C.E.J. Simons
Here We Go Again
Poetry
Craft Workshop
Repetition makes poetry. Poetry, as words arranged in order to produce memorable effects on the human ear and eye, depends on repetition in order to provide structure and to provide the mind with the opportunity to quickly grasp its sounds and shapes (if not its sense) and to retain these sounds and shapes for repetition to others. The long association between poetry and music, and between poetry and visual art, has given rise to a wide range of aural and visual techniques of repetition including the repetition of sounds, words, image patterns, and lines. In this workshop, participants will review some rhetorical techniques of word repetition in poetry including anadiplosis (‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty…’), anaphora, diaphora, epanalepsis (‘Blood hath brought blood, and blows have answered blows’), epistrophe, epizeuxis (‘Never, never, never, never, never’), polysyndeton, symploce, etc., including some well-known examples from English poetry. The workshop will also review some techniques of line repetition in stanzaic and fixed poetic forms including the pantoum, triolet, and villanelle. Participants will have time to practice one or more of these techniques of repetition by writing a few lines, stanzas, or a short poem.
Christopher Simons is Senior Associate Professor of Literature at International Christian University in Tokyo. He has held the Harper-Wood Studentship in Creative Writing at St John’s College Cambridge. His most recent poetry collection is Flight Risk (Isobar Press, 2021). His criticism and poetry have appeared in numerous UK publications including the TLS.
Recent poetry books: Flight Risk (Isobar Press, 2021); Underground Facility (Isobar Press, 2018); One More Civil Gesture (Isobar Press, 2015); No Distinguishing Features (wordwolf press, 2011).
Charles Kowalski
The Magic of Humor
Craft Workshop
Fiction, Nonfiction
What wizardry lies in writing magical symbols that make anyone who looks at them fall into helpless laughter? Here, we explore ways to infuse writing with laugh-out-loud humor, such as combining divergent situations to make a comic premise, creating comic characters, and running dialogue and narration through “funny filters.”
Of all the ways to make people laugh, one of the hardest is through the written word. This workshop will present several techniques for infusing writing with laugh-out-loud humor, including:
Charles Kowalski is the author of the award-winning thriller Mind Virus, the political/espionage thriller The Devil’s Son, the historical fantasy Simon Grey and the March of a Hundred Ghosts, and several short stories. When not writing, he teaches at Tokai University.
David Gilbey
Reeling and Writhing: A Poetry Editing Workshop Preparing for Publication
Craft Workshop online
Poetry
A closed workshop, requiring participants to submit poems before the conference as well as read and be ready to discuss the work submitted by others. To join, contact David directly at debidogirubi@gmail.com
The workshop is based on the familiar and successful structure and strategy as offered by John Gribble at the 2008 JWC and my own over the last six years. It will involve my sending out a brief to intending participants requiring submission of drafts of poems, then, before the actual workshop, reading and making comments on each of the participant’s poems and finally, participating in the workshop discussion itself at the conference.
This workshop allows writers to work on a poem or two in readiness for publication, recognising that conference delegates are themselves writers, teachers and editors and that there are both personal and professional benefits from a closely-focussed discussion of emerging texts. So the purpose of this workshop is to give a small group of poets the opportunity to meet, read and discuss in depth, a sample of each other’s work. The workshop will be open to a limited number of participants but writers of varying degrees of experience will be welcome. The session will be closed and of two hours duration. There will be two parts to the workshop: preparation and participation. Preparation also has two parts: submitting and close reading. Those who sign up for the session will be contacted before the conference.
Poet David Gilbey was Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia, and the founding President of Wagga Wagga Writers Writers. His three collections of poems are Under the Rainbow (1996), Death and the Motorway (2008) and Pachinko Sunset (2016). He has taught English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in Sendai, Japan 1996, 2000 and 2007.
Eli K.P. William
How to Build Worlds
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
All fiction takes place in an imagined world, however much that world may or may not resemble our own. Thus creating worlds is an essential skill for any writer of stories. It becomes especially crucial, however, when the fictional world being conceived diverges from what we consider real or familiar.
In this presentation, Eli K.P. William will offer practical advice on world-building, with a focus on science fiction. He will describe his own process in writing The Jubilee Cycle trilogy and draw on examples from other authors.
Eli K.P. William is the author The Jubilee Cycle, a science fiction trilogy set in a future Tokyo. The series includes Cash Crash Jubilee, The Naked World, and A Diamond Dream. He has also contributed book reviews and essays in English and Japanese to such publications as the Japan Times, the Pacific Rim Review of Books, and Subaru. His translation of the Japanese novel, A Man, by Keiichiro Hirano, is a bestseller, and he has translated essays and short stories by some of Japan’s most renowned authors for Granta, Monkey, Kyoto Journal, the Southern Review, and more. Follow him on Twitter: @Dice_Carver or visit his homepage: elikpwilliam.com
Gregory Dunne
Jeremy Seligson
Teachings on Poetry from the Uncollected Notebooks of Cid Corman
Short Lecture with Q&A
Poetry
The uncollected notebooks of Cid Corman are explored for their teachings on poetry and the life of poetry. The notebooks span the years 1959 to 1975, a time when he was maturing as a poet and as an editor. The ongoing relevance of his poetics are shared and discussed.
Some years ago, the late American Kyoto-based expatriate poet, Cid Corman gifted Fred Jeremy Seligson, an American poet living in Korea, a collection of his notebooks/journals as a token of his appreciation for the financial support that Seligson had offered him during particularly difficult years. These notebooks span the crucial time period between 1959 and 1975, when Corman first arrived in Kyoto and was actively publishing his seminal literary magazine Origin and maturing as a poet. Although Corman’s other journals and papers were purchased and placed in research libraries after his death in 2004, these notebooks remained outstanding and uncollected. At present, Jeremy and I are engaged in creating a book, comprised of selections from the notebooks that will serve poets and those interested in poetry with gleanings from the notebooks of Corman’s most salient insights and teachings on the art and craft of poetry. This presentation will share our findings regarding Corman’s poetics. In doing this, we will show how Corman’s ideas concerning the art and craft of poetry remain vital and will be ever relevant.
Gregory Dunne has published prose and poetry in such venues as The American Poetry Review, Catamaran, Prairie Schooner, Manoa, Willow Springs, The Mainichi Shimbun, Crazyhorse, Kyoto Journal, Poetry East. He contributed to The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders. (The Poetry Foundation and McSweeney’s. 2013.) His books of poetry are Fistful of Lotus (Elizabeth Forrest, 2000), Home Test (Adastra Press, 2009), and Other/Wise (Isobar Press, 2019). His critical memoir, Quiet Accomplishment: Remembering Cid Corman was published in 2014 (Ekstasis Editions). He is associate poetry editor at Kyoto Journal and teaches in the Faculty of Comparative Culture at Miyazaki International College.
Fred Jeremy Seligson J.D. Indiana University, lived in Kyoto from 1975 to 1977 where he participated in Cid Corman’s weekly workshops and began writing poetry. He has taught at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Wonkwang University and most recently Yonsei University, all in the Seoul area.
He has published poems in Hummingbird, Ocata, Otherwise Engaged, chapbooks in Longhouse, poetry books Daughters and Vietnam Diary (bilingually in AEIOU France) and won the Dangun Poetry Award for Foreigners in Korea. Also he has authored Oriental Birth Dreams and Queen Jin’s Handbook of Pregnancy. He is currently working on a prose work about his days in Kyoto, The Man Who Fell In Love With A Tree and one on Korean Dragon Dreams.
Iain Maloney
Storytelling: Scaffolding, Subtext and Secondhand Scenes
Short Lecture with Q&A, Craft Workshop
Fiction, Nonfiction
Christopher Booker famously claimed that there are only seven plots, and all stories are a variation on these archetypes. Whether we are working with fiction or non-fiction writers are storytellers, but too often we concentrate on the story and forget about the telling. We are so caught up in what that how becomes an afterthought. As an editor, this is where most books that cross my desk fail, and is the most common reason for a manuscript being rejected.
Using examples from published and unpublished manuscripts, I will examine typical problems with drafts, particularly in areas where early-stage writers commonly slip up, and suggest ways of dealing with these issues. The talk will also involve a workshop element.
Dr Iain Maloney is Associate Professor at Sugiyama Jogakuen University in Nagoya. He is the author of seven books, writes for the Japan Times and is a professional editor.
Isobar Press
This Year at Isobar
Reading with Q&A
Poetry
Paul Rossiter will introduce this year’s publications from Isobar Press, and will read from Robert MacLean’s Wintermoon, which distils twenty years of living and studying Zen in Kyoto into a single seasonal cycle seen through the lens of haiku. Taylor Mignon will introduce VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1978, his anthology of visual work from Kitasono Katue’s legendary avant-garde magazine VOU. Philip Rowland will introduce and read from An Open Parenthesis, his striking new volume of minimalist poems. Janine Beichman will introduce and read from This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems, her translations of poems from all stages in the career of the important twentieth-century poet Ishigaki Rin.
Paul Rossiter has published ten books of poetry since 1995. After retiring from teaching at the University of Tokyo in 2012, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in publishing English-language poetry from Japan, and English translations of modernist and contemporary Japanese poetry. More information can be found at: https://isobarpress.com
Janine Beichman has published translations of Masaoka Shiki, Ōoka Makoto, and Yosano Akiko. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and America PEN, and is a winner of the 2019-2020 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.
Taylor Mignon is a poet, editor, translator and university lecturer living in Saitama. He cotranslated Distant Frogs: Selected Senryu by Gengorō (2007), and led the translation and editing of Bearded Cones & Pleasure Blades: The Collected Poems of Torii Shōzō (2013). He is a cofounding editor of Tokyo Poetry Journal.
Philip Rowland’s poetry collections include Something Other Than Other (Isobar Press, 2016). He is the founding editor of NOON: journal of the short poem, editor of the Isobar anthology NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (2019), and co-editor of the anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013).
Jenna Hammer (aka CoffeeQuills)
Spinning Web Fiction for Fun & Profit
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction, Other Genre
Game Writing
Quick discussion of what authors and writers want, going into the pros that web fiction can offer and the pitfalls that are hidden among the opportunities, and showing writers and authors that – in addition to traditional publishing and indie publishing – web fiction can be a 3rd option in their writing career.
Wander deeper into the realms of internet writing and find places where writers can explore the opportunities web fiction offers through serializations (in which a story can be uploaded chapter by chapter even as it is being written) such as Kindle Vella and Radish, or interactive writing with Choice of Games and Tales, in addition to the benefits that free places such as Wattpad, HoneyFeed, and Royal Road offer.
CoffeeQuills, of Tokyo, is an embodiment of their slogan Many QuillsMany Genres. They are a game developer with 4thewords, stream daily writing sprints on Twitch, and have indie published three books: Blasted Research, Digital Lights, Spells, Snow, & Sky. They exist on coffee and seafood.
Joan Bailey
Pitch Writing: Tips on Crafting a Solid Story Idea
Short Lecture with Q&A online
Nonfiction, Career
This online pitch writing workshop will discuss and practice strategies for writing effective pitches that editors want to read. Learn the basic components of a pitch, what helps a pitch stand out, and what to avoid. The goal is a clear, concise pitch that gets an editor’s attention.
Crafting a good pitch, like any other piece of writing, requires time, effort, and often a few drafts. This online workshop will look at pitches for different publications on a variety of topics. We will talk about what every pitch should include, the questions an editor wants every pitch to answer, and how to personalize it while keeping the tone professional.
We will analyze example pitches to see how the writer put them together to match the voice and goals of the publication. Attendees will receive sample pitches, and there will be plenty of time for questions and answers.
Joan Bailey is a freelance writer based in Japan. Her work focuses on food, farming, and farmers markets, and can be found at Atlas Obscura, The Japan Times, Modern Farmer, Civil Eats, Tokyo Weekender, Savvy Tokyo, and Outdoor Japan. Visit joandbailey.com to read your fill!
John Rucynski
A Passion for Japan: The Process of Editing a Collection of Personal Narratives
Short Lecture with Q&A
Nonfiction
Editing a collection of personal narratives is a complicated, multistage process. For the presenter, this process started with many years of pondering the question “What can I add to the available nonfiction English-language books about Japan?” and ended with the publication of A Passion for Japan: A Collection of Personal Narratives (BlueSky Publishing, 2022). The presenter will guide participants through the process with a focus on the following key questions:
1) How do I come up with a good theme (and subtheme)?
2) How do I prepare a call for submissions and solicit contributors?
3) How do I share important writing guidelines (and get contributors to follow them)?
4) How do I offer constructive feedback on very personal writing?
5) How do I respect individual writing styles while also maintaining a consistent theme and tone?
John Rucynski is associate professor in the Center for Liberal Arts and Language Education at Okayama University. In addition to regularly publishing articles about language education, he has edited two volumes on humor in language acquisition, co-written three textbooks, and edited a collection of personal narratives about life in Japan.
Jillian Marshall
Reimagining Memoir: Storytelling as Analytical Inquiry
Short Lecture with Q&A online
Nonfiction
What lies between the traditional boundaries of non-fiction genres? This presentation examines the analytical possibilities of memoir and storytelling. Bookended by presentation and discussion, we will read a chapter from my new book as a case-study in analytical memoir, learning about Japanese music culture in the process.
This hybrid presentation and group reading introduces new approaches to memoir devised during my time in (and departure from) academia. Following with a brief lecture questioning the limits of non-fiction genre — what does the slippage between memoir and ethnography reveal? — we’ll examine analytical memoir by reading a chapter of my new book, Japanthem: Counter-Cultural Experiences, Cross-Cultural Remixes. Originally written as part of my doctoral thesis in Japanese ethnomusicology, the selected chapter and Japanthem on whole posit memoir and storytelling as colloquial sites of anthropological inquiry (in this case, getting subtly bullied by my Buddhist dance teacher in Akita Prefecture). With the Q and A that follows, I ultimately hope to inspire new possibilities in non-fiction writing and bridge not just the intellectual rigor of academia with the public sphere, but cultural (mis)understandings between Japan, the US, and beyond in the process.
Jillian Marshall, PhD, is a writer, educator, and musician who champions public intellectualism. Her first book, Japanthem: Counter-Cultural Experiences, Cross-Cultural Remixes, debuted in April with Three Rooms Press. Jillian’s other writings have been published by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Cornell University Press, and Music Television.
Kelly Quinn, The Font
The State of the Font
Reading, Short Lecture with Q&A
Instructional, Career
This presentation will explain what is happening at The Font Journal — changes in the editorial staff, submission numbers, subscription numbers, data about the number of visitors, and publication opportunities for writers.
There will also be a reading featuring recent contributors to The Font.
The Font Journal is well-known to many members of the Japan Writers Conference community as a publication for language teachers and learners. Since 2013, The Font has published essays, poetry and fiction pieces from language teachers around the world. James Crocker founded and has been Chief Editor from its foundation. James has been on hiatus since March 2022. This presentation will introduce the new editor and provide some data metrics on visitor and submission rates, where are submissions coming from, who is reading The Font, and some information about publication and editorial opportunities at The Font. Also, because of the long-time familiarity of the JWC with The Font, it is hoped that there will be a chance for suggestions and advice from other members about ways to improve and expand opportunities for both writers and the publication itself.
The featured readers include Michael Pronko, Steve Redford, and Jared Kubokawa.
Kelly Quinn teaches English in Japan. He is the author of several mediocre academic articles and the book Japanese History You Should Know, IBC publishing. He is currently Chief Editor of The Font.
Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi
Good News for Authors: Sourcing Expert Advice for Free
Short Lecture with Q&A. online
Instructional
For writers on a budget, knowing what to spend money on and what can be sourced for free, need not be a source of frustration or regrets. Find out about a plethora of free resources that will help you gain confidence in deciding what services are truly essential to pay for and what you can best do on your own.
There’s currently a mantra in the publishing industry that’s working to our advantage as writers. That is, “give away expert advice for free, then hook your writer with a paid service.” The expert advice found online covers everything a new or experienced author needs to know in this rapidly changing publishing world. These experts know that before they can hook an author onto a paid service, they had best offer to educate us why we need their services. The good news is that some of these free offers are so useful, so effective, you might not need the paid services in the long run. In this presentation, Liane will discuss her top free, or near-free resources, most of them a click away, to help authors at every stage of the writing process. Learn about websites, email subscription services, YouTube and podcast platforms, by both famous influencers and lesser known experts, offering practical information, community support and wonderful writing incentives.
Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi is an artist and writer for many publications during her thirty years in Tokyo (1987-2017). Since moving to Israel, she writes for The Jerusalem Post Magazine and is the author of the recently published memoir: The Wagamama Bride: A Jewish Family Saga Made in Japan.
Marc Antomattei
Watch Your Steps! How I Sidestepped Potential Legal Pitfalls and Lived to Publish Another Day
What do you do when you face a potential legal problem? As the author of four books, legal issues arose with everything I published. In this lecture, I will present an anthology of four separate but complete stories about my experiences of what I did to overcome legal hurdles to publish my books successfully. Each story is distinguished from the next but tied together by the theme of avoiding the law.
Story 1: The Photograph (Licensing)
Story 2: The Threat (Libel)
Story 3: Business Identity Theft (U.S. Public Domain Part 1)
Story 4: 001 License To Steal (U.S. Public Domain Part 2)
Disclaimer: This presentation is not legal advice and should not be taken as such; it is simply my experiences of what I did when faced with legal adversity.
Debonair sartorial guru Marc Antomattei started his spirits journey as a Japanese whisky reviewer and commentator for his men’s lifestyle YouTube channel Gentleman Masterclass. Writing and publishing the book 50 Japanese Whiskies in 2020 made Antomattei the first African-American to author a book about Japanese whisky.
Meg Eden Kuyatt
Revising with Focus: The Thesis of the Novel
Craft Workshop online
Fiction, Career
Once you’ve written a draft, it can be difficult to figure out where to go next. A range of people will provide feedback, but who is right? How do you go about discerning what to edit and what to keep the same? To effectively edit, it’s critical to identify a novel’s underlying argument—its heart. In this workshop, we’ll discuss the “thesis statement” approach to editing, looking at examples of novels’ “thesis statements,” as well as providing exercises to help you identify and hone in on your novel’s thesis.
Meg Eden Kuyatt is a 2020 Pitch Wars mentee, and teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World (Press 53, 2020) and children’s novels, most recently Selah’s Guide to Normal (Scholastic, 2023). Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal and Instagram at @meden_author.
Michael Frazier
O Death, Where is Your Sting?: A Poetics of Hope!
Craft Workshop
Poetry
Turn on the news and it is inevitable to see a news broadcast about someone dying. By a virus, a health condition, a natural disaster, or a twisted mind with a weapon. This generative workshop is a poetics on death and grappling with the fear death induces by unmasking the demon and realizing our hope.
This is a generative workshop for those interested in writing about and through the reality of being ephemeral beings in a world that is posed against our fragile lives. We will read poems anticipating, about, and responding to death. Some poets may include Danez Smith, Safia Elhillo, Li Young Lee, Max Ritvo, Mary Oliver, and others. We will read anti-eulogies, psalms, palindromes, and other poems that resist the inevitable. We will understand how they write around and through the concept of dying, with particular interest in how hope is the hinge of their poetry. We will write our own poems that face our fears.
Michael Frazier is a poet and high school teacher living in Kanazawa, Japan. Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominated, his poems appear in Poetry Daily, The Offing, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.
Michael Pronko
Making Scenes: Types, Elements, Effects, Integration
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
Scenes linger in readers’ minds. Recall a great novel and you might think of character first, but always a character doing or saying something amazing. That’s a scene. This talk will consider ways to conceive, construct, and energize scenes in novels.
Scenes are the most essential building block of novels. By attending to the complexities of scenes, novels can be strongly developed, not just structurally, but in terms of affective quality and narrative energy. This talk will first look at types of scenes and consider where different scene types can be placed in the larger narrative. The essential elements of scenes will be examined together with their effects, both in terms of the narrative and the kinds of emotions evoked. Other issues such as pacing, balance, dialogue, irony, and opening and closing lines will also be discussed. Lastly, this talk will think about how to position and integrate scenes for a stronger overall sequence of scenes. By focusing not just on structural issues, but on emotional issues, the impact of scenes can be re-examined and given deeper consideration. Examples will be drawn from well-known novels and films.
Michael Pronko has written for many publications but now focuses on the award-winning Detective Hiroshi series set in Tokyo. He also has three collections of writing about Tokyo and runs the website Jazz in Japan. He teaches American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University.
Tokyo Zangyo. Raked Gravel Press (2021)
Tokyo Traffic. Raked Gravel Press (2020).
Inbound/Outbound Japan. Tokyo: Kinseido Publishing (2020).
The Moving Blade. Raked Gravel Press (2017).
The Last Train. Raked Gravel Press (2017).
Motions and Moments: More Essays on Tokyo. Raked Gravel Press (2015).
Nithin Coca (live), Chie Matsumoto (online), Joan Bailey (online)
Cooperatives and Self-Ownership for Writers
Panel Discussion
Nonfiction
Unfiltered was created in 2020 as a journalist and reader-member-owned and operated platform for writing. Join three journalist-members of Unfiltered as they share why the cooperative model can be a viable alternative for writers as they share their story and those from other creative cooperatives around the world.
Journalists face new challenges as the industry comes under the control of a few large media outlets. In particular, Japanese media organizations lack diversity and lean toward narrow gatekeeping. The multi-lingual members of Unfiltered decided to create a place to share a broader range of stories and vantage points, to give voice to the marginalized. In less than two years, Unfiltered has covered sex workers and Covid-19, the Ainu and human rights, and freedom of the press in Japan among others.
While writer cooperatives are relatively new, cooperatives have long empowered workers around the world. Three Unfiltered journalist members will discuss the cooperative model, reader inclusion, and the process of setting up and managing a media cooperative. We’ll also share how other new, innovative cooperatives allow writers, photographers, and artists to create content outside of the traditional business model in places like Hong Kong, the US, and Europe.
Chie Matsumoto is a freelance journalist covering mainly social justice issues and marginalized communities. Her work appears on Unfiltered.coop, and in Gender Expression Guidebook (2021) (Japanese) and State of Sexual Harassment in Media (2020) (Japanese) among others.
Nithin Coca is a Japan-based, Asia-focused freelance journalist who covers climate, environment and human rights across the region. He’s also the author of Traveling Softly and Quietly, a travel memoir published in 2013.
Joan Bailey is a freelance food journalist based in Japan. Her work can be found at Unfiltered.coop, Atlas Obscura, The Japan Times, Modern Farmer, Civil Eats, and joandbailey.com
Sara Ellis
Why MFA When You Can BB?
Short Lecture with Q&A, Craft Workshop
Fiction
I will give a short overview of Big Bang and talk about my experiences as well as research and input from other participants producing original work. A workshop component will be in the second part of the presentation with Q & A, time allowing.
A Big Bang is a writing challenge wherein writers are paired with artists in the creation of a longform fic to a specific deadline. Writers take part in Big Bangs for a variety of reasons: love of fandom, to experiment with original concepts, and for the comradery and intensive experience of writing long works to a deadline. Nevertheless, writing within specific fandoms also provides writers (and readers) with a powerful opportunity to discover strengths as well as diagnose and target weak points in their writing. While BB story concepts range from old Hollywood romances to retellings of Jurassic Park or blended Star Wars/Star Trek canons, the common points allow writers to better target where they might improve in areas such as pacing, characterization, and exposition. This presentation will focus on the experience and benefits of participating in Big Bangs to improve craft and produce original longform work. I will be citing my own experiences and research as well as that of other BB participants.
Sara Kate Ellis is a Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow and attended the Milford Science Fiction Workshop in 2017. Her recent stories have appeared in Analog, Fusion Fragment and Metaphorosis.
“Snow on Snow” Visions, Shadowdance (Bulgaria)
“In-Flight Damage” Analog
“Collapse Noise,” Fusion Fragment
“The Ratio of Silence” Space and Time
“From Farm to Table: Superman as the Great Provider,” presented at the Superhero Project, Wolfsburg Catholic University, Germany
“Women at Refrigerators: The Gender Politics of Food and Eating in Supergirl,” Genre en Series, France
“To Die For” Sanvers Zine
“Sturm und Clang,” Metaphorosis
Sara Fujimura
Book Signing Superstar
Short Lecture with Q&A
Career
You have a book signing! How do you look like a professional even if it is your first event ever? Spring 2022 Tempe Library Writer-in-Residence, Sara Fujimura walks you through a roll-and-go author kit that all easily fits in a piece of carry-on luggage. Author checklist included!
From small library events and school visits to major U.S. book festivals and huge anime cons, young adult author Sara Fujimura has signed books at all of them. Though she is now a hybrid author, you may be surprised to know that many of Fujimura’s biggest signings were BEFORE she was traditionally published with Tor Teen. This workshop walks participants through setting up a simple but effective signing table with components that will all easily fit in a piece of carry-on luggage. Fujimura discusses what to do when your signing is a complete failure (it happens!) and how to course-correct afterward. A take-home worksheet makes sure authors show up at their events with all the necessary components. It also helps authors clarify their why for each event, collect important metrics, and offers tips on how to level up their book-signing game.
Sara Fujimura is a hybrid author of four award-winning young adult books: Tanabata Wish, Breathe, Every Reason We Shouldn’t (Tor Teen), and Faking Reality (Tor Teen). She is represented by Ann Rose of the Prospect Agency. Every Reason We Shouldn’t was named an NPR Best Book of 2020. www.sarafujimura.com
Sarah Coomber
Moment by Moment: Demystifying the Writing of a First Memoir
Craft Workshop online
Nonfiction, Other Genre
Memoir
Telling your story in memoir form can be daunting—you have a lifetime’s worth of experiences to draw from. Where to begin?
Moment by moment.
In this craft workshop, I will share several strategies to help you on your way.
Memoirs, like life, progress moment by moment. The most important thing is not whether your particular story is full of excitement, tragedy or coincidence. What matters is what you bring to the moments in your story—how you view, interpret, reflect on and react to them.
Infusing moments with meaning will help you uncover your larger story. This can occur with sensory explorations, analogies, linked memories, about-ness and more.
I will share what I wish I’d known before writing my first memoir and will coach you through several of my favorite moment-developing strategies.
Attendees are encouraged to bring a scene or observation to explore.
Sarah Coomber is the author of The Same Moon (Camphor Press, 2020), a memoir about two years she spent regrouping in rural Japan after wrecking her Minnesota life. She has worked in public relations and journalism, coaches writing, has degrees in creative writing and journalism, and achieved level four certification in the Seiha School of koto. https://sarahcoomber.com/
Swastika Jajoo, Masayuki Kobayashi, Trishit Banerjee
Curating a Community Newsletter: The Story of ‘iro’
Panel Discussion
Instructional, Career
This will be a discussion geared towards understanding how community revitalisation and town rebuilding can benefit from art and artists, focusing specifically on the story of ‘iro’, a student-led newsletter launched in April 2022 in Futaba, Fukushima.
We aim to first introduce our project Palette Camp, which was launched in 2021 as a means to help create a sustainable future for Futaba, a town located in Fukushima severely affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. We will then shift focus to how writing and recording become intrinsic to any effort directed towards community building, sharing how stories need to be prioritised in our world today that seems to have become overwhelmed by statistics. We will then share how we conceptualised our newsletter, shedding light on challenges we faced along the way, what has been most rewarding during this journey and our vision for the future.
Masayuki, Trishit and Swastika are the team behind Palette Camp. Masayuki Kobayashi is the Founder of Rurio and Palette Camp, and Trishit and Swastika (Hiba) are Co-founders.
Trishit Bannerjee has worked extensively with journalism in both Japan and India. He won the Grand Prize at the 2019 All Japan English Presentation Contest. His article on community rebuilding was also featured on Japan Times in May 2022 (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2022/05/30/issues/rebuilding-community-starting-scratch/)
Besides being a poet, Swastika Jajoo was one of the 100 young journalists selected for the Future News Worldwide Summit by the British Council (2021 Edition): https://www.britishcouncil.org/future-news-worldwide
Trishit Bannerjee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r7LwWZi11s&t=342s
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2022/05/30/issues/rebuilding-community-starting-scratch/
Swastika Jajoo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIKgRfJLCOI&t=80s
https://theseventhwave.co/three-poems-by-swastika-jajoo/
Swastika Jajoo
Poetry as a Social Space
Craft Workshop
Poetry
Poetry as a Social Space
This workshop will focus on how poetry, especially spoken word, can be used to reimagine the social spaces we inhabit. I would like for the participants to reflect closely on the issues our society faces today, and urge them to think about how poetry can be a tool for visualising social change. I will make a brief presentation about how poetry has been used in various social contexts in our world, sharing excerpts with a focus on India and Japan since these are the two landscapes I am most familiar with.
I would like to begin by inviting the participants to contemplate the meanings of the words ‘society’ and ‘poetry,’ and create a virtual mind map simultaneously as they share their opinions. I will then proceed to talk about the traditional perception of poetry as a formal art, often out of reach for ordinary people, and contrast it with how poetry is becoming increasingly democratised in our world today, and how the stage is now society itself. I will then share some visuals from how spoken word poetry started out, and also share contemporary instances of it being used to stir social change. I will also talk about the dangers that come with poetry for social change — very often, we see poets appropriate the experience of others rather than passing the mic where they should be. Finally, I will have the participants form groups where they discuss a specific social theme and generate short verses pertinent to their chosen theme which will be shared with everyone towards the end as a means of closing the loop.
Originally from India, Swastika is currently a Master’s student in Linguistics, based out of Sendai, Japan. Her poetry is much like how she understands her unparalleled love for the local matcha latte and the longing for her mother’s spiced chai: an exercise in navigation. She won the second prize in the poetry contest organized as part of the international Glass House Poetry Festival in July 2020. Her work is featured or upcoming in Eunoia Review, Capsule Stories, The Wild Word, Riggwelter, Muse India, and Huffington Post, among others, and her spoken-word pieces have been featured on UnErase Poetry, one of India’s leading spoken-word content producers. In April 2019, she gave a TEDx talk featuring spoken-word poetry at her school, Tohoku University. She was also invited to perform with Rolling Stone India for Pride Month 2020.
Her favourite things are fresh snow, old books and a traditional Japanese sweet called anmitsu.
Steven Wolfson
A Story Analyst’s Approach to Screenwriting: A Workshop on the Ins and Outs of Screenplay Development
Craft Workshop
Whether you are writing a studio feature or an independent film, at some point your script will enter the process known as ‘development.’ This workshop focuses on what really happens when a screenplay is developed for production. From issues of character and story to three-act structure and commercial viability, the class will look at the development process from both the perspective of the writer and the production company or studio. Through a series of writing exercises, students will learn how to manage script notes while at the same time protecting the integrity of their screenplay. The final goals of the workshop are a demystification of the development process and the tools to make your screenplay as production-friendly as possible.
Steven Wolfson has taught screenwriting, playwriting and creative writing at The Writers Program at UCLA for the past 20 years and holds the distinction of having created the most new classes, workshops and seminars of any instructor in the program’s history. He has been awarded The Outstanding Instructor of the Year award twice, in both screenwriting and creative writing. As a screenwriter, Wolfson has sold projects to Fox, Lions Gate, TNT, MTV, Langley Entertainment, Beacon Films and producer Arnold Rifkin. Wolfson wrote the independent romantic comedy, Dinner and Driving, which premiered at The Austin Film Festival and went on to win audience awards at several film festivals and was sold to HBO. Wolfson also wrote and co-produced the critically acclaimed Lionsgate feature, Gang Tapes, a coming-of-age drama set in South Central, Los Angeles. Gang Tapes played to sold-out audiences at film festivals in both The United States and Europe.
Suzanne Kamata
Clara Kiyoko Kumagai, Kristin Osani, Clarissa Goenawan, Sara Fujimura
Pivot: Writing for a Post-Pandemic World
Panel Discussion
Fiction
How do you keep going when the world, the publishing landscape, and YOU have had major paradigm shifts since 2020? Multi-published authors Sara Fujimura, Clarissa Goenawan, Suzanne Kamata, Clara Kiyoko Kumagai, and Kristin Osani discuss the limitations and growth opportunities that come with this new post-pandemic reality.
Are you waiting for the publishing world to “go back to normal?” The bad news: It’s not. Supply chain woes, soaring material costs, editorial burnout, and continued unrest in the world have made traditional publishing harder to break into and even harder to sustain a career. Savvy authors pivot. Five multi-published, award-winning, globally-minded authors give a state-of-the-industry report from their region of the world. They identify specific challenges they’ve had in the last two years, including launching new books during a pandemic (One out of 10 stars. Highly DON’T recommend!). They also offer tips and techniques on how to keep your writing career rolling when it seems the world is constantly conspiring against you.
American Suzanne Kamata has lived in Shikoku for over 30 years. During the pandemic, she published an award-winning middle grade novel, Pop Flies, Robo-pets and Other Disasters; The Baseball Widow, a novel for adults, and Waiting, her poetry debut. She is an associate professor at Naruto University of Education.
Clarissa Goenawan (she/her) is an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer and translator. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Singapore, Australia, Japan, Indonesia, Italy, the UK, and the US. Rainbirds, her debut novel, has been published in eleven different languages. Her second novel, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, came out in 2020. Watersong is her third novel.
Kristin Osani (she/her) is a queer fantasy writer who lives in Kyoto, where she works as a freelance Japanese-to-English video game translator when she’s not wordsmithing, working on nerdy cross-stitching, or cuddling her two cats (three if you include her husband). She has translated games like The Kids We Were, Voice of Cards, and Triangle Strategy. Her original fiction has appeared in FlashPoint SF, the Arcanist, and Ghost Orchid Press’s Beyond the Veil: Supernatural Tales of Queer Love anthology.
Clara Kumagai is from Ireland, Canada and Japan. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in publications such as The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee, Room, Cicada, and The Kyoto Journal, among others. Her children’s story, A Girl Named Indigo, was translated and published in Japanese with the title Indigo wo sagashite (Shogakukan, 2020). Her young adult novel, Catfish Rolling, is forthcoming in 2023. She currently lives and works in Tokyo.
Sara Fujimura is a hybrid author of four award-winning young adult books: Tanabata Wish, Breathe, Every Reason We Shouldn’t (Tor Teen), and Faking Reality (Tor Teen). She is represented by Ann Rose of the Prospect Agency. Every Reason We Shouldn’t was named an NPR Best Book of 2020. www.sarafujimura.com
Todd Jay Leonard
Publishing in the EFL Market in Japan: Four Perspectives on How to Make Your Proposal Count
Short Lecture with Q&A
Instructional
This presentation will outline the current publishing market in Japan for EFL/ESL textbooks by reviewing the various points of view of the publishing industry. The presenter, Todd Jay Leonard, has published extensively within the ESL/EFL market in Japan and will offer helpful advice to budding authors who wish to pursue projects geared to Japan’s domestic market.
Most likely, every language teacher in Japan has (at some point during his/her tenure) contemplated writing a textbook to fill a void in the market…in that constant search for the perfect, all-encompassing textbook.
In today’s competitive publishing world, getting the proverbial “foot in the door” can seem daunting and nearly impossible. What are publishers looking for in the current market? What appeals to editors who ultimately decide which titles go to production and which ones do not? What are the salespeople on the front lines hearing from their market base? What must an author do in order to get his/her book published?
This presentation focuses on these very questions, offering inside insights from all the various points of view that must be considered when writing a proposal to publish a textbook–the publisher, the editor, the salesperson, and the author. Professor Leonard explains the realities within the publishing industry and addresses some common myths associated with EFL publishing.
Todd Jay Leonard has been actively involved in book publishing for 30 years and has published 26 books. He has published books with a number of different Japanese publishing companies and this experience has given him a unique perspective in offering advice to potential authors on what the market is looking for currently and what the publishing industry is searching for in new titles.
He lives, writes, and teaches on the southern island of Kyushu, where he is a university professor at University of Teacher Education Fukuoka and is the department head for the English Department for the graduate faculty. He has published extensively in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers on cross-cultural, historical, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) themes.
Zoria Petkoska
Archeologia Poetika: The Poetry Restoration Writing Method
Craft Workshop – A lecture on the method I invented followed by a workshop in which everyone can try it
Poetry
Archeologia Poetika is an idea born out of both doom and hope. What if we lost or damaged the wealth of poems human history has? How can we restore them? It’s an imaginary scenario that led to creating this method.
The Archeologia Poetika method involves destroying a poem partially and trying to restore it. It drives you to distill the essence of a poet, inhabit their voice, choose your words, be mindful of structure and form.
Aside from being an entertaining poetry game, Archeologia Poetika is great for teaching poetry and creative writing. Among poets, it’s a good way to refresh a poem and get ideas for rewrites/edits through how others will “restore” your work.
Archeologia Poetika is a poetry reading/writing method that I came up with circa 2017. Since, I’ve practiced with fellow editors at Tokyo Poetry Journal with great success. See examples here: https://www.topojo.com/post/archeologia-poetika-aka-the-poetry-restoration-method-unearthing-old-21st-century-poetrys
Zoria Petkoska is an Associate Editor at Tokyo Poetry Journal, Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal [Ш], and working full time as the Commissioning Editor at Tokyo Weekender magazine. She completed a MEXT Research Fellowship at TUFS on Japanese visual poetry translation, and has published two poetry books. She writes in English, Macedonian, and Japanese, and has been published in poetry magazines and anthologies in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and the USA, among others.
Alan Summers
The Pull of the Lonely Single Line of Haiku
Short Lecture with Q&A
Poetry
How do we journey through a single line of haiku and back again counterintuitively? Through Q&A, discussion, and micro-workshopping we will find out.
Japan Times award-winning writer Alan Summers discusses tactics of the ‘single line haiku’ and how it embraces poetic tension. Is haiku, in English, as one poetic line, rather than over three lines, where we might capture more of the original Japanese essence?
“In adopting the tercet, those who write haiku in English are doing the exact opposite of those who write haiku in Japanese: practically all Japanese haiku writers use a monolinear form.”
“On Haiku” Hiroaki Sato (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2018)
We will engage, with examples, discussion, workshopping, how the one line of haiku reverses narrative, or at least perceived ‘linear’ narrative; how “story” impacts on, and inside, haiku poems differently than other poems, through the “and then shift.”
In conclusion, the sole or solo line of haiku will reveal its inner landscape of white space and negative space as well as its untold story.
Alan Summers is a multi-award winning haiku poet. His bilingual article on one line haiku appeared in Haiku Svyat (issue 5-6/2019-2020) published by the Bulgarian Haiku Union. He is the founder/lead tutor for Call of the Page: www.callofthepage.org
Charles Kowalski
Personality Types and Character Arcs
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
What do your characters want? What do they fear? The answers can provide ready-made road maps for their character arcs – the quest for what they want, and the detour that leads them to what they need. Discover how nine basic personality types help chart the course for your characters’ journey.
This workshop shows how fiction writers can use a classical nine-point personality profiling system to develop characters and determine character arcs. Participants will learn:
Charles Kowalski is the author of the award-winning thriller MIND VIRUS, the political/espionage thriller THE DEVIL’S SON, the historical fantasy SIMON GREY AND THE MARCH OF A HUNDRED GHOSTS, and several short stories. When not writing, he teaches at Tokai University.
Christopher Simons
The Magic Inverse: Bringing the Magic into Contemporary Poetry
Craft Workshop
Poetry
In this craft workshop, we will practice how to bring ‘magic’ into contemporary adult poetry without alienating journal editors, contest judges, and publishers. ‘Magic’ could be anything not considered realist: myth and folklore, fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, horror, etc. Poems submitted in advance will be considered for workshopping.
In this super-rational age, advances in science and technology are matched by growing readership for fantasy, science fiction, and other supernatural narratives. The more rational global society becomes, it seems, the greater our appetite for supernatural tales. The world of adult contemporary poetry publishing, however, can sometimes be an exception to this rule. This workshop will explore how to write well-crafted poems for readers who would enjoy folklore, myth, fantasy, and science fiction in their poetry—but without alienating journals and publishers. The workshop will consider an array of poetic charms, spells, and hypno-beams (i.e. formal and narrative strategies) to allow poets to write about magic, monsters, and killer robots without being dismissed by journal editors and contest judges. We will practice building a ‘magic inverse’: integrating magic into the music of verse. As A. E. Stallings writes in ‘Listening to Peter and the Wolf with Jason, Aged Three’: ‘I asked him where the wolf is. With grave logic / He answers me, “The wolf is in the music.”’
Participants are welcome (but not required) to submit a short poem to the workshop. Given the limited session time, not all poems may be discussed, but we will try to look at as many as possible. Workshop poems should be no more than 20 lines, on a theme or subject related to folklore, fantasy, or SF. Please submit your poems by 1 October. Submit to simons@ICU.ac.jp.
Christopher Simons is Senior Associate Professor of Literature at ICU in Tokyo. He has held the Harper-Wood Studentship in Creative Writing at St John’s College Cambridge. His most recent poetry collection is Flight Risk (Isobar Press, 2021). His criticism and poetry have appeared in numerous UK publications including the TLS.
Recent poetry books: Flight Risk (Isobar Press, 2021); Underground Facility (Isobar Press, 2018); One More Civil Gesture (Isobar Press, 2015); No Distinguishing Features (wordwolf press, 2011).
David Brennan
Editing Tips and Techniques
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
In this session I would like to focus on the how paying serious attention to editing your work can drastically improve it and boost your chances of winning competitions and getting published.
To new writers editing can seem dull and boring, but it is in editing and re-editing your work that often the real magic lies.
Perhaps the writer is composed of two parts: the writer and the editor. For the first ugly draft you need to keep the editor part under reins. However, for subsequent drafts you should gradually allow it more leash. In this session we will look at practical advice, techniques and suggestions on how to improve your editing skills, from working alone to joining a writers group to finally working with an editor. Do and dont’s along the way that may provide some useful insight for you when editing your own work.
David, born and raised in Upperchurch in County Tipperary Ireland, currently lives in China. In 2019 he published his debut novel Upperdown with Epoque press. He was one of the winners of the Irish Novel Fair 2018. In 2016 he won the Frank O’Connor Mentorship Bursary Award and has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story (2017), the Doolin Short Story award (2016), the Curtis Bausse Short story award, the Fish Memoire (2018) and longlisted for the Fish Memoire prize (2016 & 2017) and the Colm Tobin Award (2017). He has also published stories and poems in The Irish Times, Number 11, Memoryhouse, The Ogham Stone, Crabfat, Shanghai Poetry Zine, Tokyo Poetry Journal and Jungle Crows (a Tokyo anthology).
David Gilbey
Reeling and Writhing
Craft Workshop
On line, preregistration required
Poetry
Reeling and Writhing: A Poetry Editing Workshop preparing for publication
A closed workshop, requiring participants to submit poems before the conference as well as read and be ready to discuss the work submitted by others. To join, contact David directly at debidogirubi@gmail.com
The proposed workshop is based on the familiar and successful structure and strategy as offered by John Gribble at the 2008 JWC and my own over the last twelve years. It will involve my sending out a brief to intending participants requiring submission of drafts of poems, then, before the actual workshop, reading and making comments on each of the participants poems and finally, participating in the workshop discussion itself at the conference.
This workshop allows writers to work on a poem or two in readiness for publication, recognising that conference delegates are themselves writers, teachers and editors and that there are both personal and professional benefits from a closely-focussed discussion of emerging texts. So the purpose of this workshop is to give a small group of poets the opportunity to meet, read and discuss in depth, a sample of each other’s work. The workshop will be open to a limited number of participants but writers of varying degrees of experience will be welcome. The session will be closed and of two hours duration. There will be two parts to the workshop: preparation and participation. Preparation also has two parts: submitting and close reading. Those who sign up for the session will be contacted before the conference.
David Gilbey was Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia, and the founding President of Wagga Wagga Writers Writers, as well as a poet. His three collection of poems are ‘Under the Rainbow’ (1996), ‘Death and the Motorway’ (2008) and ‘Pachinko Sunset’ (2016). He has taught English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in Sendai, Japan 1996, 2000 and 2007.
Edward Levinson
Simple Nature Attunement – Tips and Practices for Writers of Any Genre
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry
Attunement is one of the main keys to creativity and inspiration. In this presentation Edward will share the simplest of techniques that can used to increase one’s attunement with nature and self, thus increasing our state of receptivity and balance from which all creative endeavors can benefit.
Based on 40+ years of experience with nature meditations and attunement practices, I continuously find they benefit my writing, my photography, and my whole life. The effects of these practices are relevant to any kind of writing: fiction or non-fiction, memoir or poetry, travel writing or journaling, as well as teaching these same subjects. In this presentation, I use selections of my haiku and photographs to illustrate both literally and figuratively the power of breath combined with sharing simple practices to attune to the elements and then go beyond that. The goal is to become aware of the seen and unseen energies that surround us and allow them to become a part of our beings, our personalities, our writer persona, even part of the characters in our writings. From this cultivated attuned space, inspired writing emerges, perhaps not instantaneously, but with continued practice, words will sprout in a fertile field.
Edward Levinson has lived in Japan since 1979. Whisper of the Land, his memoir, was published by Fine Line Press. He is an award-winning photographer and short filmmaker. He lives on Chiba’s Boso Peninsula staying attuned with nature and his garden, which inspires much of his haiku and poetry.
Gordon Vanstone
Developing a Sense of Place
Short Lecture with Q&A, Group Reading with Q&A
Lecture/Reading with Q&A
Fiction
‘Place’ in fiction is more than just setting as it informs and enhances character, plot, theme, atmosphere, voice, and language use. Place can play a central role in influencing the narrator’s choices, challenges, and motivations. Citing select passages from my novel, I’ll highlight strategies used to create a strong sense of place and draw readers in.
A crucial aspect of the storyteller’s job is to get your readers immersed in the world of your narrator, only then can you transport them through your tale. Place plays a vital role in this process. It’s most effective when places are portrayed as authentic, engaging, meaningful and relatable. Place can be a powerful tool to generate plot, character development and conflict. The setting becomes more than the backdrop of a novel; it dictates all that happens. It almost comes alive and pulls the reader along with it.
Reading select passages of my novel, I’ll highlight strategies used to draw readers in and create a strong sense of place: evoking the senses, capturing the essence (the devil is in the details), setting the scene vs utilising ‘nudges’ to create an accretion of environmental elements, giving locals a voice, showing impact on characters’ actions and emotions, burrowing down from the macro and establishing connections and fluidity between.
Gordon currently lives in Singapore. In April 2021, he published his first novel, Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko, with Monsoon Books. Gordon lived in Japan as an international school teacher for eight years between 2004 and 2015. His novel, in part, is an ode to the country which captured a piece of his heart.
Hans Brinckmann
Maintaining Close Connections With a City or Country Can Help Your Career
Short Lecture with Q&A
Career
One of the many sources of inspiration for a writer is a life-long connection with a certain place – a city or area, or even a country. In my case, I maintained a special connection with Kyoto, going back to the late 1950s, which recently brought surprising literary results.
Some authors focus their writing on certain places. My writings are set in many different locations, but one thread that has continued over time is Kyoto. Ever since the late 1950s, when I interacted with Kyoto artists and oddballs, I’ve stayed in touch, and included Kyoto in several of my writings. In 1970, my essay, Kyoto-san, was the lead article in the inaugural issue of Koto, a Japanese magazine. In 2011, The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills and other stories was published. In 2019 the Writers in Kyoto group invited me to give a lecture on my Kyoto connections, and they included one of my stories in Kyoto Journal, followed by a review of my memoir The Call of Japan. Then, this spring, after joining Writers in Kyoto, I participated in a short-story competition, and won Third Prize! Clearly, my long connection with Kyoto has been richly rewarded.
Born in Holland in 1932, Hans Brinckmann – though keen on writing – joined an international bank. Assigned to Japan in 1950, he stayed 24 years. He returned to Japan intermittently and since 2003 is a permanent resident and writer of seven works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. URL: https://habri.jp
Holly Thompson
Possibilities with Poetry and Picture Books
Short Lecture with Q&A
Poetry
Picture books are a format, not an age range category. This session will be of interest to poets, visual arts folks, as well as writers interested in writing for young people. Poetry and picture books are perfect allies–the distillation of poetry well suits the 32-page picture book format. Poetry in picture books ranges across all sorts of forms and styles, and this session introduces approaches and possibilities for crafting picture books with poetry.
Poetry and picture books are perfect allies–the distillation of poetry is ideal for the 32-page picture book format. Contrary to popular belief, poetry in picture books does not always rhyme and ranges across all sorts of forms and styles, including individual poems in a thematic collection; a single continuous free verse or formal poem as book text; or lyrical prose text. Since picture book text is often limited to just 500 words, and poetry skills can enable writers to deftly manage compression of text and craft a manuscript that leaves ample room for the illustrator to add further layers of meaning and story. Poetry can also help enhance page-turn anticipation, can allow for broaching complex topics for the young, and can ensure that readers of picture books will span all ages. This session introduces a range of approaches and possibilities for using poetry to craft compelling picture books.
Holly Thompson (hatbooks.com) is author of picture books, verse novels and prose novels. She serves as SCBWI Japan Co-Regional Advisor and teaches picture book writing and creative writing at Grub Street, UC Berkeley Extension, and Yokohama City University.
Iain Maloney
The Writing Process, Autocomposting and Writer’s Block
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
My latest book, a novella, was written in two days, but was the result of nearly ten years of thinking and planning. In this talk I will look at my own writing process as well as that of other writers and discuss the idea of autocomposting and of writer’s block.
My latest book, the novella “Life is Elsewhere/Burn Your Flags” was written in two days, but was the result of nearly ten years of thinking and planning. Too much attention is given to the part of creative writing where pen meets paper and not enough to everything that comes before, which I will argue is perhaps much more important. In this talk I will look at my own writing process as well as that of other writers who exemplify the concept of writing as a process in which putting words on paper is only one part. I will discuss the idea of autocomposting, of writer’s block and misconceptions about what creative writing looks like in practice.
Iain Maloney is originally from Scotland and now lives in Gifu. He is the author of three novels, a haiku collection, a memoir and a new novella, “Life is Elsewhere/Burn your Flags”.
James Crocker, Andrew Innes
Best of The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers
Group Reading with Q&A
Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Career
Readings from Japan-based authors published in The Font in 2020/21
The Font is a literary journal for language teachers and learners. It has been publishing quality fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and essays by language teachers and learners since 2013. These are all on the theme of teaching and learning languages at home and abroad. In other words, it is a place for teachers and learners to reflect on their experiences and observations while teaching and learning languages, or while living and teaching abroad.
This presentation features a selection of the best publications of the past two years, read by the authors themselves. The authors will answer questions after doing their readings.
James Crocker has published 20 text books and readers for language learning with OUP and Macmillan. He has also published numerous articles on language teaching. James has been editing and publishing The Font since it’s inception.
Andrew Innes is from Cheshire near Manchester in England and since 2002 lives in Himeji. He divides his time between teaching at Mukogawa Women`s University, Himeji Dokkyo University, Kobe Shoin Women`s University and various freelance classes around the Kansai area. He has written on whether teachers can detect if students have used machine translation in their work and the tell-tale signs that they have; and the use of video in class to reduce transactional distance during online teaching. His forthcoming book touches on various themes of interest such as science fiction and how technology can blur the boundaries of our identity (Generation C), psychedelia (Pattern Separation), Cancel culture (Ms. Representation), Othering (The Gaijin Parade), Buddhism (The Koan), The Korean Wave (Veritas), Tourist pollution (When in Rome), New ageism (Digital Detox), horror (The Rotten Mikan), and metamorphosis (The Short Story Collective). He has written three stories for The Font and had a story published in Tokyo Weekender. He describes himself as a new writer and very much learning his craft.
Joan Bailey
Social Media for Writers: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Clubhouse and You
Panel Discussion
Career
Join three writers working in fiction, non-fiction, young adult fiction and non-fiction, and science communication to discover how they use social media to promote their work, develop community, and explore their respective fields. Learn what has worked for them (and hasn’t), and how to approach this important realm of shameless self-promotion.
This panel discussion will feature three Japan-based writers: Suzanne Kamata, (fiction, non-fiction, and young adult, ); Hannah Kirshner (non-fiction, Water, Wood and Wild Things, March 2021 Viking), and Elizabeth Tasker, (non-fiction, The Planet Factory, 2017, Bloomsbury) and book title. Each writer will share how they use social media venues to promote their work, do research, foster community, and explore their respective fields and beyond. They will also share things that haven’t worked and why; their tips for getting started and approaching this realm of interaction; and why social media matters, including specific benefits they have found. Participants will have a chance to ask specific questions related to social media use and leave with a list of best practices.
Joan Bailey is a freelance writer based in Japan. Her work focuses on food, farming, farmers markets, and travel and can be found at The Japan Times, Tokyo Weekender, Modern Farmer, Civil Eats, Savvy Tokyo, and Outdoor Japan. Visit joandbailey.com to read your fill!
Joanne Anderton
Speculative fiction autobiography: The joys and the challenges of mixing truth with imagination
Short Lecture with Q&A
Other Genre
This lecture is an exploration of autobiography, speculative fiction, and the way in which we turn lived experience into narrative. I will discuss the joys and challenges of adapting my time living in Japan into a ‘speculative fiction autobiography’, and what other writers can gain from my research and experimentation.
How do you recount a lived experience, when writing it as a traditional memoir feels incomplete? Is it possible to mingle science fiction, fantasy and horror with autobiography, but maintain a sense of truth?
My creative writing PhD, The Realness of Unreal Things, is an attempt to do just that. A mixed genre collection, this ‘speculative fiction autobiography’ blends speculative short stories and creative non-fiction, drawn from my time living and working in Japan.
In this lecture, I will discuss the process of adapting my experiences in this unorthodox way, what’s challenging about it, what’s fascinating about it, and what other writers can gain from my research and experimentation.
The role of factuality in memoir inhabits a problematic space. I propose that speculative fiction autobiography will enable writers to examine the deeper truths of their lived experience, by freeing us from the difference between the real and the unreal.
Joanne Anderton is an Australian author and PhD candidate. She has won awards for her speculative fiction, which includes the novels Debris, Suited and Guardian, and the short story collection The Bone Chime Song. She has published a children’s picture book and non-fiction in Island, Meanjin and The Japan News.
Joe Palermo
No Pianos, Pets or Foreigners! Self Publishing a Memoir in eBook, Paperback and Audiobook Format at Minimal Cost
Short Lecture with Q&A
Nonfiction
A young Japanese woman was running through Tokyo station screaming “Save me! Save me!” There was a Japanese man chasing her and closing in. He grabbed her wrist and caught her about 10 feet in front of me. The woman was still yelling “Save me! Save Me!” but the Japanese people in the crowded station ignored her, not wanting to get involved.
This is the beginning of one of the stories from my experience living in Japan in the 1980’s, where I had moved right after graduating university. It was still rare to see an American who could speak Japanese fluently. This book guides the reader though my many adventures navigating through Japanese culture while living in the outskirts of Tokyo, as well as Tokyo proper.
I will detail my experience writing and publishing a book and audiobook about my life in Japan, using Amazon KDP and Amazon ACX. I will talk about what I learned through the process and what I would do differently.
Joe Palermo has retired after 30+ years as a corporate executive at the Nielsen Company and Information Resources, Inc. (IRI). He lived and worked in Japan for eight years and is the author of “No Pianos, Pets or Foreigners! My Life in Japan in the 80’s”.
Joy Jarman-Walsh
Live + Engaging Networking via Interviews with Japan Insiders
Short Lecture with Q&A
Non-fiction
Moving beyond words on a page by live broadcasting interviews to a worldwide audience in realtime – it seems daunting but is transparent and engaging, reaching new audiences tired of traditional media. If you are researching an article, you are actually prepared to livestream- let me explain how to do it, and why it’ll make your content better.
I’ve been on a crazy and unexpected journey researching and hosting daily interviews with various experts and insiders in Japan, or abroad who are focused on Japan, to dive into what it means to seek sustainability. A big part of seeking sustainability is transparency, which I think is also critical for good writing, which can be achieved by engaging with your audience as you create the content. I believe that one of the best ways to do this is by livestreaming content to engage with a wider audience. As of the end of May, I’ve done over 250 live interviews and the comments and questions of live viewers has been an important aspect of the finished product. I think this concept can inform and improve almost any type of writing project. There are key strategies to prepping for interviews as well as running live talkshows which engage with a live audience. There is also post-production work that needs to be done, including getting the interview onto a podcast platform. I will lay out not only the why’s but also the how-to’s of the process.
Joy Jarman-Walsh (jjwalsh) runs a daily livestream talkshow called #SeekingSustainabilityLive which had it’s 250th episode in May 2021. Joy co-founded GetHiroshima in 1999, worked as an Assistant Professor teaching Tourism and Business for more than 21 years, then started her own sustainability-focused travel consulting business, InboundAmbassador, in 2019. Joy has written for academic journals as well as travel copy and destination articles. Joy has an MA in Sustainable Tourism from ASU (USA).
Karen Hill Anton
Memoir: “It’s all in the writing – you get no credit for living”
Short Lecture with Q&A
Nonfiction, Memoir
In this talk we’ll delve into what the aspiring memoirist does to create and craft a narrative that is engaging.
Memoir is currently a genre as popular as fiction, and thousands of memoirs are published every year. You can have your memoir stand out in this crowd by telling a story—one that is compelling and captivates readers. And assuming you’re not a celebrity, readers of memoirs want to know: “What’s so interesting about this person’s life that will induce me to read it?” You need to tell them on Page One.
Written well, your memoir will have momentum and not just be a collection of vignettes: “I went there, I did that.” Your reward in writing your story well will be in having readers not only relate, but care. And caring is what gets them from the first page to the last.
In this talk we’ll address, ask, and answer the question: How do we write a life as a story?
Karen Hill Anton wrote the “Crossing Cultures” column for The Japan Times for fifteen years. Originally from New York City, she has lived in rural Shizuoka prefecture since 1975. Her memoir The View From Breast Pocket Mountain is winner of the SPR Book Awards Gold Prize, and the Book Readers Appreciation Group Medallion. https://www.karenhillanton.com
Liane Wakabayashi
Marketing Your Memoir Long Before It’s Completed
Short Lecture with Q&A
Nonfiction
This lecture begins anecdotally, with Liane recalling the advice of a New York book publishing industry insider, who taught her how to take the long-range view of completing a memoir–by publishing extracts. She’ll walk you through the steps of reaching your audience, publishing one story at a time, and thereby communicating with your audience while your book is still in progress.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that promoting a book essentially begins on the day we start writing it. When you’re immersed in writing a memoir, perhaps the last thing that you’re thinking about is pressing the pause button to market excerpts of your unfinished book to print and online magazines, or reading it out loud or on Zoom to your intended audience. In this lecture, we’ll talk about the why’s, the how’s and the when’s, step by step. As a journalist with nearly 40 years experience, I’d like to help inspire you to take the best excerpts of your memoir, let them be read, get your name known, and feel your confidence to soar, especially at the critical mid-point in book writing. Surely, the road to memoir completion is both a test of nerves and faith, and when someone else believes in your book, you are much more likely to as well.
Liane Grunberg Wakabayashi, raised in New York City, lived in Tokyo from 1987 to 2017, when Israel tugged at her heartstrings. Excerpts and themes from The Wagamama Bride have appeared in The Jewish Forward, Tablet, Asian Jewish Life Magazine, The Japan Times and The Jerusalem Post Magazine. Seven stories from The Wagamama Bride are now also being serialized on the Jewish world’s second largest website, Chabad.org.
The Wagamama Bride: A Jewish Family Saga Made in Japan, Goshen Books 2021
www.goshenbooks.com
Linda Gould
Ten Things to Do Before Submitting Your Work for Publication
Craft Workshop
Self-editing is hard. The hands-on activities in this workshop will give you advice and practice in developing editing skills that will improve your work and chances of being published.
Many submissions are rejected for silly mistakes. This workshop will provide a checklist that all writers should follow before submitting to any publication, and will provide activities to improve content and line editing, as well as proofreading skills.
Linda Gould is the Managing Editor of White Enso. She has a degree in journalism and extensive writing, editing and design experience. She is the founder of the Women’s English Writing Group of Japan, writes fantasy and ghost stories, and is the author of The Diamond Tree, a dual-language book.
Melinda Taliancich Falgoust
Self-Publishing on a Shoestring: Quality Independent Publishing on a Zero or Low Budget
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
Participants will become acquainted with the mandatory six components every independent publisher must address if they desire to produce a quality, professional product. In every category, multiple cost-effective options will be addressed and demonstrated to allow the widest margin of participants to find a tool that “fits like a glove.”
The stigma associated with self-publishing is slowly dissolving as even some of the Big Five’s top best-sellers are choosing the independent route over New York. With the availability of many tools to help the diligent author, there is no reason stopping anyone from putting a quality, competitive piece of work into the literary marketplace. Participants of this particular workshop will learn the fundamental steps of book production that every indie publisher must know, define over fifty free and low-cost resources available to aid in book production and marketing and acquire specific, introductory skills to produce effective and quality marketing materials.
Melinda Taliancich Falgoust is an internationally award-winning author whose writing has appeared in Reader’s Digest, AHMM, and others. She frequently presents at literary events world-wide on craft including the Japan Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville, and the West Virginia Book Festival. Her presentations offer a “novel” approach to help authors succeed.
Melinda Joe
So You Want to Be a Food Writer?
Short Lecture with Q&A
Non-fiction
People often assume that, as a food writer, I spend my days popping bonbons and swilling champagne. This is false, but not entirely so. In this short talk, I’ll dispel myths about food writing, discuss the pros and cons, and give tips for those new to freelancing.
Food writing is more than restaurant criticism. This presentation will give an overview of different kinds of food writing, introduce examples of food media outlets, and describe ways that the industry is changing. Drawing upon more than a decade of experience as a food journalist, I’ll offer insight into what makes a compelling story, how to break into the business, and share some of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a freelancer — as well as my most memorable food adventures.
Melinda Joe is a journalist based in Tokyo who specializes in food and drinks. She is a Japan Times columnist, and her work, which has been translated into four languages, has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, Nikkei Asia, Newsweek, WSJ Asia, CNN, and others.
Melissa Uchiyama
Growing Chutzpah: A Writer’s Superpower
Craft Workshop, Other Type
Craft and Encouragement
Other Genre
This is a workshop for all writers of all genres as it encourages boldness in collaboration, pitching, and publishing. Chutzpah is the way towards valuing our ideas enough to make bold moves.
We will explore the idea of “chutzpah”, the yiddish word for having the courage and audacity as writers. Publishing, in itself, is a series of steps that carry us from the private to the public, but all too often, the writer must navigate self-sabotaging thoughts, thoughts that keep the writer and the words cut off. Chutzpah is the antidote, bringing levity and spunk, shoring up the writer to harness the confidence to pitch effective ideas and drafts. It can bring our whole process of writing from meek to tremendous.
This workshop will look at the whole process, from seed idea to published piece and even onto the next step. Inspecting an idea and finding it good and profitable, we nurture it, (just how this looks will be discussed in-session) aiming big–to pitch the magazines, editors, and book queries from a place of strength and assurance in our identity, ideas, and work.
Participants will see where they have also thought “big”, taking an idea, finding its worth, and then growing it to pitch, whether inviting collaboration, beginning a new project, all of the “thinking big”. We will take part in an activity that inspires and ignites “big thinking” and all of the chutzpah we need as writers.
Melissa leads creative writing camps, collaborating with Japan-based authors and illustrators. Her essays appear in places such as The Washington Post, LA Review of Books, Brevity, Kyoto Journal, Taste, The Japan Times, and the Sunlight Press. She is featured in various anthologies like Mothering Through the Darkness and Knocked Up Abroad Again. Melissa will be launching online workshops on the subject of Jewish Food Writing.
Michael Dylan Welch
Even in Kyoto: Place Names in Haiku
Short Lecture with Q&A, Craft Workshop
Half lecture, short writing exercise, plus sharing and discussion
Poetry
We need more place names in haiku! This interactive PowerPoint presentation by Michael Dylan Welch celebrates Bashō’s iconic haiku, “even in Kyoto / hearing the cuckoo / I long for Kyoto,” and features numerous parodies and allusions to the poem as examples of utamakura or place names in haiku and explores how this poem has inspired many others. This presentation also touches on the Welsh word hireath, a sweet sort of homesickness, and the Roman concept of genius loci, or the pervading spirit of place. Also includes an invitation to try writing your own “even in Kyoto” variations, with optional sharing and discussion.
Michael Dylan Welch cofounded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 and the American Haiku Archives in 1996, and founded the Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2008 and National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com) in 2010. He has published dozens of poetry books. His website, devoted mostly to haiku, is www.graceguts.com.
His poetry, essays, and reviews have been published in journals such as Bacopa Literary Review, Cascade, City Arts, Clover: A Literary Rag, Fan, Frogpond, HQ, Hummingbird, Kyoto Journal, Line Zero, Mainichi Daily News, Matrix, Modern Haiku, Mosaic, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Nippon, Poet’s Market, Pointed Circle, Rattle, Raven Chronicles, Right Hand Pointing, Seattle Weekly, StringTown, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Writer’s Digest. My work has also appeared in books from such publishers as Writer’s Digest Books, Kodansha, Tuttle, Andrews-McMeel, Mosaic Press, MQP, Iron Press, Red Moon Press, Snapshot Press, Brooks Books, Boatwhistle, NeoPoiesis Press, Black Moss Press, and others. Most recent books include: Dance into the World, editor, Tanka Society of America, 2020; Seabeck Reunion, editor, Haiku Northwest Books, 2020; Jumble Box, editor, Press Here, 2017; Seven Suns / Seven Moons (with Tanya McDonald), NeoPoiesis Press, 2016; and Off the Beaten Track: A Year in Haiku, Boatwhistle Books, 2016.
Michael Frazier
A Poem is a Thing that Moves: Contemporary Lyric Poems
Craft Workshop
Poetry
A lyric poem is a thing that moves, through time, one’s mind, and, in turn, moves the hearts of readers. We will read and analyze lyric poems that move towards unanswerable questions, via associative jumps, by Leila Chatti, Li-Young Lee, and Aracelis Girmay. We will write our own lyric poems!
Scan through most recently released poetry collections and you are bound to find poems marked not by chronological narratives, but by incongruent images, ideas, and questions seemingly held together by only a distinct first-person voice and the magic of poetry. In this workshop we want to dispel the illusion of the non-linear lyric poem. We will read a handful of lyric poems that rely on associative jumps by Leila Chatti, L-Young Lee, Terrance Hayes, and Aracelis Girmay. We will analyze how these writers navigate through a poem (motifs, music, etc.), and pursue a question to arrive at a new revelation (the turn). As a result, we will understand how their poems are maps for how their actual minds move and perceive the world. A poem is a thing that moves, through time, one’s mind, and, in turn, moves the hearts of readers. Under scaffolded prompting, we will write our own lyric poems that prioritize the patterns of our psyche.
Michael Frazier is a poet & HS Teacher living in Kanazawa, Japan. Pushcart Prize & Best New Poets nominated, his poems appear in Poetry Daily, The Offing, RHINO, Tinderbox, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Currently, he’s facilitating a biweekly zoom poetry book club open to the public. Message @fraziermichael to join!
Michael Pronko
Why secondary characters aren’t secondary
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
This talk will focus on what many how-to writing books leave out—effective ways to develop secondary characters and reasons why they are so important. By analyzing examples of secondary characters, examining their effects, and considering ways to create these characters, the talk will consider this crucial element of fiction.
No matter where a reader might focus in a work of long fiction, secondary characters are not that secondary. Though main characters tend to hog the reading spotlight, without secondary characters acting as mirror, foil, double and counterpoint, the main characters would have little story arc. However well a main character is written, secondary characters add more than just hurdles or help. They add a dimensionality that can transform a story from flat trajectory to complex journey. Secondary characters might not get equal billing, but they deserve equal attention. This talk will look at what many how-to writing books leave out— reasons for emphasizing secondary characters and effective ways to develop them. This talk will analyze examples of secondary characters, examine their effects, offer ways to develop them, and consider the larger implications of character-filled stories.
Michael Pronko has written for many publications, but focuses on the Detective Hiroshi series, including the award-winning The Last Train, The Moving Blade, and Tokyo Traffic. He also has three collections of writing about Tokyo and runs the website Jazz in Japan. He teaches American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University.
Paul Rossiter, Eric Selland, C. E. J. Simons
This Year at Isobar
Group Reading with Q&A
Poetry
In this session, Paul Rossiter will introduce and read from his two new books, The Pleasures of Peace, consisting of recent work from Japan and the UK, and Coconut Palms & Sandalwood Boxes, a book-length sequence of poems chronicling a trip – geographical and historical – through Sri Lanka; Eric Selland will introduce and read from his translation of Yoshioka Minoru’s modernist masterpiece. Kusudama; and C. E. J. Simons will introduce and read from his volume of new poems Flight Risk.
Paul Rossiter has published ten books of poetry since 1995. After retiring from teaching at the University of Tokyo in 2012, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in publishing English-language poetry from Japan, and English translations of modernist and contemporary Japanese poetry. More information can be found at: https://isobarpress.com
Eric Selland has published five books or chapbooks of his own work and has translated a total of seven volumes of poetry by important contemporary Japanese poets. His translation of The Guest Cat, a novel by Takashi Hiraide, was on the New York Times bestseller list in early 2014, and his translation of poems by Kiwao Nomura, The Day Laid Bare, was chosen as a Recommended Translation by The Poetry Book Society, UK, for their winter 2020 season.
C. E. J. Simons is Senior Associate Professor of Literature at ICU in Tokyo. He has held the Harper-Wood Studentship in Creative Writing at St John’s College Cambridge. His most recent poetry collection is Flight Risk (Isobar Press, 2021). His criticism and poetry have appeared in numerous UK publications including the TLS.
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson
How to Launch Your Own Independent Press
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translation
As recently as a decade ago, “self-publishing” was a euphemism for shameful “vanity publishing.” Since then publishing has radically altered, and the new indie approach is edgy, innovative, and challenging an entrenched industry. Wilson shares her journey of launching her own press, plus tips and resources for starting your own.
Until recently, you couldn’t get published without gatekeepers, who not only dictated your content but took 90%+ of your profits. The alternative was exploitation at the other extreme by vanity publishers charging outrageous sums to print your book.
Innovation over the past decade has changed everything. You can hire top-tier freelance editors, designers, and illustrators easily and safely through online marketplaces. You can affordably print a single book, or a thousand, or distribute ebooks and audiobooks. With personal websites, newsletter sign-ups, social media, and more, you can build a tribe of fans directly. Add to this the warm and collaborative support that indie authors and publishers offer one another, and you’ll never bother pitching an agent again!
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson shows how she launched her own press—and how you can, too.
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson is the author of 200+ articles and multiple books. She co-hosts the podcast “Queen of the Sciences: Conversations between a Theologian and Her Dad” and writes the quarterly e-newsletter “Theology & a Recipe.” She is associate pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church and founder of Thornbush Press.
Steven Wolfson
Development 101: A Workshop on the ins and outs of Screenplay Development
Short Lecture with Q&A
Screenwriting
This workshop focuses on what really happens when a screenplay is developed for production. From issues of character and story to three-act structure and commercial viability, the class will look at the development process from both the perspective of the writer and the production company or studio.
Whether you are writing a studio feature or an independent film, at some point your script will enter the process known as ‘development.’ This workshop focuses on what really happens when a screenplay is developed for production. From issues of character and story to three-act structure and commercial viability, the class will look at the development process from both the perspective of the writer and the production company or studio. Through a series of writing exercises, students will learn how to manage script notes while at the same time protecting the integrity of their screenplay. The final goals of the workshop are a demystification of the development process and the tools to make your screenplay as production-friendly as possible.
Steven Wolfson has taught screenwriting, playwriting and creative writing at The Writers Program at UCLA for the past 20 years and holds the distinction of having created the most new classes, workshops and seminars of any instructor in the program’s history. He has been awarded The Outstanding Instructor of the Year award twice, in both screenwriting and creative writing. As a screenwriter, Wolfson has sold projects to Fox, Lions Gate, TNT, MTV, Langley Entertainment, Beacon Films and producer Arnold Rifkin. Wolfson wrote the independent romantic comedy, Dinner and Driving, which premiered at The Austin Film Festival and went on to win audience awards at several film festivals and was sold to HBO. Wolfson also wrote and co-produced the critically acclaimed Lionsgate feature, Gang Tapes, a coming-of-age drama set in South Central, Los Angeles. Gang Tapes played to sold out audiences at film festivals in both The United States and Europe.
Suzanne Kamata
Clara Kiyoko Kumagai, Kristin Osani , Clarissa Goenawan, Sara Fujimura
Writing Identity, From Inside and Outside
Panel Discussion
Fiction
In this era of #ownvoices and a heightened awareness of identity politics, what stories should be told, who should be allowed to write them, and how they should be presented are often contentious issues. In this moderated session, five authors of different backgrounds, writing inside and out of their lanes, will discuss diversity, identity, inclusivity, and their own experiences and approaches to writing these in their own work.
Identity politics play a large part in determining which stories are published and how they are currently received in the English-speaking market. Generation Z readers — the audience for YA and New Adult titles — are especially aware of issues surrounding diversity, appropriation, and ownership. In this session, to be moderated by Suzanne Kamata, four authors of different backgrounds, writing about Japan from inside and out of their lanes, will discuss diversity, identity, inclusivity, and their own experiences and approaches to writing these in their own work.
In this era of #ownvoices and a heightened awareness of identity politics, what stories should be told, who should be allowed to write them, and how they should be presented are often contentious issues. In this moderated session, five authors of different backgrounds, writing inside and out of their lanes, will discuss diversity, identity, inclusivity, and their own experiences and approaches to writing these in their own work.
Award-winning author Suzanne Kamata was born and raised in the United States, but has lived in Japan for more than half of her life. She is the author or editor of 15 published books including, most recently, The Baseball Widow (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2021) and Pop Flies, Robo-pets and Other Disasters (One Elm Books, 2020).
Clara Kiyoko Kumagai is from Canada, Japan and Ireland. She writes fiction and non-fiction for children and adults, and has had work published in Banshee, Room, Event, and Cicada. She currently lives in Tokyo.
Kristin Osani is a freelance Japanese to English translator, writer, and editor
Her previous projects include LEFT ALIVE, ONINAKI, CODE SHIFTER, DRAGALIA LOST, and many more. Her short fiction is forthcoming in Flash Point SF.
Clarissa Goenawan is an Indonesian-born Singaporean writer. Her award-winning short fiction has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in Singapore, Australia, Japan, Indonesia, the UK, and the US. Rainbirds, her first novel, has been published in eleven different languages.
Sara Fujimura is an award-winning young adult author and creative writing teacher. She is the American half of her Japanese-American family, and has written about Japanese culture and raising bicultural children for such magazines as Appleseeds, Learning Through History, East West, and Mothering, as well as travel-related articles for To Japan With Love. Her young adult novels include Tanabata Wish, Breathe, Every Reason We Shouldn’t (Tor Teen, 2020) and Faking Reality (Tor Teen, 2021). She lives in Phoenix with her husband and children.
Suzanne Kamata, THE BASEBALL WIDOW (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2021)
Clara Kumagai, “Memorials,” in The Stinging Fly, Winter 2020-21
Kristin Osani, English translation of Balan Wonderworld: Maestro of Mysteries, Theatre of Wonders by Soshi Kawasaki (Square Enix, 2021)
Clarissa Goenawan, THE PERFECT WORLD OF MIWAKO SUMIDA (Soho Press, 2020)
Sara Fujimura, FAKING REALITY (Tor Teen, 2021)
Todd Jay Leonard
So you want to publish a book? 10 Basic Points to Keep in Mind!
Short Lecture with Q&A
Career
Professor Leonard has published extensively over the past 30 years and is willing to share his experiences of both Japanese traditional publishing houses and POD formats to assist budding authors in their quests to get published.
This lecture will cover ten primary points that “potential” authors need to keep in mind when submitting a proposal to a publishing company or when self-publishing a book. He will outline the basic process from the book’s initial concept to getting the book into print to marketing it. His extensive experience in publishing as an author in Japan will serve to assist budding authors with the basics in the overall process that need to be considered when pursuing a publishing contract or when self-publishing. This is a short lecture with a Q & A format.
Todd Jay Leonard lives, writes, and teaches on the southern island of Kyushu, where he is a university professor at the University of Teacher Education Fukuoka. He has published extensively in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers on cross-cultural, historical, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) themes. He is the author of 25 books.
Tom Baker
Trivia Tips: How to Write a Pub Quiz
Short Lecture with Q&A
Other Genre
Quizzes should be challenging but fun – and that requires well-written questions. I will discuss various question formats, writing with brevity and clarity, organizing categories, anticipating and heading off disputes, making obscure questions guessable, and techniques for flattering your audience by writing easy questions that sound hard.
“I once attended a pub quiz in Bristol where a dispute over an answer resulted in a wild west-style brawl and the police had to be called,” a woman told the BBC in 2005. “Arrests were made, including the quizmaster.”
Quizzes should be fun. If you wish to host one that doesn’t end in tears – or behind bars – well-written questions are essential.
Drawing on my experience as both a contestant and a quizmaster, I will offer tips on how to write questions that are clear, entertaining, and minimally disputable.
Using examples from quizzes seen on TV and at pubs around Tokyo, I will discuss a variety of question formats, writing with brevity and clarity, ways of organizing categories, anticipating hecklers and nit-pickers, making obscure questions guessable, and the importance of flattering your audience by writing easy questions that sound hard.
Tom Baker appeared on four regular-season episodes of the U.S. quiz show “Jeopardy!” in 2004, before returning for the season-ending Tournament of Champions. He first guest-hosted a round of a Tokyo pub quiz in 2019, and has written and presented more than 20 rounds since then.
He presented over 20 rounds of questions live at a monthly charity pub quiz held at the Footnik bar in Ebisu, Tokyo, before the pandemic began, and has continued on Zoom since then. Topics have included “The FBI 10 Most Wanted List,” “Pigs and Rats,” “Literary Works,” “Officeholders,” “Prime Numbers,” “Traveling Around Japan,” “Body Parts” and “Motorcycle Gangs and Clubs.”
Walt Mussell
Across Time and Time Zones: Researching history from half a world away.
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
Presentation will discuss ways to do historical research on Japan while residing in another country. Presentation will include tips from famous authors on how they performed research (including non-Japan). Presentation to offer Q&A for attendees who wish to submit their own challenges and brainstorm ways to solve them.
Japan is the inspiration for the presenter’s works. He spent four years there in the 90s, met his wife there, and has visited several times since. However, his last visit was in 2008 and his first book, The Samurai’s Heart, was published in 2017. The presenter will detail the challenges he faced in researching Japanese history from the southern U.S. and what he has done to overcome it.
In addition, the presenter will introduce a list of challenges faced by historical authors that research not only Japan but histories of other countries as well. Detailing the challenges faced by other authors will hopefully provide attendees ideas as to how they might creatively pursue their own research challenges.
Lastly, the presenter will engage the attendees to bring up their own research challenges and the group will brainstorm on ways to help the writers solve their challenges.
Walt Mussell lives in an Atlanta-area suburb. He writes historicals, mostly about Japan where he lived for four years. He refers to his work as “Like Shogun, but the heroine survives.” His works include The Samurai’s Honor, The Samurai’s Heart, and A Second Chance. Visit his website at waltmussell.com.
Yuri Kageyama
Yoshiaki Tago, Kouzan Kikuchi (if we have a Q&A)
NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA: Meditation on an Under-Reported Catastrophe by a Poet
Film, theatre, dance, music, poetry, possible Q&A
Film showing with possibly a Q&A with the writer, director and musician
The showing of my award-winning film that documents a performance in San Francisco of a theater piece I wrote of poetry, music and dance. Film directed by Yoshiaki Tago. Performance directed by Carla Blank. A Japan premiere. The film is 1 hour and 14 minutes long.
Fukushima is the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. It will take decades and billions of dollars to keep the multiple meltdowns under control. Spewed radiation has reached as far as the American West Coast. Some 100,000 people were displaced from the no-go zone. But, 10 years after 3.11, the story hardly makes headlines.
Journalist Yuri Kageyama turns to poetry, dance, theater, music and film, to remind us that the human stories must not be forgotten. Carla Blank, who has collaborated with Suzushi Hanayagi and Robert Wilson, brings together a multicultural cast of artists to direct this provocative theater piece. Performing at ZSpace in San Francisco are U.S.-based actors/dancers Takemi Kitamura, Monisha Shiva, Shigeko Sara Suga. The musicians are Stomu Takeishi, Isaku Kageyama and Joe Small, as well as Japan-based Kouzan Kikuchi. Lighting design by Blu. Video by Yoshiaki Tago, who also directed the film. The film has won various awards, including Best Documentary Feature at the Rome International Movie Awards and Grand Festival Award at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival. It is still making the festival rounds and is not yet widely available to the public. The showing will be a Japan premiere. We are interested in getting feedback from this literary audience. Parts of the piece were first published in Ishmael Reed’s literary magazine KONCH in 2015. Reed called it, “A powerful reflection on the corruption and greed of men and their indifference to human life.” An earlier version debuted at LaMama in New York, with music led by Melvin Gibbs, in 2015.
Yuri Kageyama is a poet, journalist, filmmaker and author of THE NEW AND SELECTED YURI (Ishmael Reed Publishing, 2011). Her films include NEWS FROM FUKUSHIMA, and THE VERY SPECIAL DAY, a collaboration with stop motion animation artist Hayatto. B.A. Cornell University. M.A. University of California, Berkeley. Certificate New York Film Academy.
Zoria Petkoska
Cyber Poetry: Writing the Future in Poetry and Writing Poetry From the Future
Short Lecture with Q&A
Poetry
This lecture will dig into all the ways cyber poetry possibilities have expanded thanks to technology. I will explore the ways poetry can be futuristic, where it overlaps with concrete poetry in its use of asemic elements, and how can we employ AI writers.
Spliced with coding, images and sounds, cyber poetry or digital poetry (to use two of the most prominent terms for this still-emerging genre) is getting ever more popular and complex thanks to leaps in technology. It certainly seems anachronistic to not use technology as a tool or as a theme in poetry, seeing how it is an integral part of our lives. One might say that when we started publishing poems on websites that was an early form of cyber poetry. However, not everyone is using the full potential of technology to create cyber poetry. We will discuss all the ways technology can be a tool, down to employing AI generators as writers. This will also raise the question of authorship and credit. I will also explore the overlaps with concrete poetry, and the difference from sci-fi writing.
Zoria Petkoska K. is an Associate Editor at Tokyo Poetry Journal, editor-in-chief of the literary journal [Ш], and an Assistant Editor at Tokyo Weekender magazine. She completed a MEXT Research Fellowship at TUFS on Japanese visual poetry translation, and has published two poetry books. She writes in English, Macedonian, and Japanese, and has been published in poetry magazines and anthologies in Japan, China, Hong Kong, and the USA, among others.
Barry Eisler
How to Write a Killer Opening
An interactive lecture with plenty of Q&A.
Fiction
The job of every sentence in a novel is to make the reader want to read the next sentence. Which makes the first sentence especially important! We’ll talk about what what kind of first sentence, first paragraph, first sequence pulls the reader out of the everyday world and into the world of your story.
A story boils down to three elements: who, what, and where. Character, plot, and setting. To pull a reader into a story, from the first words you have to serve up some combination of those elements. But to keep the reader going, you have to paradoxically nourish the reader with information that simultaneously famishes the reader for more. As T.S. Eliot said in Gerontion, “the giving famishes the craving.” We’ll start by examining the opening lines of Ken Follett’s The Key to Rebecca—one of the best opening sequences ever:
The last camel collapsed at noon.
It was the five-year-old white bull he had bought in Gialo, the youngest and strongest of the three beasts, and the least ill-tempered: he liked the animal as much as a man could like a camel, which is to say that he hated it only a little.
Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan Judo Institute along the way.
Eisler’s award-winning thrillers have been included in numerous “Best Of” lists, have been translated into nearly twenty languages, and include the #1 bestsellers Livia Lone, The Night Trade, and The Killer Collective. Eisler lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and, when he’s not writing novels, blogs about national security and the media. www.barryeisler.com
Bob Tobin
Writing, Publishing and Promoting Your Non-Fiction Book
Short Lecture with Q&A
Nonfiction, Career
This will be a nuts and bolts session on writing and publishing a non-fiction book.
Topics include: starting with what you know, blogging, writers conferences, finding an agent or publisher, making a pitch, query letters, organizing materials, beta reviewers, writing a proposal, editing, self-publishing, POD and traditional publishing.
Bob Tobin is a non-fiction author who writes about happiness, careers and self-development. He’s the author of several titles in English and Japanese. His most recent book is ˆNo Regrets: How To Kickstart Your Career And Your Life [Pub. Discover 21] He’s Professor Emeritus, Keio University Originally from Boston, Bob now lives on the island of Okinawa.
Charles Kowalski
Masterminds, Minions, and Monsters: Creating 3D Villains
Craft Workshop
Fiction
Create compelling villains that readers will love to hate! This workshop will introduce three main villain motivations (the “3 D’s”) and show how these form seven archetypes, plus six effective recruiting tools for henchmen (FLAMES), the top five justifications for villainy, and how to defeat the villain for a satisfying ending.
“A story is only as good as the villain.” – Clive Barker
Bad guys make good stories, and this workshop will focus on creating compelling villains that readers will love to hate.
Here are the questions to be asked and answered in this workshop.
What makes a compelling villain? How can the BOOM technique help create a villain with a believable backstory?
How do the three main motivations of villains intersect to form seven villain archetypes? What are the common personality characteristics of each?
What are the six tools used by master villains to recruit followers? What are the top five justifications for villainy?
What are the five main patterns of villain defeat and their common variations?
Come find out!
Charles Kowalski is the award-winning author of contemporary thrillers MIND VIRUS and THE DEVIL’S SON, and the Japan-themed historical fantasy SIMON GREY AND THE MARCH OF A HUNDRED GHOSTS. When not writing, he teaches at Tokai University.
Christopher Simons
Virtuosity in Verse: Writing Powerful Cross-Disciplinary Poems
Craft Workshop
Poetry
This poetry workshop will discuss and practice strategies for writing short poems that use concepts and vocabulary from cross-disciplinary subjects that may be unfamiliar to most readers. The goal of the workshop will be to create poems that are clear and engaging without compromising their complexity of thought and language.
The workshop will look at poems on non-literary subjects (or not conventionally literary subjects) such as medicine, astrophysics, economics, politics, anthropology, linguistics, psychology. . . anything that uses concepts and technical vocabulary that aren’t immediately obvious to the general reader. How can a poem of 20 lines engage with new or challenging concepts and theories in such a way that the poem maintains the ’truth’ of the other discipline, but isn’t dry or obscure?
Poets want their work to be published and read as widely as possible; this reality drives poets and publishers towards poems built on simple subjects, clear vocabularies, and familiar feelings. Yet our world is anything but simple. In order to remain relevant, poetry must engage with new scientific and technological vocabularies; new idioms from politics and popular culture; new kinds of relationships. This workshop will explore strategies for writing and revising poems about cross-disciplinary subjects that use vocabulary, images, and concepts that most readers may find unfamiliar. How can a short poem of this kind show the reader what the poem is about, without ruining the poetry? How can such a poem find an audience, or create one? Should poets use footnotes, or expect (or even demand) that readers Google as they read? This session will workshop poems submitted in advance; however, participants are welcome to attend without submitting work.
Christopher Simons is Senior Associate Professor of Literature at ICU in Tokyo. He has held the Harper-Wood Studentship in Creative Writing at St John’s College Cambridge. His most recent poetry collection is Underground Facility (Isobar Press, 2018). His criticism and poetry have appeared in numerous UK publications including the TLS.
David Brennan
Playing Around with Voice
Lecture/Reading with Q&A
Fiction
I will do a reading from my novel which has a very distinctive voice. I will talk about this and voice in general, its importance and techniques used to achieve it. This will be followed by a Q&A and contributions/suggestions from those in attendance.
Voice is perhaps the most important quality in writing fiction yet the most difficult to achieve. I will read from my novel Upperdown which has gained praise for it’s distinctive voice. I will also discuss and give examples of other writers who have achieved distinctive voices for their characters. You can have a brilliant story but if the execution of the voice doesn’t bring it to life, the story will be like the tree falling in the woods with nobody to hear it. However, you can get away with a mediocre story if you have a very distinctive voice. A good writing voice is idiosyncratic, representative of humanity and imperfect. This lecture and reading hopes to touch on the topic of not being afraid to follow the imperfection of voice.
David currently lives in Suzhou. In June 2019 he published his first novel, Upperdown, with epoque press. He was been nominated for the Hennessey Award 2019/2020. He was one of the winners of the Irish Novel Fair 2018. In 2016 he won the Frank O Connor Mentorship Bursary Award and has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story (2017), the Doolin Short Story award, the Curtis Bausse Short story award, the Fish Memoire (2018) and longlisted for the Fish Memoire prize (2016 & 2017) and the Colm Tobin Award (2017).
David Gilbey
Reeling & Writhing at a Distance: a poetry editing workshop
This is a closed workshop of two hours’ duration, limited to 8 participants. This year it will be offered via Zoom Participants will submit drafts of poems which will be circulated so each can read and prepare comments. In the workshop writers will read their work and participants will provide editorial advice.
This workshop allows writers to work on a poem or two in readiness for publication, recognising that there are both personal and professional benefits from a closely-focussed discussion of emerging texts. So the purpose of this workshop is to give a small group of poets the opportunity to meet, read and discuss in depth a sample of each other’s work. Writers of varying degrees of experience are welcome. There will be two parts to the workshop: preparation and participation. Preparation also has two parts: submitting and close reading those who sign up for the session, all of whom will be contacted before the conference.
To sign up, contact David directly at debidogirubi@gmail.com
David Gilbey was Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia, and the founding President of Wagga Wagga Writers Writers, as well as a poet. His three collection of poems are ‘Under the Rainbow’ (1996), ‘Death and the Motorway’ (2008) and ‘Pachinko Sunset’ (2016). He has taught English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in Sendai, Japan in 1996, 2000 and 2007.
Don Maybin and Eucharia Donnery
Resuscitating “The Active Learner”: A journey of self-abuse?
Short Lecture with Q&A
Other Genre
Textbook writing
This is a report on our adventure of revising and re-publishing an out-of-print textbook series still very much in use. Revision work was guided by input from teachers who used the series. Our goal was to rewrite material and remove “warts”, including typos, wordy directions, poorly-ordered activities, and unscripted recordings that were too natural for their own good.
Although the copyright reverted to the authors, some components are locked in a “grey zone”, including illustrations and some recordings.
A tentative work schedule was decided – then along came coronavirus and all schedules were ditched! And we need to consider the new textbook in an online context.
The final hurdle will be getting the book re-published. Should we go back to the publishers? Self-publish? Put it online? Each possibility has advantages and disadvantages. We will discuss all three.
Don Maybin and Eucharia Donnery work in the Department of Applied Computer Sciences at Shonan Institute of Technology (SIT) in Fujisawa. They are the current authors of “The Active Learner”, a communication management text designed to change behavior, especially with SIT’s lovable computer geeks.
Gregory Dunne
The Truth of Poetry
Short Lecture with Q&A
Poetry
John Gardner stated that only writers of fiction tell the truth, as opposed to politicians, and just about everyone else. Writers of fiction, he went on, create worlds that are essentially dreams, and that if the dream should be interrupted by a false note, something untrue to the human experience, the novel would fail because the reader would stop reading. Thus, novelists are, in this sense, truth tellers. This lecture, applies a similar theory to lyric narrative poetry, and posits that the fictive worlds created within the narrative poem must be truthful and that this requires the poet to push beyond the literal into the more capacious world of the imagination.’
This lecture aims to help poets appreciate the way in which the autobiographical fact can work with the imagination to create a truer, more fully realized poem. The lecture will focus on poets trying to salvage drafts which aren’t working. It will provide strategies to help poets reach the goal of creating living, breathing, “true” poems.
Gregory Dunne is the author of Fistful of Lotus (Elizabeth Forrest, 2000), Home Test (Adastra Press, 2009), Other/Wise (Isobar Press, 2019) and Quiet Accomplishment: Remembering Cid Corman (Ekstasis Editions, 2014). He is associate poetry editor at Kyoto Journal and teaches in the Faculty of Comparative Culture at Miyazaki International College.
Hans Brinckmann
Making A Memoir From A Personal Journal
Lecture with Q&A
Nonfiction
A memoir of one’s life in Japan can attract readers interested in Japan’s culture and society. especially if it reflects unbiased observation, interaction with residents, and thorough fact-checking, and is supported by a journal.
In 2005, I published a memoir entitled “The Magatama Doodle, One Man’s Affair with Japan,” which attracted enthusiastic reviews, as did the Japanese version in Hiromi Mizoguchi’s translation. It eventually went out of print, but second-hand copies remained available on amazon at exorbitant prices – up to US$1,300! Its popularity made me decide to republish the book, with a new section covering the years up to now. The successor to the original publisher agreed to issue it under a new title, “The Call of Japan: a Continuing Story – 1950 to the Present Day.”
The success of the original book was no doubt due to the personal nature of the story, and its roots in the postwar period, which was supported by the journal I kept over the years. It provided the flavour of authenticity, essential for a good memoir
Award-winning author Hans Brinckmann (URL: https://habri.jp), born in The Hague, after a 36-year career as a “reluctant banker” turned to writing fiction, non-fiction and poetry. His titles include:
The Call of Japan: a Continuing Story – 1950 to the Present Day (Renaissance Books, UK, 2020)
The Monkey Dance (H2H Publishers, 2017) A brief memoir of the last winter of WW 2 in Holland
In the Eyes of the Son, a novel (Savant Books and Publications, Honolulu, 2014)
The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills and other stories (Strategic Publishers, 2012)
The Undying Day (H2H Publishers/Trafford, 2011) A bi-lingual selection of poetry written with side-by-side with Hiromi Mizoguchi’s translation
Showa Japan: the Post-War Golden Age and its troubled legacy (Tuttle, hardback 2008; paperback 2013) Japanese translation by Hiromi Mizoguchi (Random House-Kodansha, 2009)
Noon Elusive and other stories (H2H Publishers/Trafford, 2006)
The Magatama Doodle, One Man’s Affair with Japan, 1950-2004 (Global Oriental, UK, 2005)
Holly Thompson and Mariko Nagai
Re-envisioning Revisions: A YA/MG Novel Revision Workshop
Craft Workshop
Fiction
A closed two-session workshop for those who pre-register
Please note: It is no longer possible to sign up for this workshop
Re-envisioning Revisions is a closed YA/MG novel revision workshop for participants who have pre-submitted complete novel drafts (original or J>E translation) for group feedback prior to JWC. At JWC, participants will discuss whole novel revision strategies and techniques and workshop writers’ selected revised excerpts.
Writers often get bogged down in whole novel revision and struggle to re-envision their work. This workshop will create groups of writers and translators of YA and MG fiction to read and comment on each other’s novel drafts prior to meeting for novel revision workshop sessions at JWC. The aim is to give YA/MG writers/translators a fixed deadline for completing a novel draft, to ensure that in small groups they can offer and receive feedback on drafts in advance of JWC.
During the two back-to-back JWC Re-envisioning Revision workshops, writers will reflect on feedback, discuss tools and techniques identified for advancing their novel, and plan key strategies for revision. Writers/translators will have a chance to share a brief excerpt of a revised scene, and will set personal goals for completing whole novel revisions within the support of a larger writing group. The end goal is to grow writer revision practices toward developing strong YA/MG novels viable in today’s children’s and teen publishing markets. Open to participants who submit a completed draft of a young adult or middle grade novel by July 30. Those interested in participating should send an email of interest to japan@scbwi.org by July 10 with JWC YA/MG Novel Revision in the subject heading.
Holly Thompson (www.hatbooks.com) is author of the verse novels Falling into the Dragon’s Mouth, Orchards, The Language Inside; picture books Twilight Chant; One Wave at a Time, The Wakame Gatherers and the novel Ash. She writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction, teaches at Yokohama City University, and is SCBWI Japan Co-Regional Advisor.
Mariko Nagai (www.mariko-nagai.com) is the author of Histories of Bodies: Poems, Georgic: Stories, Irradiated Cities, Dust of Eden, Under the Broken Sky and the forthcoming The Sword of Yesterday. Mariko Nagai is a Professor at Temple University Japan and is SCBWI Japan Co-Regional Advisor.
Iain Maloney
The Only Gaijin in the Village: Making Narratives Out of Experience
Lecture/Reading with Q&A
Nonfiction
In 2016 my wife and I bought a house and moved to a small village in rural Gifu Prefecture. I began writing a series of columns for Gaijinpot about my experiences as the only gaijin in the village, which was published as a memoir in spring 2020.
This presentation will focus on making narratives out of the real world experiences, both personal and from contemporary history. There are two sides to this coin: I will talk about the process of fictionalizing real events, looking at writers such as David Peace, while touching on my own fiction work. I will also look at turning everyday experiences into memoir. I will talk about the process of moving from writing fiction to narrative non-fiction, the similarities between the two forms and the challenges inherent in leaving the imaginary for the actual. I will also talk about appropriation, and the tensions between factual accuracy and the requirements of storytelling.
Iain Maloney teaches English and creative writing at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies. He is the author of three novels and a collection of poetry. His memoir about life in rural Japan, The Only Gaijin in the Village, was published in spring 2020. www.iainmaloney.com @iainmaloney
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Yoko Danno and Goro Takano
Poetry Reading with Q&A
Poetry
Yoko Danno, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa and Goro Takano will each read a brief selection of poetry from their recent books, followed by Q&A with the audience.
In this session three very experienced and widely published poets will read aloud recent work. Time will be allotted at the end of the reading for participants to ask questions of the poets.
Although YOKO DANNO is Japanese, born and educated in Japan, she writes poetry solely in English. Her poems have appeared internationally in many journals and anthologies, online and in print. Her recent books of poetry include: “Aquamarine” (Glass Lyre Press, 2014), “Woman in a Blue Robe” (Isobar Press, 2016), “Further Center: Poems 1970 ~ 1998” (with an introduction by Gary Snyder, The Ikuta Press, 2017) and “Photo Scrolls” (prose poems with photographic images, a collaboration with James C. Hopkins, the Ikuta Press, 2020). Visit: http://www.ikutapress.com/danno3.html
Click here for a list of Danno’s books on Amazon
JANE JORITZ-NAKAGAWA is the author of over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry and also is the author of essays, short fiction, and cross-genre works. Recent books include “Poems: New and Selected” (Isobar, 2018), “<<terrain grammar>>” (theenk Books, 2018), and, as editor, “women : poetry : migration [an anthology]”, theenk Books, 2017. Her new poetry book “Plan B Audio” will be published in approximately July, 2020 with Isobar. Email is welcome at janejoritznakagawa(at)gmail(dot)com. Visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Joritz-Nakagawa
GORO TAKANO has published three poetry collections through BlazeVOX (NY): “Responsibilities of the Obsessed,” “Silent Whistle-Blowers,” and “Non Sequitur Syndrome.” “On Lost Sheep,” Takano’s translation of the works of the Japanese modernist poet Shiro Murano, was published through Tinfish (HI). Takano’s first Japanese-only poetry collection, “Nichiyo-bi no Shinju” (“Sunday Double Suicide”) was published through Karan-sha (Fukuoka).
Joan Bailey
Meet the Editor and Talk about the Pitch
Panel Discussion
Nonfiction/Career
Join editors from five Japan-based publications to discover what kinds of story pitches they are looking for, what makes a good one, and why pitches get passed over. Learn the dos and don’ts of pitching as well as how to catch a busy editor’s eye.
This panel discussion will feature five editors from Japan-based publications: The Japan Times, Savvy Tokyo, Gaijin Pot, Tokyo Cheapo, and Tokyo Weekender. Each editor will share generally what kinds of stories they are interested in and what they are looking for now; what makes a good pitch; what doesn’t make a good pitch; what additional skills are helpful; and what they want to know about you, the writer. They will also discuss the challenges their publications face and how that affects freelance writers pitching stories to them. Participants will have a chance to ask specific questions about the pitching process and leave with a list of resources.
Joan Bailey is a freelance writer based in Tokyo. Her work focuses on food, farming, farmers markets, and travel. Her work can be found at The Japan Times, Tokyo Weekender, Modern Farmer, Civil Eats, Savvy Tokyo, and Outdoor Japan. Visit joandbailey.com to read your fill!
John Dougill
Writers in Kyoto: The Group
Short Lecture with Q&A
Instructional
Writers in Kyoto was set up over five years ago with six members. It has since expanded to over 50 paid-up members. What do they do? Why do they exist? And what lessons can be learnt?
Writers in Kyoto is a group of some 50 published and self-published English-language authors with a special connection to the ancient capital. It is run on a membership basis and is involved with promotion, book launches, readings, the exchange of information, and social events. We have a good relationship with Tuttle and collaborate with Kyoto Journal and the Kansai branch of SWET.
Our main activities include lunch talks, a writing competition, and producing anthologies of members’ writing. We also run a website and have two Facebook pages, one for public viewing and one for members only. In addition we have invited some of the country’s leading writers to give presentations – Karel van Wolferen, Robert Whiting, Richard Lloyd Parry, Judith Winters Carpenter, and Alex Kerr amongst others.
In this presentation the speaker will review the first five years with a view to seeing what lessons can be learnt.
John Dougill is a retired professor of British Culture, who has been 30 years in Japan. Amongst his books are Kyoto, A Cultural History; Japan’s World Heritage Sites; Zen Gardens and Temples of Kyoto; and In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians. He runs the Green Shinto blog and is founder-organiser of Writers in Kyoto.
John Gribble, Kristina Butke, Percival Constantine, Alec McAulay, Warren Decker
The MFA: The Good, The Bad, and The Expensive
Panel Discussion
Career
Should I get an MFA or other graduate-level degree in writing? Aren’t they expensive? Are they difficult? Are they any good? What sort of program should I look at? What kind of benefits should I expect to receive? These questions and others will be addressed in this session.
Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and other advanced degrees with a writing emphasis have become a viable option for those seeking to improve their writing skills and advance themselves professionally. Some programs are full- or part-time on a university campus, some are on-line, some are hybrids, blending elements of both. The panelists, all with advanced writing degrees, will each talk about the programs they attended, their own experiences and answer your questions.
John Gribble is a noted gasbag. He rarely knows what he is talking about, but he states his ignorant opinions with great vigor. He has spent far too much of his life in school and other institutions. He is also a poet, co-organizer of the Japan Writers Conference and the Tokyo Writers Workshop, and earned his MFA at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. His available books are Another Wrong Fedora and Ueno Mornings.
Kristina Elyse Butke is an American writer, editor, and teacher who indulges in cosplay, art, and all things otaku. She has a BA in English Literature from Capital University and an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. A former college English teacher, playwright, and composer, she now writes fantasy and horror. Her work has been published by ExFic, First Class Literary, and Synaeresis Magazine, among others. She’s also worked the convention circuit, presenting panels on writing fanfiction and genre fiction at events such as Ohayocon, Matsuricon, and Colossalcon. In terms of editing, one of her latest projects included subtitle edits for Pied Piper Inc.’s release of the anime Skip Beat!, and she currently edits and contributes to Speculative Chic.
Kristina lives in Kumamoto prefecture in Japan, where she works in multiple high schools as an assistant language teacher. When she isn’t working on all the things, she travels to shrines, hunts for Kumamon, and spends more money than she should at the JUMP shop.
Raised on a consistent diet of superhero comics, action movies, and video games, Percival Constantine wanted to grow up and write the type of fiction he consumed. Now as a prolific author of pulp fiction, he’s written around thirty books across various genres. He’s also the host two podcasts—Japan On Film and Superhero Cinephiles. When he’s not working on projects, he somehow finds time to teach classes in literature, film, and English. Born and raised in Chicago, he’s now based in Kagoshima, Japan.
Alec McAulay is an award-winning writer and director. Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, he has lived in Japan since 1989. He teaches Creative Writing at Yokohama National University. Alec has an MA Screenwriting (Distinction), and a PhD (Screenwriting) from the Faculty of Media & Communication, Bournemouth University. His children’s novel Robot Santa (unpublished) is about a ‘hafu’ Scottish-Japanese girl who builds a robot Santa to save Christmas.
Warren Decker is a teacher and writer based in Izumi, Japan. He has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in The Best American Poetry 2018, The New Ohio Review, Modern Haiku, Sou’wester, and other journals. His first book of poetry The Long Side of the Midnight Sun is available from Isobar Press. He has an MFA in creative writing from the online program at the University of Texas, El Paso.
Kai Raine
Subsidy Presses and Self-Publishing: A First Timer’s Perspective
Short Lecture with Q&A
Career
There is a lot of information out there about self-publishing, but it can be overwhelming for a first-timer. In this lecture, I will detail my first experience with subsidy publishing, and lessons I have since learned in self-publishing.
When self-publishing, there is a lot to consider: ISBNs, cover art, editors, layout, format… And all this on top of all the writing and polishing of your writing. This can be overwhelming for a first-time self-publisher, who might not know where to start.
In this lecture, I will recount my first publishing experience, in which I went with a subsidy press, and explain the lessons I learned about both self- and subsidy publishing.
I will share information about Gatekeeper Press, the publisher I used, but I will also detail some downsides of that experience.
This is a lecture aimed at first-time authors.
Kai Raine is a PhD student of cognitive science in robotics. Kai is the author of the subsidy-published fantasy novel These Lies That Live Between Us. Kai spends her free time writing and reading anything she can get her hands on.
Karen Hill Anton
Memoir: Everyone has a story – here’s how you can tell (write!) yours
Short Lecture with Q&A
Nonfiction
Memoirists speak of their experience of writing as cathartic, but this author thinks it may be much more than that. She says writing your memoir, an endeavor of personal storytelling you’re prepared to share with the world, can be a deeply satisfying revelation.
Having recently published The View From Breast Pocket Mountain: A Memoir, in this session the author will share what she’s learned, and explore with attendees the essential elements of this genre.
In this session we will cover such topics as Chronology, Identifying Theme, Structure, Yourself as the Principal Character, Voice, Detail, and Dialogue.
Karen Hill Anton wrote the column “Crossing Cultures” for the Japan Times (1985-1999). Her short story appears in “The Broken Bridge” (Stone Bridge Press) and recently in the essay collection “The Meaning of Michelle” (St. Martin’s Press). Originally from New York City, she’s lived with her family in rural Shizuoka since 1975.
Recipient of the “Outstanding Nonfiction (Memoir)” award at the Southern California Writers Conference, September 2018, The View From Breast Pocket Mountain is available at www.karenhillanton.com
Marco Lobo
Providing Authenticity through Research in Both Fiction and Non-Fiction
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction/Nonfiction
A look into research sources for developing timelines and fact-checking in order to build an environment that supports a credible narrative.
One of the greatest challenges in writing historical novels is ensuring that historical descriptions for the period are authentic. Often an arduous task, it is also a delight to be able to immerse readers in the real world of a novel’s protagonists and antagonists.
With no experience of biographical writing, I accepted a commission to document the life of a historical figure (and family member) who died in the 1960’s. With a very restrictive deadline, I threw myself into the research and successfully completed the project on time. Reviews of the book have been overwhelmingly positive. I will share my experience with this project.
With a 40-year business career, Marco built his reputation by helping European and North American multinationals establish their commercial footprint in Japan and the wider Asia region.
He published his first book in 2012, ‘The Witch Hunter’s Amulet’ a historical novel. He has since published three more historical novels: ‘Mesquita’s Reflections’, ‘The Atavist’, ‘JINCAN’, and ‘…everyday is mine’, a biography of Pedro José Lobo.
Melinda Falgoust
The Mad, Mad, Science of Dissecting the Plot Monster: A Universal Formula for Success
Short Lecture with Q&A, Craft Workshop
Fiction
It IS Rocket Science…well, sort of.
Participants learn the scientific formula distilled from the teachings of master storytelling gurus worldwide which can be applied universally across all types of writing. With a slight margin for error, the formula holds true for most successful works, many which will be examined in this presentation.
Every good doctor (evil genius scientist) knows the inner mechanics of his patient (or monster). Writers are no different. We have no Gray’s Anatomy, but we do have some scions of story science to provide guidance to the systems and organs that make a truly good story sing – the 16 elements that form the anatomy of plot.
Attendees will participate in guided dissection of some successful, well-known titles in children’s and adult literature to see how the Plot Formula applies and, when adhered to, nearly guarantees a concise, tightly woven plot that keeps the monster under control.
Melinda Falgoust is an internationally award-winning author whose writing has appeared in Reader’s Digest, AHMM, and others. Most recently, she was recognized as a finalist in the Clive Cussler Adventure Writer’s Competition. The veteran actor often reaches into her actor’s bag-of-tricks to introduce quirky characters that bring her presentations alive!
Michael Frazier
I AM MY FAMILY (a persona workshop)
Craft Workshop
Poetry
This is a poetry workshop (open to writers of all genres) who are interested in writing about and through their family. We will use the persona form—writing in the voice of family members—to interrogate ourselves. Some poets we’ll look at include Natalie Diaz, Paul Tran, and Julian Randall.
No one can move forward without looking back at where they’ve come from. This is the principle that guides this workshop. Persona poetry is poetry in the voice of someone, or thing, other than ourselves: shiba inu, wild iris, Sailor Moon, Kanye West, or even your bed. We will use the persona to focus on and interrogate our own families and make meaning out of the relationships that have formed us. In order to embody the voices of our family (biological or chosen) we must practice radical empathy. While a persona is in the voice of someone else, my hope is that in the poems we will write, we will turn inwards and learn something new about ourselves. We will look at writers who wield the persona and voices of their family with urgency like Paul Tran, Yalie Kamara, Hiwot Adilow, K-Ming Chang, Natalie Diaz, and Eduardo C. Corral.
Michael Frazier is a poet in Kanazawa. He graduated from NYU, where he was the 2017 poet commencement speaker & co-champion of CUPSI. He’s performed at venues including Nuyorican Poets Café & Lincoln Center. On staff at The Adroit Journal, his poems appear in COUNTERCLOCK, Construction, Visible Poetry Project, among others.
Mike (Michael) Guest
Depicting Multiple Identities and Marginalized Characters in Fiction
Short lecture with Q&A
Fiction
Intersecting cultural, ethnic, and social identities are a feature of our increasingly hybrid/hyphenated society, and one that has emerged in modern fiction. In this presentation, with reference to his own writing struggles, the presenter will discuss how writers might tackle the depiction of such characters while avoiding stereotypes and caricatures.
Intersecting and, often, competing senses of self and other — ethnic, cultural, linguistic, sexual, or social — is a fact of 21st century life. The world is becoming increasingly populated with hyphenized-hybrid cultural and linguistic identities, a wider recognition of non-traditional sexual/gender identities, ‘third-culture children’, all working within multiple socio-cultural milieus. Such characters are also now increasingly emerging in fiction, as in the presenter’s novel, ‘The Aggrieved Parties’. This, however, creates a fiction writer’s dilemma: How can we depict such complexity in our characters without falling into the traps of pandering to stereotypes or using such characters merely as vehicles for socio-political commentary? Taking examples from both his own and others’ work plus thirty years’ experience living and traveling ‘abroad’, the presenter hopes to ignite a discussion as to how balance, sensitivity, and accuracy in creating complex identities in pan-cultural fiction might best be achieved.
Michael (Mike) Guest is Associate Professor of English in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Miyazaki. Besides over twenty years’ worth of academic publications, Guest has written two novels, the latest being ‘The Aggrieved Parties’
The Aggrieved Parties: A Novel
He also maintains an EFL blog, ‘Musings and Methods’,
https://ltprofessionals.com/author/mike-guest
and a literary blog, ‘Honeyed Badger Feet’.
Michael Pronko
The Structuring Blues
Short lecture with Q&A
Fiction
This talk will propose various forms of structuring in the creative process. Both conceptual and practical approaches to employing structuring processes will be explained as ways to enhance the creative process and become more productive.
Structuring longer forms of writing is extremely important. Some writers can handle that in their head, but many need the help of paper, pen, craft books and computer tools. This talk will go into the how and why of structuring a novel with a focus on keeping the process flowing, productive and changeable. Structure need not be confining, formulaic or straightjacketing. Just the opposite, utilizing structure is one of the most important ways to improvise and create freely. This short lecture with Q&A will talk about the stages of structuring a novel, starting with the initial core idea and moving through three- and five-part concepts of structure, to final revisions. At each stage of the process, a supple, tensile concept of structure can greatly enhance improvised creativity and narrative flow. The talk will look at various techniques for best using structuring techniques.
Michael Pronko has written for many publications. His mystery novels, The Last Train and The Moving Blade, won numerous awards. Tokyo Traffic was released in 2020. He also has three books about Tokyo life and runs the website Jazz in Japan. He teaches American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University.
Michael Dylan Welch
Going Nowhere: Learning Haiku from Pico Iyer (and a writing exercise)
Lecture with exercise and discussion
Poetry
Join Michael Dylan Welch for an inspirational PowerPoint presentation on the art of going nowhere, and writing haiku about it. Haiku poets are accustomed to seeing the virtue of the ordinary, but now that we’re all mostly still in coronavirus lockdown, or have been for a while, we’ve all been forced to “go nowhere.” Pico Iyer, the well-known travel writer based in Kyoto, has written about the art of stillness that finds much in common with haiku. This presentation explores his ideas and applies them to haiku, and may inspire you even if you write other poetry or fiction. You can help with the presentation by taking turns reading “nowhere” haiku shown on screen. After the presentation and a brief discussion, we’ll turn our attention to a writing exercise, and then share what we write (if you like) for group discussion.
Michael Dylan Welch is originally from England, and grew up there and in Ghana, Australia, and Canada. He currently lives near Seattle, but enjoys visiting Japan (his wife is Japanese, from Gifu prefecture). Michael’s haiku have been recited for the Empress of Japan, performed at the Baseball Hall of Fame, printed on balloons, and chiselled into stone. He has won first prize in the Henderson, Brady, Drevniok, and Tokutomi haiku contests, among others, and his poems, essays and reviews have appeared in hundreds of books, anthologies, and journals in more than twenty languages. His translations from the Japanese (with Emiko Miyashita) have included books on Noh, furoshiki, bonsai, and a translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a selection of which appeared on the back of 150,000,000 U.S. postage stamps. Michael was also keynote speaker for the 2013 Haiku International Association convention in Tokyo. He served as vice president of the Haiku Society of America for many years, and cofounded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 and the American Haiku Archives in 1996. He founded the Tanka Society of America in 2000 (and returned recently as president), the annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2008, and National Haiku Writing Month in 2010 (www.nahaiwrimo.com). Michael has also served two terms as poet laureate of Redmond, Washington, where he is also president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword and curator since 2006 of the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night readings. He has published more than 75 books, mostly related to haiku. You can learn more about Michael, and read his essays and poems at www. graceguts.com.
Naomi Hirahara
The Gardener Did It: Developing a Mystery Sleuth
Lecture with Q&A
Fiction
One of the most popular categories of books, the mystery genre opens a door to history, culture and setting. At the center of a successful standalone novel or series is its sleuth.
Naomi Hirahara, author of the Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai mystery series, will share specific details on how she developed her gardener protagonist and discuss other sleuths–from classics such as Sherlock Holmes to more contemporary ones like Maisie Dobbs.
A former journalist with The Rafu Shimpo newspaper in Los Angeles, Naomi worked on her debut book for 15 years before SUMMER OF THE BIG BACHI was published in 2004 by Random House. Since then she has released a total of 10 mysteries, one middle-grade book and several nonfiction history books. Her final Mas Arai mystery, HIROSHIMA BOY, will be published in Japan by Shogakukan in 2021. Her upcoming historic standalone set in 1944 Chicago, CLARK AND DIVISION, is scheduled for publication in 2021 with Soho Crime. For more information, go to www.naomihirahara.com. All her novels, both print and electronic, are available on all platforms; the entire Mas Arai mystery series, including two in Japanese, are offered as audiobooks on Audible.
Patrick Parr
How to Write and Sell Biography
Short Lecture with Q&A
Nonfiction
For anyone looking to write about someone other than themselves. To write original biographical portraits, it takes knowing where to look. Archives, interviews, microfilm…if you like these words, come on in.
For this presentation/Q and A, I’ll take the audience through a simple five-step process to create a unique article about someone who you assume everything has been written about.
I’ll also show how I started creating my ‘biographical portrait’ platform back in 2014 after writing short fiction for fifteen years.
I’ll also describe how to properly research and write an article (or book) about a well-known historical figure, such as Albert Einstein or Martin Luther King Jr.
Patrick Parr’s first book is The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age. His newest is One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation. He is a history columnist for Japan Today and teaches at Lakeland University of Japan.
Paul Rossiter, Warren Decker, Gregory Dunne, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Philip Rowland
This Year at Isobar
Reading with Q&A
Poetry
Five Isobar poets will introduce and read from their latest books: The Long Side of the Midnight Sun (Warren Decker), Other/Wise (Gregory Dunne), Plan B Audio (Jane Joritz-Nakagawa), and The Painting Stick (second, expanded edition, Paul Rossiter), NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Philip Rowland, editor).
In this session, five Isobar authors will introduce their latest books. Warren Decker will perform passages from his book-length poetic drama, The Long Side of the Midnight Sun, in which the hero, Craig, along with his wife and family, leaves home in Osaka and embarks on a mind-altering journey in Ocean City, Maryland. Gregory Dunne will read his quietly moving elegies and open-hearted poems of friendship, marriage, family and vocation from his collection Other/Wise. Jane Joritz-Nakazawa will read from Plan B Audio, her powerful book-length poem written in response to a life-threatening illness and in the aftermath of the radical surgery that saved her life. Paul Rossiter will read from The Painting Stick, a collection of poems from 1991-2002, originally published in 2005; eleven (at last finished!) poems from the same period have been added to this second, expanded edition. Philip Rowland will read from NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems, which he edited.
Warren Decker lives in Izumi, Japan,
trapped in his doubts, but presuming he can
write his way out by rhyming each line
with his feet keeping time. He aspires to shine
like a luminous wave of blinding compassion
but was just a dim ripple the last time we asked him.
Warren’s poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, NOON: journal of the short poem, Acorn, The New Ohio Review, THINK, Sou’wester, Fifth Wednesday, and several other online and print journals. He has also been spotted performing his rhymed poetry online and in front of live audiences in Osaka.
Gregory Dunne is the author of Fistful of Lotus (Elizabeth Forrest, 2000), Home Test (Adastra Press, 2009) and Quiet Accomplishment: Remembering Cid Corman (Ekstasis Editions, 2014). He is an associate poetry editor at Kyoto Journal and teaches in the Faculty of Comparative Culture at Miyazaki International College. Dunne has published poetry in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, cold drill, Crazyhorse, Hummingbird, Kyoto Journal, Modern Haiku, Poetry East, Poetry Kanto, Rock and Sling, Verse and Voice and Yomimono, among others. His books are Fistful of Lotus (Elizabeth Forrest, 2000) and Home Test (Adastra Press, 2009). His critical memoir, Quiet Accomplishment: Remembering Cid Corman was published in 2014 (Ekstasis Editions).
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is the author of ten poetry collections, as well as chapbooks, ebooks, and a volume of selected poems: Poems: New & Selected (2018). She has also edited an anthology of innovative transcultural poetry and essays by fifty women poets titled women : poetry : migration [an anthology]. She has published poetry, essays and memoirs in many journals, including A glimpse of, The Argotist Online UK, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Marsh Hawk Review, Modern Haiku, New American Writing, NOON: journal of the short poem, Otoliths, Past Simple, Plumwood Mountain, Sibila, Tears in the Fence, Translating Chronic Pain, and Wordgathering. She has published ten books of poetry, including Poems: New & Selected (Isobar Press, 2018), and in 2018 she edited women : poetry : migration [an anthology] (theenk Books).
Paul Rossiter has published nine books of poetry since 1995. After retiring from teaching at the University of Tokyo in 2012, he founded Isobar Press, which specialises in publishing English-language poetry from Japan. More information about Isobar Press can be found at: https://isobarpress.com. Journals where his work appear include NOON: journal of the short poem, Otoliths, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Tears in the Fence, Shearsman, Tokyo Poetry Journal and World Haiku. He has published nine books of poetry since 1995: the most recent are Temporary Measures (Isobar Press, 2017), and On Arrival (Isobar Press, 2019).
Philip Rowland lives in Tokyo, where he works as a professor of English. He is the author of Something Other Than Other (Isobar, 2016), the founding editor of NOON: journal of the short poem, editor of NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar, 2018), and co-editor of the anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). His other publications include together still (Hub Editions, 2004), where rungs were (Noon Press, 2007), someone one once ran away with (Longhouse, 2009), before music (Red Moon Press, 2012), Something Other Than Other (Isobar, 2016). He is the founding editor of NOON: journal of the short poem.
Percival Constantine
Finding Success With Self-Publishing
Lecture with Q & A
Career
The rise of ebooks has made it easier than ever to get your book to your readers without going through a publisher. But is self-publishing even right for you? How do you find readers? Can you actually make money? Self-published author Percival Constantine will help you answer these questions and more so you are better informed about what decision is best for your writing career.
Raised on a consistent diet of superhero comics, action movies, and video games, Percival Constantine wanted to grow up and write the type of fiction he consumed. Now as a prolific author of pulp fiction, he’s written around thirty books across various genres. He’s also the host two podcasts—Japan On Film and Superhero Cinephiles. When he’s not working on projects, he somehow finds time to teach classes in literature, film, and English. Born and raised in Chicago, he’s now based in Kagoshima, Japan.
Website: http://percivalconstantine.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/percivalconstantine
Twitter: http://twitter.com/perconstantine
Email: pc@percivalconstantine.com
Steve McClure
The Art of the Interview
Short Lecture with Q&A
Instructional
Veteran journalist Steve McClure passes on some tips about how to prepare for, conduct, and write up a successful interview.
There’s a lot more to conducting a successful interview than sitting down with your subject and turning on your recording device (or opening your notebook) and asking questions. In this talk, veteran Tokyo-based journalist Steve McClure outlines how to prepare for, conduct, and write up an interview so that the finished product — in print or electronic form — is clearly presented, informative and maybe even entertaining. Making an interview work involves striking the right balance between planning and spontaneity, thinking on your feet, and remembering that the point of doing an interview is to enable the subject to communicate his or her ideas or information to your intended audience — it’s not about you. A good interviewer is a combination of stenographer, psychologist and logician. And good interviewing skills are useful in all sorts of fields — not just journalism.
Steve McClure is a native of Vancouver, Canada, and has lived in Tokyo since 1985. From 1991 until 2008 he was the Japan correspondent and then Asia bureau chief of Billboard magazine. He now works as a TV news rewriter at NHK World as well as a freelance writer and narrator.
Steve Redford
Stuck in a Dark Tunnel? Really? — Managing the Writing of a Novel
Short lecture with a bit of workshopping and discussion
Fiction
This presentation/discussion will focus on the problems involved in managing the writing of a novel–useful, hopefully, for those who have in the past struggled with “keeping a novel together,” and for those trying to tackle a long piece of fiction for the first time.
You’ve got an idea for a novel, a rough idea of plot and conflicts, a rough idea for five or six major characters. You want to guarantee the likelihood of producing an excellent work of fiction and increase the likelihood of finishing it. How much more brainstorming about character and plot should you do before you actually begin the writing of the novel itself? How completely do you need to understand each character’s personality, quirks, likes/dislikes, past experiences, recent experiences, and impressions?These are questions this presentation will address. After some statements on writing by a number of novelists, the presenter will discuss how he’s approaching the writing of his current project. A short exercise will follow, encouraging participants to consider how important depth of knowledge about a character can be.
Steve Redford is originally from Atlanta, Georgia. He has one M.A. in American Literature and Creative Writing, and another in Advanced Japanese Studies. He has been a professor of American literature at Shizuoka University for twenty-two years. Most importantly, he is a hiker, a ukulele player, and a gardener. His website is https://www.persimmon-dreams.com/
Steve’s books include: When a Sissy Climbs a Mountain in May and Along the Same Street
Steven Wolfson
The Art of Cinematic Storytelling
Lecture with Q&A
The greatest challenge facing all screenwriters, whether novice or professional, is the process of transforming a premise into a compelling, sustainable story. This workshop focuses solely on the art of the story, with an emphasis on such fundamentals as character development, super-objective, rising conflict, scene work, and three-act structure. Participants learn how to spot critical mistakes often made in the first draft of a screenplay. The final goal of the workshop is a greater understanding of what makes a story work and a series of tools that participants can immediately apply to their current script.
Steven Wolfson has been an Outstanding Instructor of the Year in The Writers Program at UCLA twice where he has taught for the past 20 years. A highly sought-after story consultant and dramaturg, he has worked one-on-one with several A-list Hollywood writers and directors.
As a screenwriter, Wolfson has sold projects to Fox, Lions Gate, TNT, MTV, Langley Entertainment, Beacon Films and producer Arnold Rifkin. Wolfson wrote the independent romantic comedy, Dinner and Driving, which premiered at The Austin Film Festival and went on to win audience awards at several film festivals and was sold to HBO. Wolfson also wrote and co-produced the critically acclaimed Lionsgate feature, Gang Tapes, a coming-of-age drama set in South Central, Los Angeles. Gang Tapes played to sold-out audiences at film festivals in both The United States and Europe.
Suzanne Kamata
Wheelchair User or Wheelchair-bound?: Writing About Disability
Short Lecture with Q&A
Fiction, Nonfiction
In this session, I will discuss positive and problematic representations of persons with disabilities in literature, including my own work, with a view to developing better awareness.
With the approach of the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics (hopefully), people with disabilities in Japan have been given more attention than perhaps ever before. English textbooks for Japanese children now frequently include stories about or representations of people with disabilities. Worldwide, initiatives such as #weneeddiversebooks and the call for #ownvoices have led to an increase of books featuring characters with disabilities. That said, some of these representations, and the way that they are discussed remain problematic. When do stories about disability become “inspiration porn”? What kind of language should we use when discussing disability? Who has the right to tell these stories? In this session, I will address these questions, using examples from recently published Japanese textbooks and literature featuring children in Japan and other countries, including my own work.
Suzanne Kamata is the award-winning author or editor of twelve published books including Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, 2008), Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible (GemmaMedia, 2013), A Girls’ Guide to the Islands (Gemma Open Door, 2017), Squeaky Wheels: Travels with My Daughter by Train, Plane, Metro, Tuk-tuk and Wheelchair (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2019), and Indigo Girl (GemmaMedia, 2019). She is an Associate Professor at Naruto University of Education.
Todd Jay Leonard
Publishing in the EFL Market in Japan: Four Perspectives on How to Make your Proposal Count
Short lecture with Q & A
Career
This presentation will outline the current publishing market in Japan for EFL/ESL textbooks by reviewing the various points of views of the publishing industry. The presenter has published extensively within the ESL/EFL market in Japan and will offer helpful advice to budding authors who wish to pursue projects geared to Japan’s domestic market.
Most likely, every language teacher in Japan has (at some point during his/her tenure) contemplated writing a textbook to fill a void in the market…in that constant search for the perfect, all encompassing textbook.
In today’s competitive publishing world, getting the proverbial “foot in the door” can seem daunting and nearly impossible. What are publishers looking for in the current market? What appeals to editors who ultimately decide which titles go to production and which ones do not? What are the salespeople on the front lines hearing from their market base? What must an author do in order to get his/her book published?
This presentation focuses on these very questions, offering inside insights from all the various points of view that must be considered when writing a proposal to publish a textbook–the publisher, the editor, the salesperson, and the author. Professor Leonard explains the realities within the publishing industry and addresses some common myths associated with EFL publishing.
Todd Jay Leonard has been actively involved in book publishing for thirty years. He is the author of 22 books. He has published books with a number of different Japanese publishing companies. He lives, writes, and teaches on the southern island of Kyushu, where he is a university professor at University of Teacher Education Fukuoka. He has also published extensively in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers on cross-cultural, historical, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) themes.
Warren Decker
Pterodactylic Pentagrameter: Working with Rhyme and Meter
Craft Workshop
Poetry
In this workshop we will focus on poetry that incorporates rhyme and meter. As a participant, please bring 2-10 lines of rhymed and metered poetry for us to discuss. Please also be ready to share your unique techniques for finding the right meter and rhymes for your poetic lines.
Paradoxically, the confines of rhyme and meter can often serve to open unexpected creative doors. One who sets out to write about “fractals” may find “pterodactyls” swooping into their poem. Maintaining a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed beats might lead a poet—after many hours at the keyboard—feeling as though a supernatural rhythmic force is guiding them to choose the perfect words and in the perfect order.
In this workshop, while looking at specific examples of rhyme and meter as exhibited in the participants’ samples, we will collectively attempt to recall the wonderful technical terminology describing syllabic meter (for example: “iambic pentameter,” and “dactylic tetrameter”), but also consider looser and more intuitive accentual poetic rhythms.
Furthermore, we will discuss the incredible variation contained within the seemingly simple concept of “rhyme,” focusing on concrete examples to understand how and why certain rhymes work.
Warren Decker has published poetry, fiction and non-fiction in The Best American Poetry 2018, NOON, The Font, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Acorn, The New Ohio Review, THINK, Sou’wester, Fifth Wednesday, and several other online and print journals. He also performs his poetry online and in front of live audiences in Osaka.
Wendy Jones Nakanishi (aka Lea O’Harra)
How to Write a Crime Novel
Short lecture w/ Q & A
I will offer advice and suggestions to individuals who wish to try to write a murder mystery. These include the importance of creating a group of clearly-defined individuals (including, of course, the potential victim and the potential murderer) within a well-established context: people with whom readers can identify, in situations which are readily comprehensible, Plotting, naturally, is an essential component of such a novel. The author needs to increase the tension and stakes (and suspense) steadily throughout the book. All the main plot lines and subplots need to support or complement each other, ratcheting up the tension. Detail has to be vividly presented — and made implicit rather than explicit, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. I will provide examples from from famous exemplars of this fiction genre as well as from my own crime fiction novels.
Wendy Jones Nakanishi, an American by birth, has lived in Japan for 36 years, employed full-time at private Japanese universities. She has published widely in her academic field of English literature and also writes creative non-fiction and short stories. In recent years, under the pen name of Lea O’Harra, she has published three crime fiction novels in her ‘Inspector Inoue Mystery Series.’
https://www.amazon.co.jp/s?k=lea+oharra&ref=nb_sb_noss
Amanda Alvarez, Alex Watson
Be There: Events that Bring Words to Life
Panel discussion with Q&A
The Tokyo scene now has a mix of storytelling, poetry, outreach and scholarly events that present great opportunities for writers reach new audiences, learn from experts and find inspiration. Organizers of science & humanities cafes and poetry events discuss the power of live shows for sharing and sustaining your writing.
In this session, organizers of Nerd Nite Tokyo, Tokyo Humanities Cafe and Tokyo Poetry Journal* discuss their experiences, featuring authors, journalists, bloggers, scholars and poets. The growing community of ‘smart’ events are a source for story ideas, inspiration and co-creation with keen audiences, enthusiasts and experts. The attendees are encouraged to share their ideas for effective and entertaining live formats that can best showcase the talent and knowledge base of the writers of Japan.
*special video cameo
Amanda Alvarez is a science communicator at RIKEN, Japan’s national science institute. Her writing has appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Physics Today, Yale Medicine, Medium and elsewhere. She also produces Nerd Nite Tokyo, a monthly evening of thinking and drinking. Twitter: @neuroamanda
Alex Watson is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Letters, Meiji University. His research focuses mainly on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British writing. He also serves as a series co-editor for Palgrave’s Asia-Pacific and Literature in English series. He is the main organiser of Tokyo Humanities Cafe and a regular contributor to Wall Street International and Kyoto Journal. Twitter: @Alexwat51720119
Angela Torres and Naoko Fujimoto
The Inside Story: Preparing a Successful Poetry Submission
Short Lecture with Q&A
Based on over ten years of experience both as poetry editors of RHINO magazine and as published poets, we will share our practices for preparing and submitting poetry to literary journals. Topics will include choosing your market, writing a cover letter, creating a bio, preparing and formatting poems for submission, and more. We will discuss some of the inner workings of RHINO magazine: how and why we choose poems for publication, what common pitfalls to avoid when submitting, and how to be a good citizen of the poetry community. Special focus will be given to navigating the literary landscape as writers of color in the United States.
Angela Narciso Torres, author of Blood Orange (Willow Books Poetry Award), has recent or forthcoming work in POETRY, Missouri Review, and New Ohio Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She recently placed first in the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize (Yeats Society of New York). Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she’s a senior and reviews editor for RHINO and a reader for New England Review.
Naoko Fujimoto was born in Nagoya, studied at Nanzan Junior College and received a B.A. and M.A. from Indiana University. Her recent publications and forthcoming are or will be in POETRY, Kenyon Review, and Diode Poetry Journal. Her poetry collections, Where I Was Born (Willow Books), Glyph: Graphic Poetry=Trans.Sensory (Tupelo Press, 2020), Mother Said, I Want Your Pain (Backbone Press), Silver Seasons of Heartache (Glass Lyre Press), and Home, No Home (Educe Press) are available from each press. She is a RHINO associate editor.
Baye McNeil
What Skills and Expertise are Essential to a Successful Writing Career in Japan
Short Lecture
I’ve written professionally in Japan for a decade now and in that time I’ve accrued experiences, honed skills, and developed habits and built a career from the ground up. Some of these I believe are essential to achieving success as a writer here, while others should be avoided. For this session I will share some of them with anecdotes and illustrations.
Baye McNeil was born and raised in Brooklyn New York and has lived in Japan since 2004. He’s the author of two books on life in Japan as a non-Japanese, and has been a Japan Times columnist since 2014. His column Black Eye is globally- recognized as the source for info on “blackness” in Asia. He lives in Yokohama.
C. E. J. Simons
‘Draft Z: Revising Poetry for Publication’
Writing and Publishing Workshop
This is a poetry workshop that will focus on strategies to revise poems for publication. The ethos of the session is that poems are reborn through extensive revision.
The session will begin with a short presentation that shows examples from the history of poetry of how revision has transformed poems between early and late drafts. The presentation will suggest strategies for transforming a draft into a publishable poem.
The last 20 minutes of the session will be a mini-workshop in which participants apply these strategies to an attendee’s draft poem. I will ask the participants to extract key lines and ideas from an existing draft in order to start a new draft.
The goal is to inspire attendees that the revision process is not only necessary, but enjoyable. The session will also discuss how the right kinds of revision should produce a seemingly more spontaneous poem than the first draft—a more vibrant, living poem, as opposed to an over-written or over-edited ‘zombie poem’.
NOTE: If you would like your short poem (20 lines or less) considered for the in- session mini-workshop, send it to “simons “at” (replace with @) ICU.ac.jp”.
Preferably it will be one which has been submitted to one or more journals or competitions and has been rejected.
E. J. (Christopher) Simons is Senior Associate Professor of British Literature at ICU (International Christian University), Tokyo. He holds a D.Phil in British Romanticism from Lincoln College, Oxford, and in 2003 he held the Harper- Wood Studentship in Creative Writing at St John’s College Cambridge. He has published two collections of poetry with Isobar Press: One More Civil Gesture (2015) and Underground Facility (2018). His poems have won prizes in international competitions including the Bridport Competition, the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Wigtown Competition. His criticism and poetry have appeared in publications including the Independent, Isis, Magma, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and World Haiku.
Charles Kowalski
What’s In A Name? Tips and traps in character naming
Craft workshop
Remember the journey into Mordor by the heroic Bingo Baggins? (Of course not, and aren’t you glad?) The naming of characters is a difficult matter, but we will discuss the three main considerations (sound, meaning, and associations) and their applications to genres ranging from contemporary fiction to SF and fantasy.
This workshop will discuss the three key considerations in naming characters: sound, meaning, and associations, along with pitfalls to avoid.
Charles Kowalski’s debut thriller, MIND VIRUS, won the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold Award, and was a finalist for the Killer Nashville Claymore Award and the Adventure Writers’ Grandmaster Award. His first middle-grade novel, SIMON GREY AND THE MARCH OF A HUNDRED GHOSTS, was just released by Excalibur Books.
David Gilbey
Reeling and Writhing: A Poetry Editing Workshop – preparing for publication.
A ‘closed’ workshop, requiring participants to submit poems before the conference as well as read and be ready to discuss the work submitted by others. To join, contact David directly at debidogirubi(at)gmail.com (substitute the @ sign).
The proposed workshop is based on the familiar and successful structure and strategy as offered by John Gribble at the 2008 JWC and my own over the last ten years. It will involve my sending out a ‘brief’ to intending participants requiring submission of drafts of poems, then, before the actual workshop, reading and making comments on each of the participants’ poems and finally, participating in the workshop discussion itself at the conference.
This workshop allows writers to work on a poem or two in readiness for publication, recognising that conference delegates are themselves writers, teachers and editors and that there are both personal and professional benefits from a closely-focussed discussion of emerging texts. So the purpose of this workshop is to give a small group of poets the opportunity to meet, read and discuss in depth a sample of each others’ work. The workshop will be open to a limited number of participants but writers of varying degrees of experience will be welcome. The session will be closed and of two hours’ duration. There will be two parts to the workshop: preparation and participation. Preparation also has two parts: submitting and close reading – those who sign up for the session will be contacted before the conference.
David Gilbey was Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia, and is the founding President of Wagga Wagga Writers Writers, as well as a poet. His three collection of poems are ‘Under the Rainbow’ (1996), ‘Death and the Motorway’ (2008) and ‘Pachinko Sunset’ (2016). He has taught English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in Sendai, Japan 1996, 2000 and 2007. These days he works as a medical receptionist
Diane Hawley Nagatomo
How Things Change! A comparison of the 1993 edition with the updated 2020 edition of an EFL textbook
Short lecture with Q&A
In this presentation, I will compare two editions of the same textbook published nearly thirty years apart. I will discuss not only how EFL textbooks in Japan have changed with the times, but also how I, as a materials writer, have changed as well.
Dr. Diane Hawley Nagatomo, professor at Ochanomizu University, has published academic books, academic articles, and EFL textbooks, and self-study books. Her most recent academic book is Identity, Gender and Teaching English in Japan (2016) published by Multilingual Matters.
Edward Levinson
Simple Photo Editing Techniques for Writers and Other Photography Tips
Illustrated talk with Q+A
Being knowledgeable about photography is helpful for: illustrating one’s own writing, working collaboratively with photographers, working with editors and designers, and most importantly, understanding basic post-processing editing techniques to improve photos after capture, no matter what kind of camera you use.
The basic concepts of photo editing find many parallels with the writer’s editing process: Cut what’s not necessary. Find the proper angle or “hook”. Edit, tweak, and polish. Create a story line.
Explained simply with photo examples, this presentation is for those who want to: up the level of photos accompanying their writings, improve the wow factor of social media posts, add inspiring photos to blogs, or anyone who simply wants to better preserve their precious memories in a private journal.
Learn simple post-processing editing techniques to improve photos plus tips for organizing, selecting the keepers, and backing up.
Participants can bring in a “problem” photo and Edward will try to “fix” it as you watch. (Due to time restraints, this offer limited to 2-3 people. Bring original data on a USB stick.) NOTE: Participants who want to submit a photo for an editing a demonstration should contact Edward at the venue BEFORE the presentation if possible.
A photographer and writer focused on Japan, Edward Levinson shares openly from his broad base of knowledge. He has lived in Japan since 1979. His memoir, Whisper of the Land, was published by Fine Line Press (2014). He has published two books in Japanese by Iwanami Shoten and an award winning photo book. He lives on Chiba’s Boso Peninsula, inspired by nature and his garden.
Elizabeth Tasker, Amanda Alvarez
The Science in Storytelling
Short lecture with Q&A
How can the power of storytelling be employed to explain scientific concepts or conversely, can science help tell a story? This session looks at how two science writers use stories in their fields of neuroscience and astrophysics and how science figured prominently in the storytelling of a YA novel.
Creating delight from the cradle to old age, storytelling is a powerful tool for engaging with an audience. There is growing understanding of how and why stories have a powerful effect on the brain, with scientists and communicators using this knowledge to transmit research more effectively to non-specialists and the public. Writers too can take advantage of the principles and power of storytelling.
Two science writers will discuss how narrative, framing and tension are used to tell effective research stories, tackle technical concepts and connect to life outside the lab. These ideas will then be flipped to look at how science helped the storytelling in the YA novel ‘The Center of the Universe’ by Ria Voros, in which Elizabeth features as a character.
Amanda Alvarez is a science communicator at RIKEN, Japan’s national science institute. Her writing has appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Physics Today, Yale Medicine, Medium and elsewhere. She also produces Nerd Nite Tokyo, a monthly evening of thinking and drinking. Twitter: @neuroamanda
Elizabeth Tasker is an astrophysicist and science communicator at JAXA, Japan’s national space agency. She writes for the NASA NExSS ‘Many Worlds’ column on exoplanets and space missions, among other publications, and her popular science book ‘The Planet Factory’ came out in paperback this year. Twitter: girlandkat
Evan Fallenberg
Sex on the Page—A New Spin on Showing Versus Telling
Short craft lecture with Q&A
Sex on the page can be anything from breathtaking to appalling, from delicate to violent, and it serves a variety of functions. So why is it so hard to do well, no matter whether the parties involved are gay or straight, lovers or enemies, and whether the scene is meant to be romantic, horrific or hilariously funny? Participants are urged to bring a favorite sex scene from a published work.
Evan Fallenberg is the author of the novels Light Fell (Soho Press 2008), When We Danced on Water (HarperCollins 2011) and The Parting Gift (Other Press 2018) and a translator of Hebrew fiction, plays, libretti and film scripts. His work has won or been shortlisted for numerous awards, including an American
Library Association Award, the Edmund White Award and the PEN Translation Prize. He teaches at Bar-Ilan University and is faculty co-director of the Vermont College of Fine Arts International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation.
Hans Brinckmann
How Giving Talks on Any Subject Can Help Promote Your Books.
Lecture illustrated with Power Point and readings, followed by Q&A
Selling their books is what writers need to continue writing. But in addition to book launches and internet promotion, giving lectures at every opportunity – even on unrelated subjects – can provide an excellent additional platform for selling your books.
How best to promote your writings? When you publish a new book, there usually are opportunities to introduce it at a book launch organized by your publisher or other institutions prepared to help you, as well as at online platforms such as Amazon and Facebook. But there is an additional effective way to promote your publications: by giving lectures on any subject, even if not directly related to your books. I will offer you some examples of how the talks I’ve been giving at many locations in Japan and abroad on a wide variety of topics often unexpectedly stimulated my audience’s interest in my writings, with some good book sales and signings as a result.
Hans Brinckmann, born in The Hague, after a 36-year career as a “reluctant banker” in Japan, New York, Singapore, Amsterdam and Curaçao, turned to writing fiction, non-fiction and poetry. URL: www.habri.jp and www.habri.co.uk
Holly Thompson and Mariko Nagai
Re-envisioning Revisions: A YA/MG Novel Revision Workshop
“Closed” Workshop (2 sessions on Saturday morning, by pre-registration only)
YA/MG novel revision workshop for participants who have pre-submitted complete novel drafts for group feedback prior to JWC. At JWC, participants will discuss whole novel revision strategies and techniques and workshop writers’ selected revised excerpts.
The aim is to give YA/MG writers/translators a fixed deadline for completing a novel draft, to ensure that writers are placed in small groups for offering/ receiving feedback on drafts in advance of JWC. Then, during the two JWC Re- envisioning Revision workshops, writers will reflect on feedback, discuss tools and techniques identified for advancing their novel, and plan key strategies for revision. Writers/translators will have a chance to share a brief excerpt of a revised scene, and will set personal goals for completing whole novel revisions within the support of a larger writing group.
Please Note: These sessions are open only to participants who submitted a completed draft of a young adult or middle grade novel before July 30.
Holly Thompson is author of the verse novels Falling into the Dragon’s Mouth, Orchards, The Language Inside; picture books Twilight Chant; One Wave at a Time, The Wakame Gatherers and the novel Ash. She writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction, is SCBWI Japan Co-Regional Advisor, and teaches at Yokohama City University.
Mariko Nagai is the author of Histories of Bodies: Poems (2007), Georgic Stories (2010), Instructions For The Living (2012), Dust of Eden (2014), Under the Broken Sky (2019) and Cold Spring (forthcoming 2021). She is an Associate Professor at Temple University Japan and is SCBWI Japan Co-Regional Advisor.
Iain Maloney
The Only Gaijin in the Village
Reading with Q&A
In 2016 my wife and I bought a house and moved to a small village in rural Gifu Prefecture. I began writing a series of columns for Gaijinpot about my experiences as the only gaijin in the village. Collected, they will be published as a memoir in spring 2020.
This presentation will focus on both the content of the forthcoming book and the techniques used to turn everyday experiences into narratives. My previous book, The Waves Burn Bright, was a fictionalisation of a real-life tragedy, while this book is a non-fictional dramatic retelling of real life. I will talk about the process of moving from writing fiction to narrative non-fiction, the similarities between the two forms and the challenges inherent in leaving the imaginary for the actual, and about the tensions between factual accuracy and the requirements of storytelling. I will read extracts while examining and explaining the techniques used to dramatise actual events, how to portray real people within a shaped world, and the universal in the specific.
Iain Maloney teaches English and creative writing at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies. He is the author of three novels and a collection of poetry. His memoir about life in rural Japan, The Only Gaijin in the Village, will be published in spring 2020. www.iainmaloney.com @iainmaloney
Isobar Press
Philip Rowland, Gregory Dunne
The Year’s Work at Isobar Press Poetry reading with short Q&A
Readings from the three latest Isobar books: NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems, edited by Philip Rowland; Other/Wise by Gregory Dunne; and On Arrival by Paul Rossiter.
Isobar Press, which is based in Tokyo, specialises in English-language poetry from Japan. In this session, Isobar authors will introduce the latest Isobar books: Philip Rowland will introduce NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems, which is a careful renga-like arrangement of a strikingly diverse selection of poems from the issues of NOON: journal of the short poem; and Gregory Dunne will introduce and read his elegies and poems of friendship, marriage, family and vocation from his collection Other/Wise. Philip and Gregory will also introduce and read from Paul Rossiter’s On Arrival, book of poems arising from travels in Japan and South East Asia.
Gregory Dunne is the author of Fistful of Lotus (Elizabeth Forrest, 2000), Home Test (Adastra Press, 2009) and Quiet Accomplishment: Remembering Cid Corman (Ekstais Editions, 2014). He is an associate poetry editor at Kyoto Journal and teaches in the Faculty of Comparative Culture at Miyazaki International College.
Philip Rowland lives in Tokyo, where he works as a professor of English. He is the author of Something Other Than Other (Isobar, 2016), the founding editor of NOON: journal of the short poem, and co-editor of the anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013).
Paul Rossiter founded Isobar Press in 2013 after he retired from the University of Tokyo, where he taught Applied Linguistics. He has published eight books of poetry, most recently From the Japanese (Isobar, 2013), World Without (Isobar, 2015), Seeing Sights (Isobar, 2016), Temporary Measures (Isobar, 2017), and On Arrival (2019).
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
Hybridity and Writing
How writers can learn from hybrid forms such as prose poetry, flash fiction, haibun, and literary non-fiction and cross-genre fiction/poetry/essay/research will be the subject of this session.
What is it, a poem? A work of fiction? A short story? A chart? Research? A personal essay? None of these? A combination? Many hybrid works make us wonder how to categorize them. I will argue that these difficult to categorize hybrid forms can be examined with the goal of energizing one’s writing regardless of the style or genre one adopts by imitating their boldness brashness freshness and ambiguity.
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent books are <<terrain grammar>> (theenk Books, 2018) and Poems: New and Selected (Isobar, 2018). She lives in Shizuoka prefecture and can be reached at janejoritznakagawa at gmail dot com.
Jennifer Hammer
NaNoWriMo – What Are These Syllables and Why Do Writers Care?
Lecture
This lecture will focus on what exactly NaNoWriMo is, the pros and cons of writing 50,000 words in thirty days, and how writers can benefit from this online (and real life) community during the official November event, in April and July for “Camp NaNo,” and with writers of varying levels from around the world.
Why should a writer care about these four syllables? Because NaNo is a great resource for writers, can be adapted to schools (and/or clubs), and is a way to make friends for life (as well as connect with the 5AM writing club, whichever time zone you’re in.)
Jennifer Hammer is the Tokyo Municipal Leader (ML) for NaNoWriMo and a four year NaNo winner. She writes whatever pretty idea catches her attention, all the way from super hero romance (White Knight) to creepy-crawly horror (JA Hammer) to fantasy video games (CoffeeQuills). Join her this November for NaNo!
John Spiri
Breaking down Barriers: Freewriting for Greater Creativity and Authenticity workshop
Freewriting, and just understanding the liberating power of writing without regard for the product, leads to greater creativity and productivity. In this workshop we’ll discuss the aims and methods of freewriting, make distinctions between freewriting and focused freewriting, look at freewriting samples, and get a taste of freewriting ourselves.
Ever since Peter Elbow wrote his seminal book Writing Without Teachers in 1975, freewriting has been a valued activity. One freewriting objective is to help writers overcome writer’s block. Freewriting is also used to brainstorm ideas and cultivate creativity. Perhaps most importantly, freewriting places an absolute emphasis on the process of writing. In doing so, writers can find their voice, and restrain the pressures we might feel to adhere to conventions, both regarding the written word and the unsanctioned or difficult ideas we might want to express.
The presenter will argue that while trying freewriting is desirable, just understanding the rationale for its importance can be a source of guidance if not inspiration as well. We will also discuss the distinction between freewriting and focused freewriting. During this workshop participants will get a brief taste of both freewriting and focused freewriting and discuss the relative benefits of each.
John Spiri has taught composition at Champlain College (Vermont), Kyoto University, and other universities. He’s a freelance writer with many publications including 17 in The Japan Times. John raises ducks and bees in rural Shiga.
Leza Lowitz
Mindful Writing
Workshop
Mindfulness helps us cultivate presence in a non-judgmental, curious way. This awareness is a wonderful tool to use in the writing process.
From conception to creation, writing and mindfulness have much in common. Commitment and discipline. Exploration and playfulness. Finding the perfect balance of will and surrender.
In this workshop, we’ll explore simple meditation and writing exercises to help unlock creativity, release blocks, and cultivate a more compassionate approach to the creative process.
Whether you seek inspiration, need tips on how to transform your ideas into powerful words on the page, want support to grapple with the inner critic, or desire courage and tenacity to shape what you’ve already written into something that matches your vision, this offering is for you.
Leza Lowitz, M.A., is an award-winning author of over 20 books, including five amazon best-sellers in multiple genres. A long-term practitioner and teacher of meditation and yoga, she is also the owner of Tokyo’s beloved Sun and Moon Yoga studio. Visit her at www.lezalowitz.com or www.sunandmoon.jp
Maria A. Ioannou
Object Animation in Contemporary Short Fiction – How to Create Engaging Lifeless Protagonists
Short presentation and creative writing practice with Q&A
This creative writing presentation/workshop focuses on ways to animate objects in contemporary short fiction and investigates how an object-centred approach can affect form, language and creative writing methodology. The presentation/ workshop proposes an object-centred approach to creative writing, without excluding human characters but becoming the means to talk about human reality through objects. It focuses on both conventional and unconventional creative writing techniques in relation to object animation, while using examples from 20th and 21st-century adult short fiction. The presentation/workshop will also slightly refer to the theoretical background used in the above study, eg. related aspects of the Phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and could become a useful point of reference for writers, artists, academics and publishers interested in the animation of objects in literature.
Maria A. Ioannou (Limassol, 1982) is an awarded writer, creative writing tutor and festival organizer (Sardam festival). She studied Literature and Creative Writing in the UK (Vice Chancellor’s Excellence in Research Award 2019 for her PhD in progress) and published two short fiction collections, one experimental novella and two fairytales (Emerging Writer State Prize 2012 for her short fiction collection The gigantic fall of an eyelash).
More info and full bio: www.mariajoannoushortstories.wordpress.com
Mark Yakich and Loren Goodman
The Serious Play of Surrealism: How to Generate Poems while Having Fun with Yourself and Others
A great power of poetry is to help us re-envision what has become too familiar, thereby waking us from states of complacence. The Surrealists pushed poetry’s re-envisioning to an extreme—most often by engaging in serious play. In this workshop, we will draw on and modify their games and techniques to generate new drafts of poems and to probe the space of collaborative writing. As the Surrealists did, we will pay particular attention to how various strategies allow us to upend convention, connotation, and perspective. To such ends, we will experiment with a variety of strategies ourselves, including exquisite corpse, question/answer machines, automatic writing, erasures, cut-ups, and aleatory methods that we devise on-the-spot. Practicing such strategies together will remind us of the importance of making the “work” of writing both playful and rigorous, entertaining and serious, while leading to further discoveries.
A former Fulbright Fellow and communications consultant, Dr. Mark Yakich is the Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. He has 25 years of experience teaching writing, editing, literature, politics, history, and design, and has published books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and pedagogy. His unconventional guide to reading and writing poems, Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide (Bloomsbury, 2016), is taught worldwide. His next poetry collection, Spiritual Exercises, is forthcoming from Penguin in July.
Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018). An Associate Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as UIC Creative Writing Director.
Melinda Taliancich Falgoust
The Mad, Mad Science of Dissecting the Plot Monster: a universal formula for success
Short lecture with Q&A and craft workshop
Participants will learn the scientific formula distilled from the teachings of master storytelling gurus worldwide which can be applied universally across all types of writing. With a slight margin for error, the formula holds true for most successful works, many which will be examined in this presentation.
Every good doctor (evil genius scientist) knows the inner mechanics of his patient (or monster). Writers are no different. We have no Gray’s Anatomy, but we do have some scions of story science to provide guidance to the systems and organs that make a truly good story sing – the 16 elements that form the anatomy of plot.
Attendees will participate in guided dissection of some successful, well-known titles in children’s and adult literature to see how the Plot Formula applies and, when adhered to, nearly guarantees a concise, tightly woven plot that keeps the monster under control.
Melinda Falgoust is an award-winning author whose writing has appeared in Reader’s Digest, AHMM, and others. Most recently, she was recognized as a finalist in the Clive Cussler Adventure Writer’s Competition. The veteran actor often reaches into her actor’s bag-of-tricks to introduce quirky characters that bring her presentations alive!
Melissa McIvor
Objective Self-Editing: What Cats Can Teach Us about Killing Our Darlings
This presentation will cover the basics of how to edit your own work, as well as 5 traps authors often fall into during the self-editing process. At the end, we’ll examine some flawed pieces of writing and try to determine which trap the author fell into.
There’s more to writing than putting words on paper. Self-editing is an important step in getting your writing to its best. This presentation will kick off with some absolute basics: the difference between editing and proofreading, what editors expect out of a submission, and some simple pre-submission polishing techniques. We will then cover trickier areas where writers get subconsciously stuck as they fine-tune their work. In the last 20 minutes, we’ll examine a few pieces of writing and discuss what the author could have done to improve the work.
Melissa McIvor is Editor-in-Chief and contributor to GLOBIS Insights, a business school online publication. She has worked as an editor for various large corporations in Tokyo, including Coca-Cola, Shiseido, Warner Bros. Japan, and Toshiba.
Micah Tasaka, Yoshika Wason, and Michael Frazier
Beyond Borders: Creating Connective Writing Communities
Reading, Panel, and Q&A
In this presentation, we will discuss how to build international writing communities, utilize internet resources, and create publishing opportunities for one another. Ultimately, we want to explore the connective power of writing communities in our home countries and abroad while focusing on creating mutual support and legitimacy for other writers.
While publishing is often thought of as written work being “accepted” by a publisher, we would like to question what publishing means and focus on how to build international communities that support and create opportunities for one another. Through this discussion, we seek to dismantle the scarcity complex that often surrounds publishing and find new ways to get our work in front of audiences by means of collaboration and community support while utilizing internet resources to extend our reach to a global scale. With backgrounds in both written and performance art, we would like to redefine publishing to be more inclusive and community based. By establishing communities that are willing to hear and experience one another’s work, can we create space for more writers to be legitimized? In doing so, how can we ensure that those who exist in the margins are also heard from and not just established writers?
Micah Tasaka is a queer mixed Japanese poet and spoken word artist from the Inland Empire, California, residing in Fukui prefecture, Japan. They received their undergraduate degree in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside. Micah is a community organizer and has taught workshops on publishing manuscripts, poetry performance skills, and using poetry as healing for trauma survivors. Their first full length manuscript, Expansions, was released on Jamii Publishing in 2017, and their work has appeared in In the Words of Women, Name and None, and Nikkei Uncovered among others. www.micahtasaka.com
Yoshika Wason is a teacher and writer. She earned her BA from Boston College, where she was Editor in Chief of ASIAM, an Asian Pacific Islander American literary magazine. She is continuing her work in the API community through her current role as Co President of the Asian Pacific Islander Association for Japan Exchange and Teaching (API AJET.) Yoshika is working on her first full length poetry manuscript currently titled Second Chances for Fallen Blessed Children and also has a self-published micro chapbook called Extra Bold. She currently writes a monthly education column called Today’s Lesson and has been published in Ghost City Review, Rice Paper Magazine, The Paper Napkin, and elsewhere. Learn more at www.yoshikawason.com
Michael Frazier graduated from NYU, where he was the 2017 Poet Commencement Speaker & College Union Poetry Slam Invitational Co- Champion. He has performed at venues such as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, & Gallatin Arts Festival. His poems appear in The Visual Poetry Project, Day One, The Speakeasy Project, & others. Catch him reading poems for The Adroit Journal & teaching SHS in Kanazawa.
Michael Frazier
Haibun, Tanka, Pecha Kucha—Contemporary English-Language Poets & Japanese Forms
Craft Workshop
This workshop focuses on the influences of unsung Japanese poetic forms on contemporary English language poetry and spoken word. We’ll watch and read haibun, pecha kucha, and tanka. We’ll discuss the forms and write our own poems using one of the forms. This generative workshop is open to writers of all genres.
In particular, we will look at less common forms (haibun & tanka) and newly- invented forms (Origami & Pecha Kucha). The Pecha Kucha, based on a Japanese business presentation style, was pioneered as a poetic form by American poet Terrance Hayes. It is this type of ingenuity this workshop is to focused on. In this workshop we will look at poems by writers of color who practice “re-approaching” by using Japanese forms like Aziza Barnes, Sonia Sanchez, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Amiri Baraka, and Terrance Hayes. We will discuss the content of their poems, why they used the form, and how they reinvented. Participants will be asked to choose a form and write something new in the workshop.
Michael Frazier graduated from NYU, where he was the 2017 Poet Commencement Speaker & College Union Poetry Slam Invitational Co- Champion. He has performed at venues such as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, & Gallatin Arts Festival. His poems appear in The Visual Poetry Project, Day One, The Speakeasy Project, & others. Catch him reading poems for The Adroit Journal & teaching SHS in Kanazawa.
Mike (Michael) Guest
Merging Multiple Identities and the Marginalized Character in Fiction
Short lecture with Q&A
Characters with multiple identities are an increasing reality in both our increasing mobile and hybrid society and in fiction. In this presentation, based on his recently published novel ‘The Aggrieved Parties’, the presenter will suggest how fiction writers might tackle depicting such complex characters while avoiding stereotypes and sociopolitical polemics.
The notion of multiple, often competing, identities is not merely a feature of current socio-political discourse, it has always been an essential quality of being fully human. However, with increasing mobility, the world is gradually becoming populated with hyphenized-hybrid cultural and linguistic identities, a wider recognition of non-traditional sexual/gender identities, ‘third-culture children’, and people thrust into unfamiliar cultural milieus. As a result, such characters are now increasingly emerging in fiction, as in the presenter’s recently published novel, ‘The Aggrieved Parties’.
This, however, creates a writer’s dilemma: How do we depict or address such complexity without falling into the trap of pandering to stereotypes or using the characters as vehicles for our own socio-political pronouncements? Using examples from ‘The Aggrieved Parties’, plus thirty years’ experience living and traveling ‘abroad’, the presenter hopes to ignite a discussion as to how balance, sensitivity, and accuracy in pan-cultural fiction writing can best be achieved.
Biography: Mike Guest is Associate Professor of English in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Miyazaki. Besides twenty years’ worth of academic publications, Guest has also written two novels, the latest being ‘The Aggrieved Parties’. He also maintains an EFL blog, ‘Musings and Methods’, and a literary blog, ‘Honeyed Badger Feet’.
Michael Pronko
Make Characters Sing–Sharpening Point of View
Short lecture with Q&A
This lecture and Q&A will go into specific techniques for sharpening the point of view and taking it more deeply into the character’s worldview, mindset and limitations in-scene by looking at examples and working with rewriting techniques.
This short talk with Q&A will dig into methods for expanding character by sharpening the point of view. By looking at examples from great writers and by examining how those examples help connect character to readers, attendees will be able to see how word choice, word excision, and phrasing can greatly influence the connection between reader and character. The talk will also examine how character POV supports the larger arc of the character. The talk will focus on specific scenes, but also consider point of view from the perspective of character change in successive scenes. The talk will also look at how multiple characters can provide an expansive ensemble set of viewpoints. Suggestions on how to rewrite and how to think when rewriting for POV will conclude the talk.
The first two Detective Hiroshi mystery novels, The Last Train and The Moving Blade, have won numerous awards, as have his three collections of creative non- fiction about Tokyo life. He has written for numerous publications and runs Jazz in Japan (www.jazzinjapan.com). He teaches American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University.
Peter MacMillian
One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each : Translating the Poems, Reinventing the Game
The waka (tanka) anthology One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin Isshu), was compiled by Fujiwara no Teika (1162 –1241) The collection remains an important part of Japanese literature. It is also the basis of a “karuda,” a party card game still popular in Japan.
Peter MacMillan’s translation was published in 2008, winning prizes in both Japan and the United States. This year he created Whack a Waka, the world’s first English karuta based on the One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each.
This talk will focus on the translation of the poems and the creation of the game.
There will also be an opportunity to play a round of the karuta under the guidance of its creator.
Peter MacMillan is a prize-winning translator, scholar, poet, and artist.In addition to creating prints, Dr. MacMillan is also a poet and translator. His translation, One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin Isshu), was published in 2008, winning prizes in both Japan and the United States. His translation of The Tales of Ise (Ise Monogatari), which was published by Penguin in 2016. He has also published a collection of poetry entitled Admiring Fields. In 2018 a new translation of One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each (Hyakunin Isshu) was published by Penguin Books. In 2019 he created Whack a Waka, the world’s first English karuta based on One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each.
Peter Jonathan Mallett
The Past is a Foreign Country: Writing Historical Fiction
Short lecture, workshop and discussion
Why write historical fiction and how do you do it? We will examine examples of novels set in the past by contemporary writers and the authors’ different reasons for writing about or creating history.
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ L.P. Hartley famously wrote in the opening lines of The Go Between. How do they ‘do things differently’ and how does a novelist show this in a work of historical fiction? Why would a novelist want to?
We will examine the methods used by contemporary writers such as Sarah Waters, J.G. Ballard, Richard Flanagan, Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Alan Hollinghurst to achieve a credible sense of period in their novels.
Winner of the 1st Writers in Kyoto Writing Contest and runner-up in the 2017 Scottish Arts Club Short Story Competition, Peter Mallett’s short stories have been published in the anthologies The Desperation Game and Other
Stories and Eternal: Award Winning Short Stories, and online in The Font and East Lit. He has written for Kyoto Journal, The Asahi Evening News, Gramophone Japan, Opera News, The New Internationalist and others. He has an MA in Creative Writing (Bath Spa University) and is now writing a historical novel.
Philip Rowland
Being Creatively Selective: Editorial Approach in Assembling a Poetry Collection
Short Lecture with discussion/Q&A
The presenter will draw on his experience of editing poetry collections to describe and discuss questions of editorial approach and decision-making. Several examples, chosen to highlight issues of poem-selection and arrangement, will be considered, in hopes of helping those wishing to edit their own poetry book projects more effectively.
Assembling and editing a book of poems — whether a collection of one’s own or an anthology — can be as creatively challenging and satisfying as the writing of the poems themselves. The presenter will draw on his experience of book, journal and anthology editing to describe and discuss questions of editorial approach and decision-making. When, for example, may less be more, in selecting poems for inclusion? What kinds of juxtaposition and layout can enhance a reading of the book as a whole? Attendees will be invited to consider several examples, chosen to highlight issues of poem-selection and arrangement. It is hoped that this presentation and discussion will inspire and help those wishing to edit their own poetry book projects more effectively.
Philip Rowland is the founding editor of NOON: journal of the short poem, editor of NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar, 2019), and co-editor of the anthology Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). His most recent poetry collection is Something Other Than Other (Isobar, 2016).
Rebecca Otowa
Pictures to Words: Using the Photographs of John Einarsen as inspiration for Microfiction and Micropoetry
Writing Workshop
This will be a writing workshop in which participants will look at photographs by John Einarsen and use these as inspiration to experiment with writing microfiction and micropoetry.
Photographs by noted photographer and Kyoto Journal editor-in-chief John Einarsen will be shown on a projector by way of introduction. Smaller hard copies of the photographs will also be available for participants’ use. Then various types of ultra-short fiction and micropoetry will be introduced. In the body of the workshop, participants will choose one or more photographs and experiment with writing short pieces using these as inspiration. At the end of the workshop participants may share their work if they wish.
Born in USA, grew up in Australia, moved to Japan in 1978, never left. Member by marriage of an old Japanese family and community in countryside southeast of Lake Biwa. Have worked as primary and University level teacher, writer and translator. Publications: At Home in Japan (Tuttle, 2010), My Awesome Japan Adventure (Tuttle, 2013), The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and other Tales of Life in Japan (now in the works; Tuttle wants to publish it in 2020) Also bimonthly columns in Mainichi Weekly English newspaper (present), articles in Kyoto Journal, Chanoyu Quarterly, Eastern Buddhist etc. (past)
Rosey Chang
Recasting your Inner Critic as a Fool
Experiential workshop
In this hands-on workshop, participants will consider the inner critic in terms of the super-ego, and be led through a short writing activity to recast their inner critic as a clown, fool or similar figure.
Writers can experience their inner critic as challenging and even debilitating. This workshop explores our inner critic by drawing on the concept of the super-ego from the tradition of psychoanalysis. The presenter will introduce Adam Phillips’ discussion of the super-ego as a means to potentially reframe our experiences with our inner critic. We will explore the super-ego—judge, internal critic, domineering parent—and its function “to protect and prohibit the individual from desires that endangered him (sic), or were presumed to”. We will consider Phillips’ metaphorical use of Don Quixote characters to recast the super-ego from judge to the role of Sancho Panza—“nitwit”, “clown”, or “fool”.
Participants will be invited to engage in a writing activity to recast or otherwise occupy their own inner critic, which builds on the writing activity recommended by friend of JWC, David Gilbey, in 2018.
There will be time for discussion. Bring writing materials.
Rosey’s short story, “The Girl who Drew Cats” appeared in “Victorian Writer”. She has also published in “TEXT”, “Peril”, and “Research Whisperer”. Rosey’s PhD research at Monash University, Melbourne, explores creative writers’ experiences of everyday anxieties in writing practice through the lens of mindfulness. She is developing a middle-grade novel.
Sara Kate Ellis
From the Panel to the Page: Using Comic Books to Write Better Prose
It’s all fun and games dreaming up a duel on a space yacht, but putting one into words? Touché.
Where do you start? How do you start? Is swordplay harder in zero gravity? And how do you know what to add or leave out without either confusing readers or drowning them in details? Certainly writing and reading more helps, but an easier approach may lie in that hybrid stepchild of cinema and prose—the comic book. Comics, writes Scott McCloud, rely far more than cinema on reader agency, and closure is “anything but involuntary” dependent on the ability to draw inferences from what is and isn’t visible on the page. Using McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993) as a guide, this presentation will look at how the composition and layout of comics provide helpful cues for prose writers to approach a scene, manage POV, and express a mood or the passage of time. After comparing examples from both mediums, we’ll take part in a ‘panel to prose’ writing exercise before sharing our work.
Sara Kate Ellis is a 2011 Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow and Milford Science Fiction Workshop alum. Her fiction has appeared in Visions, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Crossed Genres, and AE: Science Fiction and the Chaffey Review. She lives in Tokyo with an insatiable one-eyed flerken.
SCBWI Japan
Brown Bag Lunch and Meeting
SCBWI Japan, the Japan regional chapter of The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, offers illustrators, writers and translators of children’s and young adult literature throughout Japan support, information, and community. Although primarily an English-language organization, SCBWI Japan welcomes members of all nationalities based in Japan and holds events throughout the year in English and Japanese.
Bring your snack, meet members of this lively group, and learn what all they do.
Stephen Mansfield
Visualizing Okinawa
Lecture with slides. Short Q&A.
What makes Okinawa such a good subject for writers and photographers? A garrison island that is also a tourist resort, Okinawa is the most politicized region of Japan. This presentation will examine issues of identity against a backdrop of military occupation as they relate to writers. Okinawa’s unique culture, its landscape, climate and flora all provide material for people profiles, and pieces on travel, food, music, textiles, political commentary, and many other topics and issues. I will be sharing my own experiences of publishing work on Okinawa and the successes and failures encountered in this process. I will also talk about the specific writing techniques and styles applied to different themes. This will include photo caption writing, a skill in itself.
Stephen Mansfield is a British photojournalist and author based in Japan. Early photographic projects included photo-essays on London street life and a six-week stint covering the civil war in Lebanon. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers and journals worldwide. He has had twenty books published to date. Themes have varied from travel, ethnology, food, architecture, cultural geography, book reviewing and music, to Japanese garden design.
Steve McClure
The Art of the Interview
Short lecture with Q&A
This session offers practical tips about how to prepare for an interview, how to conduct one and how to use the material collected.
Background research, preparing a list of questions, using a recorder, avoiding interview faux pas, staying in control of an interview, etiquette, using an interpreter, are some of the topics to be covered.
Steve McClure is a Canadian writer, editor and narrator who has lived in Japan since 1985. He has written for many publications and worked as an editor at various news organizations during his career, most notably as Billboard magazine’s Japan/Asia bureau chief from 1991 until 2008.
Steven Wolfson
The Art of Superstructure: Finding the Essential Turning Points in Your Story
Lecture
One of the greatest challenges facing all writers is the process of developing an engaging premise into a compelling, well-structured story. This workshop explores the art of superstructure, those essential narrative turning points that have held together great stories since Shakespeare and The Greeks. From your opening scene to midpoint to your story’s emotionally engaging climax, you will learn how each of these critical scenes work in synthesis with one another and in the process avoid the pitfalls of the poorly structured story. The final goal of the workshop is a greater understanding of what holds any great story together and a set of tools that participants can immediately apply to their current work.
Steven Wolfson has taught screenwriting, playwriting and creative writing at The Writers Program at UCLA for the past 20 years . He has been awarded The Outstanding Instructor of the Year award twice, in both screenwriting and creative writing.
As a screenwriter, Wolfson has sold projects to Fox, Lions Gate, TNT, MTV, Langley Entertainment, Beacon Films and producer Arnold Rifkin. Wolfson wrote the independent romantic comedy, Dinner and Driving, which premiered at The Austin Film Festival, won audience awards at several film festivals, and was sold to HBO. He wrote and co-produced the critically acclaimed Lionsgate feature, Gang Tapes, a drama set in South Central Los Angeles. Gang Tapes played to sold out audiences at film festivals in both The United States and Europe.
Wolfson is a founding member of the Mark Taper Forum’s Mentor Playwrights Project . His original plays have been produced and workshopped at The Mark Taper Forum, Taper Too, The Getty Museum, Cornerstone Theater Company, The Virginia Avenue Project and The Geffen Contemporary. His most recent play, The Absence of Wanting, premiered in Berlin.
Suzanne Kamata
Wheelchair User or Wheelchair-bound?: Representations of Persons with Disabilities in Children’s Books
Short lecture with Q & A
In this session, I will discuss positive and problematic representations of persons with using examples from recently published Japanese textbooks and literature featuring children in Japan and other countries, including my own work, with a view to developing better awareness.
With the approach of the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics, people with disabilities in Japan have been given more attention than perhaps ever before. English textbooks for Japanese children now frequently include stories about or representations of people with disabilities. Worldwide, initiatives such as #weneeddiversebooks and the call for #ownvoices have led to an increase of children’s and young adult books featuring characters with disabilities. That said, some of these representations, and the way that they are discussed remain problematic. When do stories about disability become “inspiration porn”? What kind of language should we use when discussing disability? Who has the right to tell these stories? In this session, I will address these questions, using examples from recently published Japanese textbooks and literature featuring children in Japan and other countries, including my own work.
Suzanne Kamata is the award-winning author or editor of twelve published books including Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, 2008), Gadget Girl: The Art of Being Invisible (GemmaMedia, 2013), A Girls’ Guide to the Islands (Gemma Open Door, 2017), Squeaky Wheels: Travels with My Daughter by Train, Plane, Metro, Tuk-tuk and Wheelchair (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2019), and Indigo Girl (GemmaMedia, 2019). She is an Associate Professor at Naruto University of Education.
Todd Jay Leonard
Publishing in the EFL Market in Japan: Four Perspectives on How to Make your Proposal Count
Short lecture with Q & A
This presentation will outline the current publishing market in Japan for EFL/ESL textbooks by reviewing the various points of views of the publishing industry. The presenter has published extensively within the ESL/EFL field in Japan and will offer helpful advice to budding authors who wish to pursue projects geared to Japan’s domestic market.
What are publishers looking for in the current market? What appeals to editors who ultimately decide? What are the salespeople on the front lines hearing from their market? What must an author do in order to get his/her book published?
This presentation focuses on these very questions. sociated with EFL publishing.
Todd Jay Leonard has been actively involved in book publishing for thirty years and has published twenty books. He lives, writes, and teaches on the southern island of Kyushu, where he is a university professor at University of Teacher Education Fukuoka. He has published extensively in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers on cross-cultural, historical, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) themes.
Warren Decker
Publishing Haiku in English
Craft workshop with practical publishing information
In the first half of this session I will present information about how to submit haiku to leading English-language haiku journals. In the second half, participants will share their own haiku and offer feedback to others.
This presentation is intended for anyone interested in publishing haiku in English. I will introduce some of the leading journals for English-language haiku including Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and Acorn, providing information about when and how to submit your haiku. We will also have a chance to share our haiku and offer each other feedback to get our haiku prepared for submission to a journal. All participants are asked to bring five to ten haiku that they are hoping to publish.
Warren Decker is an associate professor at Momoyama Gakuin University of Education. His haiku have appeared or are forthcoming in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. His triolet appears in The Best American Poetry 2018. He also published fiction and nonfiction.
Wendy Jones Nakanishi (aka Lea O’Harra)
‘How Writers Write
I will present a short overview of how writers write: their methodology of getting pen to paper — or fingers to keyboard — to produce short stories and novels. I will look at a few representative authors — mainly from Britain and America, concentrating mostly on writers in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Wendy Jones Nakanishi, an American by birth, has been resident in Japan for the past 35 years, employed full-time at a private Japanese university. She has published widely in her academic field of English literature and also writes creative non-fiction and short stories. In recent years, under the pen name of Lea O’Harra, she has published three crime fiction novels in her so-called ‘Inspector Inoue Mystery Series’.
Yoko Danno, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa, Goro Takano
Poetry reading with Q & A
Poets Yoko Danno, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa and Goro Takano will each read a short selection of their poetry. Each poet will read for approximately 12 minutes. Subsequently there will be a question-and-answer session with the audience.
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa has published over a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry including <<terrain grammar>> (theenk Books, 2018)and Poems: New and Selected (Isobar, 2018).
Goro Takano published three poetry collections through BlazeVOX (NY): Responsibilities of the Obsessed, Silent Whistle-Blowers, and Non Sequitur Syndrome. On Lost Sheep, Takano’s translation of the works of the Japanese modernism poet Shiro Murano, was published through Tinfish (HI). Takano’s first Japanese-only poetry collection was published this year.
Yoko Danno’s recent poetry books include “Aquamarine” (Glass Lyre Press, 2014), “Woman in a Blue Robe” (Isobar Press, 2016) and Further Center: Poems 1970 ~ 1998 (The Ikuta Press, 2017). Her translation, “Songs and Stories of the Kojiki” (compiled in eighth-century Japan), was published by Red Moon Press in 2014.
Charles Kowalski
How to Keep Readers Turning Pages The secret to creating suspense is
Craft Workshop
This workshop will present ways of creating conflict and suspense. Specific topics to be addressed include the multiple layers of suspense (paragraph-level, scene-level, macrosuspense, and hypersuspense), how to make effective use of the pre, during, and post around key incidents, and the difference between suspense and action. The principles discussed can be applied to any genre.
Charles Kowalski is an active member of International Thriller Writers. His debut thriller, MIND VIRUS, won the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Award, and was a finalist for the Clive Cussler Grandmaster Award, the Killer Nashville Claymore Award, and the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Award.
C. E. J. (Christopher) Simons
One Rhyme To Rule Them All How to Write Poetry and Use Published Poetry in Fantasy and Sci-fi poetry in science fiction and fantasy.
Lecture workshop
This session is a workshop focused on how to write poetry, and use published poetry, in works of science fiction and fantasy. The session will review the use of poetry by SF and fantasy authors such as Mary Wroth, Sara Coleridge, J. R. R. Tolkein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Douglas Adams, Dan Simmons, and Gene Wolfe. The session presentation will suggest when and how verse can be used effectively in SF and fantasy, and how to write poetry for different fiction projects. A brief workshop will give participants a chance to try writing a few lines of serious or light-hearted verse for either (a) a well-known work of SF or fantasy such as Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or (b) their own SF or fantasy story.
The presentation will examine some technical problems that arise when authors attempt to write deliberately antiquated verse, such as for medieval fantasy novels. It will also (time permitting) include some discussion of the opportunities and challenges of pitching SF and fantasy novels that incorporate poetry to agents and publishers.
C. E. J. (Christopher) Simons is Senior Associate Professor of British Literature at ICU (International Christian University), Tokyo. He holds a D.Phil in British Romanticism from Lincoln College, Oxford, and in 2003 he held the Harper-Wood Studentship in Creative Writing at St Johns College Cambridge. His first full collection of poetry, One More Civil Gesture, was published by Isobar Press in 2015, and his second collection, Underground Facility, will be published in 2018. His poems have won prizes in international competitions including the Bridport Competition, the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Wigtown Competition. His criticism and poetry have appeared in publications including the Independent, Isis, Magma, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and World Haiku. Christopher is currently pitching his first young-adult science fiction novel to agents and publishers.
David Gilbey
Reeling and Writhing A Poetry Editing Workshop preparing for publication
A closed workshop, requiring participants to submit poems before the conference as well as read and be ready to discuss the work submitted by others. To join, contact David directly at debidogirubi(at)gmail.com (substitute the @ sign).
The proposed workshop is based on the familiar and successful structure and strategy as offered by John Gribble at the 2008 JWC and my own over the last six years. It will involve my sending out a brief to intending participants requiring submission of drafts of poems, then, before the actual workshop, reading and making comments on each of the participants poems and finally, participating in the workshop discussion itself at the conference.
This workshop allows writers to work on a poem or two in readiness for publication, recognising that conference delegates are themselves writers, teachers and editors and that there are both personal and professional benefits from a closely-focussed discussion of emerging texts. So the purpose of this workshop is to give a small group of poets the opportunity to meet, read and discuss in depth a sample of each others work. The workshop will be open to a limited number of participants but writers of varying degrees of experience will be welcome. The session will be closed and of two hours duration. There will be two parts to the workshop preparation and participation. Preparation also has two parts submitting and close reading those who sign up for the session will be contacted before the conference.
David Gilbey was Adjunct Senior Lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia, and the founding President of Wagga Wagga Writers Writers, as well as a poet. His three collection of poems are ‘Under the Rainbow’ (1996), ‘Death and the Motorway’ (2008) and ‘Pachinko Sunset’ (2016). He has taught English at Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University in Sendai, Japan 1996, 2000 and 2007.
Diane Hawley Nagatomo
How an academic identity theory may be of use in creating fictional characters
Workshop
Workshop attendees will explore how a theoretical framework used for exploring identity in academic research might be a useful tool for adding depth to fictional characters.
This workshop will explore how linguist James Paul Gees theory of identity might enable writers to add layers of depth to their fictional characters. Gee defines identity as being a certain type of person in a given context, and he offers four perspectives from which to view identity development. First I will describe the four perspectives of identity. Then I will show how I used it to interpret interview data. Finally, through guided discussion and activities, we will explore ways that this framework might be of use to fiction writers.
Diane Hawley Nagatomo has been living and teaching in Japan since 1979 and is the author of numerous EFL textbooks and academic papers as well as two academic monographs that explore the lives of English teachers in Japan. She dreams of publishing a novel.
Dorothy Hiu Hung Tse and James Shea
Writing Time Zero From Painting to Fiction
Short lecture with QA and a craft workshop
This session begins with a short lecture on a story by a Hong Kong author and how her work uses the paintings of Ren Magritte and Italo Calvino’ s idea of time zero. Participants will be invited to write a short piece in response.
This session focuses on experimental fiction writing methods through a discussion of cross-media practices and reflections on genre conventions. It will begin with a short lecture on the story Marvels of a Floating City, written by the prominent Hong Kong writer Xi Xi and include a discussion of the writing strategies applied in this piece which juxtapose Ren Magritte’s 13 paintings with 13 texts, and how it adopts Italo Calvino’ s idea of time zero to break through the conventions of narrative fiction. Participants will be invited to write a short piece in response to the story based on the ideas and writing techniques introduced.
Dorothy Tse is the author of four short story collections in Chinese, including So Black and A Dictionary of Two Cities. Her collection, Snow and Shadow, translated by Nicky Harman, was long-listed for The University of Rochesters 2015 Best Translated Book Award. A recipient of the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature and Taiwans Unitas New Fiction Writers Award, Tse is a co-founder of the Hong Kong literary magazine Fleurs de lettres. She currently teaches literature and writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. Snow and Shadow website http//www.musemag. hk/books/snow-and-shadow
James Shea is the author of two poetry collections, The Lost Novel and Star in the Eye. Star in the Eye was selected for the Fence Modern Poets Series and included in the Poetry Society of Americas New American Poets series. He currently teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Eric Johnston
A Field Guide to English-Language News Reporting On Japan
This is a practical, how-to guide for writers who want to submit story ideas to Japans English-language media, either as budding freelance news reporters or as occasional Op-Ed writers. What do you need to know about Japan, and about the industry, in order to develop a steady career What do you need to study and read in order to catch an editors attention What kind of writing is in demand And what kinds of research skills and knowledge give aspiring writers a leg up on their competition Based on my nearly quarter century experience as a full-time writer for English-language newspapers and my past experience as a freelancer for overseas media, Ill review the English-language media landscape and offer some tips.
Eric Johnston is Senior Kansai Correspondent at The Japan Times. In 2016, he covered U.S. President Barack Obama’s trip to Hiroshima and traveled to Hawaii to cover Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s trip to Pearl Harbor. He covered the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2009 Copenhagen Accord conferences, the 2010 Biodiversity Conference in Nagoya, and numerous other UN conferences on issues ranging from disaster relief to nuclear nonproliferation to health.
In addition to The Japan Times, Erics work has appeared in The International Herald-Tribune, The Guardian, The Observer, USA Today, The Times of London, and Adbusters magazine among many others In addition to journalism, he has guest lectured at universities in Hokkaido, Yamagata, Tokyo, the Kansai region and in the U.S. and Australia on Japans energy issues and media landscape.
The Font – 2018’s Best
Readings with QA
The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers is an online journal of quality writing on the theme of teaching and learning languages at home and abroad. Authors of some of this year’s best publications will read their works and answer questions.
The Font A Literary Journal for Language Teachers is a journal about teaching and learning languages at home and abroad. It looks at the topic from a more creative, literary, and humanistic perspective than existing academic publications. It publishes quality short stories, articles, essays, anecdotes, poems, interviews, and other forms of creative writing which provide insight, reflection, humour, and inspiration on the theme of teaching and learning languages at home and abroad. It seeks to publish writing by language teachers, learners and translators in all countries, and in doing so become a venue for language teachers and learners of the world to come together and share. It also promotes the idea of creative writing as a form of arts based research, and seeks to create a collection of works which arts based researchers can draw on. Join us, enjoy some quality writing on this theme and learn more about what is going on at The Font.
The Font Editor James Crocker lectures at Kobe Women’s University. He has been Editor of The Font for all of it’s 5 years and 10 issues. He has presented at several Japan Writer’s Conferences and also international TESOL conferences. His publications include TESOL curriculum material and readers for Southeast Asian schools.
Gareth Jones and John Wolfgang Roberts
Stories Storying Story Walking through our Narrative Landscape(s)
Short discussion live collaborative walking event and feedback
Participants will be unleashed upon the campus to wander its labyrinthine spaces. Armed with smartphones and Facebook, and the plethora of human emotions, walkers are encouraged to post pictures, videos, memories, quotes, ruminations, or any other spontaneous artistic construction associated with, or inspired by the things and spaces encountered.
The purpose of this session is to walk through/with the chaotic jumble of narrative entities and co-participate as storytellers. The presenters (a psychogeographer and a metafictionist) see place and narrative as synonymous material events. Likewise, they see material events as stories in the co-participatory process of being told between people, places and the myriad objects that come in and out of this ongoing storying. It follows, then, that our stories are the places of our experiencesin our texts, minds, landscapes and right in front of us. This session consists of walks throughout the campus, utilizing Facebook technology to record the material events around us, which in turn (through Facebook) will feedback into the walk itself. This walk serves three main objectives to offer an experience of present-continuous storytelling an example of a creative exercise useful for mining creative material and, to serve as historians documenting this years JWC event.
Gareth is a British artist, researcher and educator living in Osaka, Japan. His practice-based research is an enquiry into place and subjectivity. Aimed at promoting personal, cultural and environmental wellbeing, this interdisciplinary practice entangles creative walking, writing, drawing and theoretical analysis. Gareth presents his research in a number of international contexts and is a member of the steering committee for the International Visual Methods Conference. He is currently a PhD candidate with the School of Humanities, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK.
John Wolfgang Roberts teaches at Mie University. He is a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, completing his thesis on metafictions as heuristics for engaging the narrative ecologies of people, societies, and technologies. His fiction and poetry have appeared in MiNUS Tides, Shale, and Post Poetry Magazine.
Gregory Strong
Writing Graded Readers Building on the Basics of Story Writing
Short lecture with Q&A
Drawing on the presenters experience writing graded readers, particularly Battle for Big Tree Country (2015), Cengage, an Extensive Reading Foundation 2016 award winner, this presentation emphasizes five key principles in writing graders, starting in medias res, maintaining conflict, charting plot, examining genres, and finally, making a book proposal.
This presentation draws on the presenter’s experience writing graded readers, particularly Battle for Big Tree Country (2015), Cengage, an Extensive Reading Foundation 2016 award winner. Some resources will be outlined, along with narrative devices. The presentation will emphasize five principles in writing graders, from formulating the story to making the sales pitch. This starts with the premise that a good story should start in medias res (in the middle of things). Other principles to be explored are how to maintain conflict in a story, charting a story’s plot, examining the genre of graded readers, and finally, making a book proposal to a publisher. Some very successful graded readers will be introduced as well as sample synopses for proposed graded readers.
Gregory Strong has published more than 200 pieces — articles, reviews, stories, chapters, and books, Flying Colours The Toni Onley Story, Harbour Publishing, 2002, with Ann Smith, Adult Learners Context and Innovation, TESOL, 2009, as well as several produced theatre pieces, including The Magic Fan, by Tokyo Theater for Children.
Hans Brinckmann
What to avoid and what to focus on when writing about Japan
Lecture illustrated with PowerPoint and readings, followed by QA
Foreign writers living in Japan are inevitably tempted to write books about Japan. But its important to avoid explaining the country or idealizing it. I will share my approach in writing about this country, notably my book Showa Japan published by both Tuttle, and, in Hiromi Mizoguchis translation, Random House Kodansha.
When writing about Japan it is important to focus on specific elements such as the country’s history, society, or politics avoid generalizing and mix personal experiences and opinions with those of respected Japanese friends and public gures. I will share with you my methodology in writing Showa Japan – The Post-War Golden Age and its Troubled Legacy, a book that enjoyed highly favourable reviews in both Japanese and foreign media, and has recently been reintroduced to the market by its publisher. I used a combination of personal journal notes and photographs interviews with scholars, businessmen and bureaucrats and a written survey of over 100 Japanese from all walks of life. The result as called a balanced approach to Japans postwar history.
Hans Brinckmann, born in The Hague, after a 36-year career as a reluctant banker mostly in Japan, turned to writing fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Three of his books, the novel In the Eyes of the Son, a collection of short stories, The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills, and a bilingual book of poetry, The Undying Day won Honorable Mention Awards at Book Festivals in 2015 and 2016. URL www.habri.jp and www.habri.co.uk
Hiromi Mizoguchi
Deconstructing my translation of Brinckmanns The Tomb in the Kyoto Hills and Other Stories
Lecture with PowerPoint, followed by Q&A
Paradoxically, translating a story set in your own country is no less challenging than translating a story located in unfamiliar territory. I will demonstrate how I translated stories set in Japan back in the 1960s and 70s, and how I deconstruct the original text in order to reconstruct its Japanese translation.
The process of translation involves not only language but cultural background and history. As a translator, I always try to reconstruct the particular time and space of the original text. My experience of translating Hans Brinckmann’s short stories gave me an interestingly challenging opportunity all stories are set in Japan half a century ago.
Those stories are not necessarily autobiographical, but all are based on the author’s own experience and observation. I will explore the relationship between the text and the experience that the author had, and how I approached the images and meanings the author created, which originated in Japan that I have never seen.
Hiromi Mizoguchi has translated most of Hans Brinckmanns books, essays and stories, and co-authors his bilingual website www.habri.jp. Since 2014, her translations of Brinckmanns essays are published regularly in the Japanese literary magazine Atlas, based in Kanda, Tokyo. She holds an MA from the Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University.
Holly Thompson
Half the Story Writing for the Picture Book Market
Short Lecture, Exercises and Q&A
Picture book writing is a particular art. Writers of picture book manuscripts must write for page turns and create opportunities for the illustrator writing just enough to offer possibilities. This session introduces the craft of writing picture books for current English-language picture book markets.
Writing is only half the story in picture books–images and text interact to tell the story together. So how do we write text without saying too much Where in our writing should we step aside for the illustrator And how do we compress stories for the strict count of 32 pages How can we skill up to craft manuscripts that appeal to editors and art directors for their illustration possibility This session will explore the anatomy of the picture book as it pertains to writers and offer guidelines for crafting fresh, marketable picture book manuscripts. We’ll examine sample picture books, fiction, nonfiction, poetry and try some interactive exercises. We will address the current English-language picture book markets and share the gaps, openings, and opportunities for writers to get a foot in the door.
Holly Thompson is author of the picture books Twilight Chant One Wave at a Time, The Wakame Gatherers verse novels Falling into the Dragons Mouth, Orchards, The Language Inside and the novel Ash. She writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction, is SCBWI Japan Regional Advisor and teaches at Yokohama City University.
Iain Maloney
The Death of the Genre Recent trends in writing and publishing.
Short lecture with Q&A
This presentation looks at how the boundaries between genres are disappearing. Drawing on my experience as a writer and a professional editor, I will talk about how attitudes to genres are shifting among writers and readers. I will examine recent trends in writing and publishing that indicate the death of genres as clearly defined, distinct categories. I will show how seemingly disparate genres can co-exist within the same work and how writers are breaking down barriers to utilize elements and techniques from different genres. I will also show how attitudes to genre classifications are slowly changing within the industry and look ahead to a future in which the idea of genre as a meaningful method of classification may be dead.
Iain Maloney has published three novels and a poetry collection and works as a fiction editor. He regularly writes about literature for the Japan Times and is based in Gifu.
Isobar Press
The Weather in Tokyo (and Shizuoka) The Years Work at Isobar Press
Poetry reading with short Q&A
Readings from the four latest Isobar books Taro Nakas Music Selected Poems, translated by Andrew Houwen and Chikako Nihei Poems New and Selected by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (introduced by Paul Rossiter) Temporary Measures by Paul Rossiter and Underground Facility by C. E. J. Simons.
Isobar Press, which is based in Tokyo, specializes in English-language poetry from Japan. In this session, Isobar authors will introduce the latest Isobar books Andrew Houwen will introduce the work of the major and previously almost untranslated post-war poet Naka Taro and read from Music Selected Poems, translated by himself and Chikako Nihei Paul Rossiter will read from Poems New Selected, a selection of work from the years 20062018 by the important Japan-resident avant-garde poet Jane Joritz-Nakagawa C. E. J. Simons will read from his new collection Underground Facility, whose three sections Afterlives, Live Feed and Life Sciences include powerful poems about family, place, animals, and mythology and Paul Rossiter will give a short reading from his own Temporary Measures.
Andrew Houwen is a translator of Dutch and Japanese poetry and an associate professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University. With Chikako Nihei he has translated Music Selected Poems by Taro Naka (Isobar, 2018). Individual translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Shearsman, Asian Cha, and Tears in the Fence.
Paul Rossiter founded Isobar Press in 2013 after he retired from the University of Tokyo, where he taught Applied Linguistics. He has published seven books of poetry the most recent are From the Japanese (Isobar, 2013), World Without (Isobar, 2015), Seeing Sights (Isobar, 2016), and Temporary Measures (Isobar, 2017).
C. E. J. Simons is a Senior Associate Professor of literature at International Christian University, Tokyo. He holds a D. Phil from Lincoln College, Oxford, and has published on Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Yeats, and Emily Dickinson. Isobar has published two of his collections One More Civil Gesture (2015) and Underground Facility (2018).
Jacinta Plucinski
You’re Not Alone Finding The Right Writing Buddies
Short lecture with Q&A
When your story is dull, your characters won’t talk to you, or your writing time is no longer sacred, what can you do Call in your writing buddies!
In this discussion, Jacinta challenges the notion of writing as a solitary pursuit. Shell talk about the magic of having the right writing community, how to find or create it, ways to keep it alive, and tips and tricks to help each other out of writing potholes.
Within each piece of writing lies the edits, input and encouragement of others, whether it’s through being a sounding board, reading the early, clumsy drafts, or simply checking in to make sure you’re still writing. With so many forums, organizations and meet up groups to choose from, Jacinta will share her roadmap for finding or creating a rewarding writing community.
Jacinta Plucinski runs Zoot Publishing and is a founding member of Hackerfarm where she holds writing retreats and workshops. She has over 19 years of experience writing for organizations including Google and Discovery Channel. For South China Morning Post, shes interviewed more than 400 leaders and influencers across Asia, Europe, The Americas, and The Middle East. She was also an Associate Partner, editor, and writer for the social publication, Be Movement. Writing as Cinta, she’s the author of Who Ate The Cake, Lets Play Hide-and-Seek, and Who Made The Mess
John Williams
Adapting Kafkas Trial for the Screen
I will talk about the process of adapting a novel into a screenplay, mostly focusing on my own adaptation (and resetting) of Kafka’s novel in contemporary Tokyo. I will also make reference to the Orson Welles film version. This will be a practical case study. I will not be talking in a highly theoretical way about adaptation but in a very practical way of use to would-be screenwriters. It may be of interest to writers of fiction too, as I will be talking about the differences between novels and film.
John Williams studied French and German Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. He moved to Japan in 1988 and established the production company, 100 Meter Films to produce his first feature. He has written and directed three award-winning Japanese feature films, Firefly Dreams (2001), Starfish Hotel (2007) and Sado Tempest (2013). He has also produced documentaries, short films, and feature films, and worked with METI and UNIJAPAN to run the J-Pitch Co-Production initiative. He teaches Film Production and Screenwriting at Sophia University. The Trial is his fourth feature.
Hopefully, we will be able to screen the film in Otaru.
Juliet Winters Carpenter
Translating Shiba Ryotaro’s Ryoma ga yuku
Short lecture with Q&A
The talk will delve into some of the challenges and delights in translating Shiba Ryotaro’s most famous work, Ryoma ga yuku dialects, swordfighting and sword nomenclature, avoiding repetition while maintaining some of the newspaper-novel style, deciding on the level of historical detail needed, and more.
Ryoma ga yuku (1963-66) has been a monster best-seller in Japan, with some 24 million copies sold to date. It is a rollicking page-turner with a beloved protagonist, Sakamoto Ryoma–a man who more than most paved the way for the Meiji Restoration. Three translators have split the volumes (Margaret Mitsutani, vols 4-5 Paul McCarthy, vols. 1, 3, and 7 myself, vols. 2, 6, and 8). The first volume of the English translation is now out, and the rest will follow through 2020. In the talk I will discuss challenges such as rendering various dialects (Kochi, Kagoshima, Edo, Kyoto…) dealing with minutiae of kendo and swords translating the various waka that occur in the text coordinating a myriad details with the help of our indefatigable editor, Phyllis Birnbaum trying not to overwhelm the Western reader with too many foreign personal and place names, and generally trying to make the novel as lively and appealing in English as it is in Japanese.
Juliet Winters Carpenter has lived in Japan for some forty-five years and is a prolific, award-winning translator of Japanese literature. Besides Ryoma!, other recent translations include works by Minae Mizumura, Miura Shion, and Nakano Koji. She will retire from Doshisha Women’s College in March 2019.
Kai Raine
Writing Fictional Diverse Characters That Feel Real How Background and Society Might and Might Not Define a Person
Brief lecture with Q&A/discussion
I will discuss the difficulty of writing diverse characters for a very sensitized audience, and my history of doing this as someone with a very complicated and diverse background. After a brief lecture, I will open up the discussion to the audience.
We live in an age of increasing globalization. In parts of the world, cultural appropriation has become akin to a societal taboo. But the nature of fiction writing is in the weaving of a person other than the self, perhaps in a world other than our own.
There are characters that are inauthentic because they are written without regard to the life and history that comes with their background. Then there are characters that are perceived as inauthentic only because the author didn’t grow up with the background being portrayed.
I will discuss the reactions that some of my queries and works receive from those who are unaware of my background, and how that reaction often changes after I explain my personal history.
After this brief lecture, I will open up the discussion to the audience. I would welcome those writing diverse characters to bring their stories to the discussion.
Cognitive scientist, neurobiologist, and author, Kai Raine writes to question assumptions and the accepted nature of things. Author of the fantasy novel These Lies That Live Between Us and numerous short stories published in anthologies such as Denizens of Darkness and Suddenly Lost in Words. Website at kairaine.com
Kelly Quinn
A Condom Stuffed With Walnuts using character descriptions to confirm genre conventions and advance the narrative
Lecture Discussion
I was quite taken with Peter Mallet’s presentation last year on opening lines and thought to do something similar with character descriptions. What makes a character description effective By looking at some famous examples, we hope to get some insight into how the language of the genre, helps the reader visualize the character and his or her predicament.
This presentation will examine physical descriptions from a variety of genre fiction to research the role the physical description in advancing the plot and reinforcing the narrative elements of the story. We will examine the language used and see that the language used in the physical description of characters and people is not neutral, but has been selected to suit the genre type and expectations of the reader.
Aspiring writers of genre fiction will find insights into improving their own descriptions by maintaining a consistent tone and helping to advance the plot.
Kelly Quinn teaches English and technical writing at Nagoya Institute of Technology. He is the author of several mediocre academic articles and textbooks. His humorous fiction has appeared in Transnational Literature and The Font. His non-fiction Japanese History You Should Know was published by IBC Publishing in 2013.
Lise Goett
Quickness Putting Your Poem on the Train Tracks with the Train Coming
Lecture and Q&A
From Yeats Leda and the Swan to Montales love poems for Irma Brandeis, many great poems embody perfect timing, a quickness suffused with an allusive economy that Italo Calvino identifies as a proximity to death. How does one capture this immediacy?
In his monumental essay, Quickness, Italo Calvino speaks of proximity to death, a quickness, that makes a great poem come alive. How do we as poets access our most essential utterance, this immediacy, and urgency one might call our primal language, and imbue it with a quality of perfect timing Certain forms lend themselves to this essential saying. Poems written as letters, prayers, seductions, aphorisms or even as a single sentence can bring us closer to this more intimate consciousness. Certain forms lend themselves to this essential saying. Poems written as letters, prayers, seductions, aphorisms or even as a single sentence can bring us closer to this more intimate consciousness. How does one stalk this essential lan and bottle it With excerpts from Calvino’s marvelous text, Goett will discuss how to maximize this immediacy and put your poem on the train tracks with the train coming with examples gleaned from contemporary and Modernist poetry for discussion.
Lise Goett’s second book, Leprosarium, was the 2012 winner of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award in Poetry from the Poetry Society of America and published in February 2018 by Tupelo Press. Her other awards include The Paris Review Discovery Award, The Pen Southwest Book Award in Poetry, the Capricorn Prize from the West Side Y, the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and The Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her first poetry collection, Waiting for the Paraclete (Beacon), as well as postgraduate fellowships from The Milton Center and the Creative Writing Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Image, Mandorla, and the Antioch Review.
Loren Goodman
Moist Salvages Generating New, Used Rebuilt Poems from Altered Texts
Craft Workshop
This is an eco-friendly poetry writing/translation workshop in which wethrough subtle and not-so-subtle linguistic alterationreconfigure, recycle and resuscitate a variety of desiccated, dilapidated and abandoned texts both poetic and non-poetic into functional art works of literary and social value.
While a poem can mean different things to each reader, the Absolute pleasure (or vodka) of the poem needs to be distilled. Derived from seven years of hemorrhoids, sonic imagery and sailing as a metaphor for insanity, we begin with the premise that within each text is palpitating poetic confection. If we simply drift upon the sea of our own writing, we may never experience the joy of breaking up on others rocks. While this workshop takes place in the woods under incredibly sharp time constraints, at least half will be devoted to proper enunciation, giving hope to participants that they may be able to escape. Such hope is a fig, not a pheasant. What we must do is undermine the patterns of the past in order to see how futures may be found. All participants will be allowed to levitate briefly during the course of the workshop.
Loren Goodman wrote Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, Suppository Writing (2008) and New Products (2010). Associate Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the UIC Creative Writing Director.
Marian Pierce
Finding stories
Lecture and Q&A
Where do stories come from Sometimes you find stories, and sometimes they find you? I’ll differentiate between the two by discussing where some of the stories in my collection Finding Land Stories of Japan came from. I’ll touch on density, vitality, choreography, conflict, and meaning, as well as how to sustain your story into the middle after you’ve expended that initial rush of energy that propels you to begin. If time allows, well also discuss by what means writers engross readers in their fictional world.
Marian Pierce (MFA, Iowa Writers’ Workshop) has worked for NHK radio, backpacked in the Himalayas, and traveled to India four times. Her stories have appeared in Hospital Drive, GQ, Portland Monthly Magazine, Yomimono, Creative Writers’ Handbook, Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997, STORY, The Mississippi Review, Confrontation, and Puerto del Sol.
Mark Austin
Multimedia Journalism a Revolution in Storytelling
Lecture with activity
This will be an introduction to the strengths and weaknesses of the five-plus one media elements text, video, still, photography, audio, graphics, and social media and how they can be combined for effective communication. Participants will watch two documentary videos, by the BBC and SBS, featuring multimedia content, look at an interactive graphic by Italian newspaper La Stampa and do a multimedia storytelling activity.
Mark Austin is a Scottish journalist and academic. He worked for The Yomiuri Shimbun in Tokyo for 13 years before moving to India in 2010 to teach multimedia journalism as a visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Journalism New Media in Bangalore. Back in Tokyo since 2015, he is a script editor at NHK World, a copy editor at Jiji Press and a visiting professor at Tama Graduate School of Business, where he teaches business communication. As well as writing and reporting for The Daily Yomiuri (now The Japan News) and The Yomiuri Shimbun, he has written and reported for newspapers and magazines including The Asahi Evening News, The Independent, The Irish Independent, Scotland on Sunday, Newsweek Japan and The Diplomat. He has lectured on journalism at colleges, roundtables, and forums across India and Japan.
Michael Pronko
Becoming an Indie Writer-Publisher
Lecture with Q&A
The opportunities for independent publishing are vast in this digital age. However, the challenges are complex and intimidating. This talk will focus on my experience of becoming an independent writer-publisher. I will provide details of how writers can set up their own network and present ideas on how and why to accomplish that.
Going indie is not as easy as most writers would hope and depends on a variety of people. The talk will get into the specifics of who is needed and how to work with them. Finding ways to work with assistants, editors, proofreaders, formatters, and designers, among others adds tremendously to the process of writing and post-writing.
The indie mindset differs from those of traditional publishing. Attending to business details, diligently working on the writing, and developing a broad understanding of the complex interconnections between writing and publishing are invaluable to developing productively and creatively.
I’ve published three award-winning books on Tokyo life. My mystery, The Last Train, also won numerous awards, with the follow-up, The Moving Blade out this year. I’ve written for Newsweek Japan, The Japan Times, Artscape Japan, and my website, Jazz in Japan. I teach American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University.
Peter Marsh
Authentic Dialogue
Workshop
This workshop will allow participants to develop their ear for authentic dialogue that is to say, for making their characters speak like real people, and using dialogue to display and develop character.
The presenter will give an entirely personal (i.e. deeply considered, but unresearched) take on the elements of dialogue writing. The rules of punctuation of direct speech will be covered, as will the use of dialogue tags, but the rude mechanics will not be dwelt upon. The main purpose of the workshop will be to get people to compose dialogue in voices distinct both from one another and from the narrator. Samples of excellence from both narrative and dramatic writing will be examined for imitable tropes and techniques. Exercises will be then set in which a dialogue presented in received English is to be rewritten as if it occurred between, say, a brash sports coach and a shy professor of philosophy, or an arrogant plumber and a sleazy investment adviser. The dialogues will be read in a neutral tone, and the audience invited to guess the identity of each character.
Peter Marsh lives in Yokohama, and is a regular member of the Tokyo Writers Workshop. His stories have been published most recently in The Font, The Lowestoft Chronicle and Fabula Argentea. He has recently completed a musical, of few of the songs from which were performed at the last JWC. Peter has noticed that it is often the quietest people who have the best ear for dialogue.
Rosey Chang
Exploring Mindful Writing Practice
Experiential workshop
In this hands-on workshop, participants will be led through a short, mindfulness meditation, and experience a mindful-writing activity.
The presenter will briefly discuss understandings of mindfulness — drawing from contemporary contemplative science and long-standing traditions of Zen arts practice. She will focus on frameworks that are relevant to creative writers and related practitioners, including what John Daido Loori Roshi calls the still point in creative practice. Inspired by Jon Kabat-Zinns observation that Mindfulness can only be understood from the inside out, participants will be invited to take part in a short, mindfulness meditation. Participants will also engage in a mindful-writing activity, drawing from the work of Natalie Goldberg, Dennis Palumbo, and Bonnie Freedman. There will be time for participants to discuss their reflections.
Bring writing materials.
Rosey’s short story, The Girl who Drew Cats appeared in Victorian Writer. She has also published in TEXT, Peril, and Research Whisperer. Roseys Ph.D. research at Monash University, Melbourne, explores creative writer’s experiences of writing practice through the lens of mindfulness. She is developing a middle-grade novel.
Sara Kate Ellis
Its the Story, St#pid What Fic Taught Me about Writing
Short lecture with craft workshop and sharing
Much-maligned and misunderstood, fanfiction or fic enjoys a tremendous following among readers and writers, providing the chance for both newbie and veteran alike to venture away from creative comfort zones and receive immediate audience feedback. In contrast to IRL or even online writers workshops, fic platforms also offer up an ever-present and easily accessible readership, one often engaged with story logic, emotional clarity, and characterization over but not necessarily at the expense of craft. This presentation is not about the merits or lack thereof of fic vs. the writer’s workshop, but focuses on how one can leverage the benefits from both to take risks and improve your writing while staying motivated and yes!having fun. In this workshop, I’ll discuss what I’ve learned from a year of playing in the fic sandbox, after which participants will write and share their own mini-fics. Please bring your own pens and mass-market characters!
Sara Kate Ellis was a 2011 Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow and is a Milford Science Fiction Workshop Alum. Her stories have appeared in Ideomancer, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Crossed Genres, and AE-The Canadian Science Fiction Review. Her story Liarbird also won the 2015 Defenestrationism short fiction contest. She lives in Tokyo.
Shivaji Das
Why Just be a Traveller Be a Travel Writer! – Travel Writing Workshop
Workshop with Exercises
The workshop will cover the essentials of travel writing in our current age, with tips on getting published in various online and print platforms. Interactive exercises will be given to participants to demonstrate the techniques. The workshop is aimed at beginners as well as budding travel writers.
You love traveling. Then why not share your travel experiences with a wider world The workshop will aim to answer the following questions How can I write a great travel story What should I include and what should I exclude How do I structure the flow of my writing What kind of pictures and multimedia can I use to enhance my story What else do I need besides a pen and a camera Who should I approach for publication How should I write the pitch How do I create and sustain my brand as a travel writer.
Shivaji Das is the author of three travel memoirs and photography books. His latest book is Angels by the Murky River Travels Off the Beaten Path. Shivajis work has been featured in TIME, Economist, BBC, Asian Geographic, etc. He is the conceptualizer of Migrant Poetry Contests in Singapore and Malaysia.
The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI)
Join SCBWI Members and those interested in writing for children and young adults for a lunchtime meet-up and informational gathering. Bring a bento lunch. SCBWI Japan Regional Advisor Holly Thompson will lead this gathering.
The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (scbwi.org) is an international professional organization for authors, illustrators and translators of books for children and young adults. The mission is to support the creation and availability of quality childrens books in every region of the world. Through awards, events, and publications, SCBWI aims to give established writers, illustrators and translators the tools and resources to manage their careers, as well as educate those just starting out. SCBWI is also proud to serve as a consolidated voice for its members within the publishing industry. Membership in SCBWI is open to anyone with an active interest in childrens literature, from picture books to young adult novels. There are active SCBWI regional chapters throughout the world including Japan (japan.scbwi.org).
Suzanne Kamata
The Truth about Writing Contests
Short lecture with Q&A
I will describe various kinds of writing contests, the pros and cons of entering said contests, and give advice on how to improve an entrant’s chances of winning.
There are many contests for writers. Some may think that it’s not worth the time or the cost of the entrance fees. After all, many contests get hundreds of submissions, and judging is often somewhat subjective every reader has different likes and dislikes. However, thanks to winning or placing in writing competitions, I have received plane tickets to Paris, Sydney, and Columbia, South Carolina (from my home in Japan). I’ve also been awarded cash, medals, trophies, and plaques and shiny prize stickers for my books, not to mention bragging rights and prestige. A contest win can also be an excuse for a burst of publicity. Contests may lead to recognition, getting an agent or publisher, and book sales. So how do you decide which contests to enter How do you win In this session I will share my expertise as a frequent contest entrant, sometime winner, and occasional judge.
Suzanne Kamata has won many awards for her writing including a grant from SCBWI for her forthcoming novel tentatively titled Indigo Girl (GemmaMedia 2018), a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation for her as-yet-unpublished mother/daughter travel memoir Squeaky Wheels, the Paris Book Festival Grand Prize for Gadget Girl The Art of Being Invisible (GemmaMedia 2013), and an IPPY Silver Medal for her most recently published novel The Mermaids of Lake Michigan (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing 2017).
Suzanne Kamata and Wendy Jones Nakanishi
Introducing The Best Asian Short Stories anthology
Panel discussion with Q&A
Contributors Suzanne Kamata and Wendy Jones Nakanishi will discuss The Best Asian Short Stories 2017 anthology and other projects from Kitaab, an independent Singapore publishing house. Kitaab Publisher Zafar Anjum will also talk via video about other anthologies in the works and publishing opportunities for Japan-based writers and translators in Singapore.
Suzanne Kamata is the author or editor of ten published books including, most recently Screaming Divas (Simon Pulse, 2014), The Mermaids of Lake Michigan (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2017) and A Girls’ Guide to the Islands (Gemma Open Door, 2017). Her story “Mon-chan” was selected for inclusion in The Best Asian Short Stories 2017 anthology. She is an Associate Professor at Naruto College of Education.
Wendy Jones Nakanishi, an American by birth, has been a resident in Japan for the past 34 years, employed at a private Japanese university. She has published widely in her academic field of English literature and also writes creative non-fiction as well as short stories, with her work appearing in, for example, The Kyoto Journal, Transnational Literature, The Mom Egg, and Tales from a Small Planet. Under the pen name of Lea OHarra, she has recently published three crime fiction novels Imperfect Strangers (2015) Progeny (2016) and Lady First (2017) with Endeavour Press (UK). She has work forthcoming in The Best Asian Crime Fiction from Kitaab.
Tara McIlroy and Gregg McNabb
Publish or Perish One Story of How to Begin and Operate an Academic Journal
Short lecture with Q&A
The presenters describe the processes of starting up and running a relatively new academic journal. The Journal of Literature in Language Teaching was started in 2012 and is published twice-yearly. The two presenters describe the different aspects of journal publishing, including managing submissions, reviewing, editing, open source publication and publicity.
Tara McIlroy and Gregg McNabb will share with the audience their experiences of running the Journal of Literature in Language Teaching, and the knowledge gained through their involvement in the academic publishing process. The Journal was set up in 2012 to provide members of the JALT Literature in Language Teaching SIG with a quality periodical in which to publish articles featuring their research and views on using literature in the language classroom. Among the topics discussed will be the creation of submission guidelines attracting submissions managing the double-blind peer review process ways of providing constructive feedback to authors publishing options (opting for online open source over hard copy) and publicity outreach. We will also share the ongoing story of how the journal has received more interest from overseas readers and writers, leading to professional connections across continents. The talk will be of interest to attendees who find themselves involved in any stage of journal publishing on either side of the desk – including as submitting writer, as reviewer, as vetter or as overseeing editorial staff.
Tara McIlroy, M.A. PGCE, is an associate professor at the School of Global Japanese Studies, Meiji University in Tokyo. Her interests include literary reading, investigating uses of creative texts and world literature in the language classroom. She is a co-coordinator of the Literature in Language Teaching SIG in JALT.
Gregg McNabb, M.A., B.Ed., MATESOL Originally with concentrations in French literature and language, I moved to Japan where Ive taught university students in Kyoto and Shizuoka for over 25 years. My focus has been on reading skills and writing (reading) textbooks, but increasingly moving towards mentoring junior educators.
Tim Knight and Alan Meadows
Dispatches from the Frontline by Two Authors of University Textbooks Working in different ways with different styles of Japanese publishers
Short Lecture with Q&A
This presentation will compare and contrast the experiences of two authors of university textbooks working with different sized Japanese publishers. One author has largely worked alone with a small company. The other has worked with a co-author and a larger company. Tips and potential pit-falls will be revealed.
Textbook writing has often been a way for writers, and teachers who aspire to writing for an audience, to get published in Japan. The textbook market is becoming more of a challenge, though, as more teaching materials become available online, and fewer children being born means publishers are chasing a declining pool of sales. However, publishers are still successfully releasing a wide variety of textbooks in English for the university market.
This presentation will compare and contrast the experiences of two authors of university textbooks working with different sized Japanese publishers. One author has largely worked alone with a small company. The other has worked with a co-author and a larger company. They will explain the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches. Various tips and potential pit-falls will be revealed about how much freedom there is, what extra materials need to be written, payment arrangements, etc.
Tim Knight is Associate Professor at Shirayuri University in Tokyo. He worked as a journalist in the UK before coming to Japan and gradually moving into university teaching. He has published several textbooks focusing on Britain and on media English, mostly with Tsurumi Shoten.
Alan Meadows is Associate Professor at Seitoku University in Chiba. Born in the UK, he has taught English in Japan for over twenty years. He has published two ESP textbooks through the Japanese publisher Nanun-do Co., Ltd Speaking of Nutrition and Speaking of Nursing.
Tom Baker
Anatomy of a Book Review
Short lecture with Q&A
Anatomy of a Book Review will explain how a book review is structured and what elements it should include. The key is to not merely indulge in one’s own reaction to a book, but to focus on being an informative and trustworthy guide for other readers.
A book review is like a book in miniature. It must grab the reader’s attention at the beginning, hold their interest through the middle, and leave them feeling satisfied to have spent their time on it by the end. But what goes into each of those parts and how do you put them together.
Anatomy of a Book Review will pin several reviews to the dissecting table to look at what parts they include and what function those parts serve. Vital organs include a catchy lead, facts about the author, and at least a sketch of the context in which the book appears.
Reviews of fiction and nonfiction will be compared. For any type of book, reviewers, of course, want to express their opinions. This presentation will focus on doing so in a way that fulfills the reviewer’s mission to be a concretely helpful guide for other readers.
Tom Baker has written and published hundreds of book reviews over the past 20 years. He edited the Books page of The Daily Yomiuri, which is now The Japan News, where he edits the Bound to Please column. He was the ACCJ Journals book columnist for two years.
Wendy Jones Nakanishi
Why Writers Write a Short Overview
Short lecture with Q&A
I will provide a short overview of the motivations writers express or won’t admit to for writing. Writing is a lonely, difficult enterprise rarely awarded by fame or financial gain. I will look at a few representative authors mostly ones from America and Britain from the seventeenth up to the twenty-first century.
Writers are fond of repeating Samuel Johnson’s remark that No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money, a sentiment he would elaborate by saying he wrote not for love or desire of fame but for want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of. The irony is that these assertions are implicitly disproved by their context. They appear in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a work Boswell began at the age of twenty-two, upon first meeting Johnson in London when he would begin noting down their conversations in journals that would later serve as the basis for what has been described as the greatest biography of all time. What motivates writers Arguably Boswell first began noting down dialogue and anecdotes because he recognized Johnson’s greatness and wanted it recorded for posterity. That is one reason for putting pen to paper. Earlier writers such as Rochester were proud of their amateur status as authors, producing works as jeux desprit. Others, like Dryden or Swift, wrote works intended to serve a political cause. Romantic poets would assert they write as a form of self-expression other writers of different ages, that literature offers a form of consolation to themselves and to their readers. This survey of writer’s intentions is intended to remind us of why we write and how our motivation probably influences the kind of work we do.
Wendy Jones Nakanishi, an American by birth, has been resident in Japan for the past 34 years, employed at a private Japanese university. She has published widely in her academic field of English literature and also writes creative non-fiction as well as short stories, with her work appearing in, for example, The Kyoto Journal, Transnational Literature, The Mom Egg, and Tales from a Small Planet. Under the pen name of Lea OHarra, she has recently published three crime fiction novels Imperfect Strangers (2015) Progeny (2016) and Lady First (2017) with Endeavour Press (UK).
Yolanda Yu Miaomiao
A Tender Giant Inside Our Heart – Fairytales in the City
Writing workshop
Cities are the most unlikely places for fairy tales, and yet can be the best places for that. Fairy tales are not exclusively for children, they can be a source of happiness and healing for adults living in the modern society. Yu will share her observation and well as techniques to create fairy tales with a setting in day-to-day life.
What do Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rene Margritte, and Hayao Miyazaki have in common Yolanda Yus short story A Giant’s three wishes was featured at the Singapore Writers Festival 2015. In her workshop she will share her observation in the evolution of fairy tale genre across cultures and examine the core elements of fairy tales settings and inner logic, characters, and morale (or lack of it). You will also have an opportunity to create your own fairy tale from day-to-day life. Hope you will enjoy the mystical journey.
Yolanda Yu, poet and novelist, she has received multiple literature awards, including Singapore Tertiary Chinese Literature Award, Golden Point Award 2017 and 2015. Her work has been published in anthologies, and magazine newspapers such as New York Times Travel Magazine, Guangxi Literature Magazine in China and Singapore Lianhezaobao.