Conference Mission
Established in 1987, the Casper College and ARTCORE Literary Conference strives to serve the campus, the community, and the state by fostering an appreciation of literature by writers and nonwriters alike. In addition, the conference offers an opportunity to hear regional and national authors read and discuss their own and others' work; to participate in learning opportunities related to writing; to network with others interested in literature; and to receive encouragement and support.

??? Questions ???
Please contact Conference Director Terry Rasmussen or 307-268-2480.

Thursday, Sept. 22

• 2-4:30 p.m., CE 217 South –
  Laurie Kutchins workshop: "Uprising in the Creative Writing Process."
  Invite an uprising, a revolution, a transformation into your personal story. Start something new or bring a draft of something that needs an infusion of the new and unprecedented. Working closely with the energies of uprising, transition, and subversive imagination, this workshop will offer generative exercises for new writing or for a radical revision of an existing piece.
  
  
• 5:30 p.m., Summit Elementary School –
  Poetry and Potluck with Naomi Shihab Nye
  The Wyoming Humanities Council is bringing this award-winning poet, writer, and educator to Wyoming to culminate a year-long Civility Matters! initiative, supported in part by the Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources through funding by the Wyoming State Legislature. Out-of-town conference attendees can bring fast food or just themselves to the potluck.

Friday, Sept. 23

• 8:30-11 a.m., CE 217 South –
  Pam Houston workshop: "Into the Deep End: Getting a Piece of Writing off to a Running Start (w/o Boring Yourself to Death First)."
  The blank page is a bad mo' fo'. And sometimes we are so afraid of it we fill it up with a whole lot of throat clearing that, in the best case scenario we end up cutting later, and in the worst case scenario derails whatever energy sent us to the blank page in the first place. In this class we will talk about (and practice) getting the good stuff down first. The most salient image, the most memorable bit of dialogue, the white hot story moment that we are most terrorized by... We will worry less about trying to keep everything under control and more about getting all those electrically charged particles on paper.
  
  
• 8:30-11 a.m., CE 217 North –
  Patrick Madden workshop: "The Double Perspective in Memoir and Personal Essay."
  The most effective way to make individual experience interesting to a readership of strangers is to universalize it by reflecting from a current writerly perspective on past events lived in relative ignorance. This workshop will offer a brief theoretical framework and several examples of the double perspective, then give participants the chance to split their viewpoint on a piece they've written before (please bring at least three pages of your own memoir/personal essay to the class).
  
  
• 12-1:45 p.m., CE 217 North –
  Kristen Elias Rowley workshop: "Getting Published: Everything You Need to Know About Finding – and Getting – the Right Publisher for Your Book."
  Whether you've finished your manuscript, or are just getting started, this workshop will help you focus in on how to find the right publisher for your book. For fiction and nonfiction writers alike, this session will cover how to pitch your book to editors, how to identify which publishers to approach, how to make yourself and your manuscript appealing to publishers, and the pitfalls to avoid when submitting your material. A crash course in dealing with editors and publishers, this session will provide for plenty of Q&A time so that attendees will come away with a firm grasp on how to get noticed by an editor for all the right reasons. Participants are encouraged to bring a sample proposal or cover letter.
  
  
• 2-4:30 p.m., CE 217 South –
  Laurie Kutchins workshop (continued)
  
  
• 5-7 p.m. –
  Dinner at Poor Boys
  739 North Center Street
  
  
• Free Public Talks/Readings
  • 7:30 p.m., Durham Recital Hall, Aley Fine Arts Center – Laurie Kutchins: "Words From the Wind"
  • 8:30 p.m., Durham Recital Hall, Aley Fine Arts Center – Patrick Madden: "The Infinite Suggestiveness of Common Things"

Saturday, Sept. 24

• 8:30-11 a.m., CE 217 South –
  Pam Houston workshop (continued)
  
  
• 8:30-11 a.m., CE 217 North –
  Patrick Madden workshop (continued)
  
  
• 11 a.m. – 1:45 p.m., CE Vista Lounge –
  Manuscript critiques by Kristen Elias Rowley
  Proposal and manuscript sample of a chapter or two (50 pgs. max.) should be emailed on or before Sept. 1 to Kristen at krowley2@unlnotes.unl.edu with header clearly stating "Casper College and ARTCORE conference submission." Exact times for individual critiques will be posted in CE.
  
  
• Free Public Talks/Readings
  • 2 p.m., Goodstein Foundation Library lobby – Pam Houston: Contents May Have Shifted: "A Reading and Conversation About Places and Moving Between Them."
    
    
• 3 p.m., GFL lobby –
  Wyoming Arts Council – Fellowship winner announcements and readings
  
  
• 4 p.m., GFL lobby –
  Kristen Elias Rowley: "Book Business: Publishing with a University Press."
  
  
• 5 p.m., GFL lobby –
  Free reception, all invited.
  
  
• 9 p.m. – Metro Coffee Company, 241 S. David, downtown Casper,
  Open readings and poetry slam,
  – Emceed by George Vlastos.

Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays called A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards. She is the director of creative writing at U.C. Davis and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program, and at writer's conferences around the country and the world. She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Her new book, Contents May Have Shifted, will be published by W.W. Norton in early 2012.

Laurie Kutchins has published three books of poems: Between Towns, winner of the Texas Tech University Press First Book Award; The Night Path, which received the inaugural Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and Slope of the Child Everlasting (BOA Editions). Her poems and creative nonfiction have been published extensively in many anthologies and magazines, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Orion, Poetry, and Denver Quarterly. She directs the interdisciplinary creative writing program at James Madison University in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, and she has taught at the Summer Writers Conferences in Taos, N.M., and Jackson, Wyo. Kutchins was born and raised in Casper, Wyo., a community and state to which she maintains close ties.

Patrick Madden is the author of Quotidiana (Nebraska, 2010), winner of essay-category book of the year awards from Independent Publisher, ForeWord Reviews, and the Association for Mormon Letters. His essays have appeared in the Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, and other journals, as well as in the Best American Spiritual Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction anthologies. He is an associate professor at Brigham Young University and visiting faculty member at Vermont College's low-residency MFA program. In his spare time, he edits an anthology of classical essays and essay resources at www.quotidiana.org.

Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a "wandering poet." She has spent 37 years traveling the country and the world to lead writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity. The author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes, Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry reading series in the country. Her collection 19 Varieties of Gazelle was a finalist for the National Book Award. In January 2010 she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets.

George Vlastos has been a poetry-pusher for nearly two decades, finding the 'spoken word' to be as vital to his daily living as meals, mountainsides, making-up to his wife, and moderating the emotional moguls of their boys. His emcee credentials stretch as far as the island of Crete where he helped highland shepherds learn then perform in an impromptu gangsta-rap competition (the winner was chosen according to who aroused the most sheep bleatings) to inciting a packed room of Cheyenne's so-called troubled youth to calmly chant the entirety of Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road." Vlastos will emcee the open reading and poetry slam at the Metro Coffee Company, 241 South David in downtown Casper at 9 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 24.