Hirayama is a public toilet cleaner working in Tokyo. He lives a balanced, and for some banal, life that not only is functional but also by all accounts blissful. Hirayama is happy, lives in the moment, and values each moment as it passes. In this lecture, we'll explore what it means to find mental and physical balance. We'll explore how doing so can help create mindfulness that will help protect you as you navigate the uncertainties, the highs and lows, of a writing career.
Kem Joy Ukwu
Discovering Goals as Propulsion
Having goals as a writer can provide motivation and momentum for literary creation. While choosing writing-related goals can clarify, certify and/or change what writers want to achieve with their work, how can the act of discovering goals propel a writer through phases and pathways of a literary journey?
Kem Joy Ukwu
Goals & Gravity in Story Creation (& Recreation)
When writing and revising drafts of fiction, what are the intentions and objectives of the writer? What are the goals of the writer regarding the reader's reactions? What are effective strategies to create and achieve the determined goals? And how can the significance of the work be found (or created) during the writing process?