Writers to Head East
Big names flock to Southampton summer program
 Jennifer Landes |
(2/21/2008) Stony Brook Southampton will enhance its annual Southampton Writers Conference with additional children’s literature and screenwriting conferences this summer.
The dates for the conferences, which are offered as part of the school’s Master of Fine Arts Program in Writing and Literature, are July 16 to 27 for the writers’ conference, July 9 to 13 for the children’s literature conference, and July 30 to Aug. 3 for the screenwriting conference.
Last Thursday, Robert Reeves, a professor at Southampton who is also the director of the master’s program and writers’ conference, credited the character of the program and conference for its sustained success. “If you look at the tone of other M.F.A. programs, they’re all terribly earnest. . . . We have a good time and hold people to high standards.”
Lou Ann Walker, who is the director of the children’s conference, said last Thursday that Richard Peck, a Newbery Award winner from the American Library Association, will be the keynote speaker.
Other confirmed faculty members include Mitchell Kriegman, who created and produces “Bear in the Big Blue House” and “Clarissa Explains It All” for television, the authors Gregory Galloway and Tor Seidler, and Cindy Kane, a book editor. Gahan Wilson, a New Yorker cartoonist and children’s book illustrator, will also participate and has designed posters for this year’s events. Jules Feiffer, a faculty member, designed artwork for the conference brochures.
Ms. Walker said she ran into Mr. Wilson on Main Street in Sag Harbor and asked him, “Don’t you want to do a poster for us?” Mr. Reeves added that running into the illustrator “on a walk was indicative of the talent in the area, something unique to the East End that we are taking advantage of, as we have an obligation to do.”
Annette Handley Chandler, director of the screenwriting conference, was the executive producer of “Ansel Adams: The Documentary,” directed by Ric Burns. The conference will have programs for both beginning and advanced screenwriters. The faculty will include Malia Scotch Marmo, who wrote “Hook” and “Madeline,” and Andrew Bienen, who co-wrote “Boys Don’t Cry.” Two writers of books on how to write screenplays will teach workshops and other screenwriters, producers, and arts professionals will participate.
The Southampton Writers Conference, now in its 33rd year, will include the writers Frank McCourt, Billy Collins, Kaylie Jones, and other familiar faces, but will also add Amy Hempel, Alan Alda, and Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for his poetry.
According to Mr. Reeves, people’s impression of the conference is that “12 days is not really writing; it’s talking about writing.” But the workshops are so intense that after five days participants say, “Please let us go home. Then they go into an altered state. They get energized, make friends,” he said. “It’s so life-altering it scares me, I don’t want that responsibility.”
The ideal participants, he said, were “grown-ups who care about writing. Our primary students are not young people right out of college, but mid or post-career professionals, who are doing other things.”
Mr. Reeves said the M.F.A. program had recently been accredited, which was required when Stony Brook University took it over from Long Island University. As a result, the school can now actively recruit and begin to build on its existing program and graduate the students who stayed on from the Southampton College program. But already, he said, they are receiving more applications for the 15 to 20 students they plan to take in the fall and the 5 to 10 additional students they will take for the spring semester.
The program will also be expanding to Stony Brook’s Manhattan campus with classes offered there during the school’s regular term with the option to go out to the Southampton campus for the conference for credit or to take other classes over the summer.
The Manhattan program will provide a winter edition for the school’s literary periodical, “The Southampton Review,” which will continue to produce its summer issue at the Southampton campus.
“It’s useful for M.F.A. students to get the experience of producing a high-quality literary periodical and earn credits toward their degree,” Mr. Reeves said, adding that it was a great way to show what the school can do.