Ninth annual spring writing workshops set

BOWLING GREEN, O.—The Creative Writing Program at Bowling Green State University is inviting area poets and fiction writers to participate in its spring 2007 Open Writing Workshops.

"The open workshops afford creative writers in our area the opportunity to come together and to share work in progress," said Wendell Mayo, a fiction writer on BGSU's creative writing faculty. "They're intensive workshops and include hands-on advice about preparing manuscripts for submission to editors and publication."

Over the past nine years, poets and fiction writers of all ages and backgrounds from Ohio, Michigan and Indiana have participated. BGSU's internationally known Creative Writing Program has been attracting literary talent from around the world for nearly 40 years. "It only makes sense," said Mayo, "to open our doors to writers in our region, especially northwest Ohio. Too many people write in isolation."

Many of BGSU's fiction writers and poets go on to distinguished careers, to receive fellowships and to win national literary prizes. BGSU also is home to the “Mid-American Review,” twice winner of the Ohioana Library Association's prize for the best literary magazine in Ohio.

This spring's workshop leaders include poet Christof Scheele, whose work has appeared widely in literary magazines such as Jubilat, Prairie Schooner and Verse, as well as in the online journal, Poetry Daily. In 2003, he won an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry. Last year, Three Sheets Press released “Eitherland,” a chapbook of his poems. Last fall, Scheele conducted a poetry workshop for the Northwest Ohio Writer's Forum.

Mayo also will be a leader at the spring workshop. Winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, he also has received a Fulbright to Lithuania, an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship and a Master Fellowship from the Indiana Commission. He is author of three books of fiction: a story collection, “Centaur of the North” (Arte Público Press), an Aztlán Prize winner and finalist in the Associated Writing Programs Award Series in Short Fiction; “B. Horror and Other Stories” (Livingston Press), and a novel-in-stories, “In Lithuanian Wood” (White Pine Press).   More than 80 of his short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including the Yale Review, Harvard Review and Chicago Review.

The writing workshops are open to the public and designed for poets and fiction writers of all levels of experience. Writers in the workshops share their work in a professional studio setting and receive commentary on works in progress and advice about publishing.

The spring workshops will be held Saturday, April 14, on the BGSU campus. Deadline to register is Monday, April 2.

For more details, call 419-372-8370 or visit http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/creative-writing.

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(Posted February 06, 2007)