38th Annual CC Literary Conference examines ‘Perspective’

“Perspective” is the theme for the 38th Annual Casper College Literary Conference, Thursday and Friday, Sept. 26 and 27. All conference activities will occur in the Goodstein Foundation Library, Rooms 215a and 215b and are free and open to the public.

Focused on the theme of “Perspective,” the conference will let this year’s four guest writers, Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Matt Daly, James Fujinami Moore, and Chad Hanson, help attendees form ways of seeing the world and thinking about being in the world. According to Joseph Campbell, literary conference director and English instructor, writers can help us see the power of nature and technology, in thinking about family, and about trauma.

The conference will begin on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. with a reading from Chad Hanson, followed by his workshop titled “Literary Horsepower: Deciding What You Care About and Committing to Craft.” During this workshop, Hanson will lead participants through a series of considerations focused on “Seven Steps to Becoming a Passably Successful Writer.” These considerations will look at subject matter and commitment, all of which relate to the process of producing stories, articles, or poems for publication.

A sociology and religion instructor at Casper College, Hanson is the author of a wide range of books, including the forthcoming title,” The Wild Horse Effect: Awe, Well-Being, and the Transformative Power of Nature.” He is also the director of the nonprofit Wyoming Mustang Institute.

The next workshop, beginning at 11 a.m., will feature Fujinami Moore, who will look at redaction poems, also known as erasure or blackout poetry. Titled “Looking Back: Some Notes on Redaction,” attendees will learn the formal technique of redaction that can often bend and invert the perspectives of power — between writer and text and between reader and poem. According to Fujinami Moore, attendees will explore specific technical advantages and disadvantages of certain forms of removing text and discuss the broader ethics and implications of withholding information from a reader.

Funinami Moore’s debut collection of poetry, “Indecent Hours,” was released in 2022. He is the winner of the 2023 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in Poetry, the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Outstanding Achievement Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the Golden Poppy’s Martin Cruz Smith Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry.

Following a lunch break, at 1:30 p.m., Fujinami Moore will return for a reading.

The afternoon workshops will begin at 2. Hanson will be back with a nonfiction workshop where participants will consider the values and perspectives they bring to the critical issues we face today as a society. During this workshop, Hanson will have participants start a piece of writing with the potential to spark or inspire change.

At the same time, the other workshop will be led by Daly, who describes his workshop as a “generative workshop.” During “Transparent Structure: How Source Material Invites Poetic Forms,” students “… will play with possibilities for finding invented poetic forms inspired by the structural elements of the source material for poems.” Students will also look closely “… at the structural elements of art, natural and found objects, nonpoetic texts, and physical movements to invite new forms of organization to their poetic efforts.”

Daly is the author of two poetry collections: “The Invisible World” and “Between Here and Home,” and the chapbook, “Red State.” He received a Neltje Blanchan Award for writing inspired by the natural world and a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the Wyoming Arts Council. The executive director of Jackson Hole Writers, Daly is also the co-founder of Write to Thrive, an enterprise that brings reflective and creative writing practices to individuals and professional groups to cultivate creativity and well-being.

The activities on Friday will begin with a reading by Gonzalez James at 9:30 a.m. and will be followed at 10 with a workshop from Daly.

The “Call and Response: Poetic Practice as Conversation” workshop will feature Daly sharing stories of how individual poems and larger poetry projects have emerged from responses to various sources. The sources include art forms to landforms and linguistic phrases to movement phrases. He intends to motivate writers to “… find new perspectives and challenges from the instigating experiences which spark our writing.”

Gonzalez James’ workshop will begin at 11 a.m. Gonzalez James will show participants that voice is vital for anyone planning on publishing their work in “Making Yourself Heard: Writing Strong Voice in Fiction.” According to Gonzalez James, agents and editors frequently cite voice as the most critical element that makes a manuscript stand out from the slush pile. She will discuss six aspects of voice in fiction that are important for the writer to consider: inflection, dialect/jargon, saying precisely what you mean, sentence length and rhythm, characterization, and access.

Daly will start the afternoon’s events with a reading at 1:30, followed by Fujinami Moore’s workshop on poetry at 2.

During the workshop, Fujinami Moore will help students understand how creating new forms can help shape a poem’s content, how to “… pull forms from an existing poem, and how to use numeric repetition and recurrence to build a poem’s engine and complicate its associations.”

The other workshop at 2 p.m. will be a fiction workshop by Gonzalez James. She encourages attendees, through a Henry James quote, to “Be a person upon who nothing is lost.” She will discuss how writing with your five senses and your heart can invigorate your writing.

The free workshops require advance registration. For more information or to register, contact Campbell at 307-268-2387 or joseph.campbell@caspercollege.edu. The Goodstein Foundation Library is on the Casper College campus.

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