Green Mountain

Writers Conference

 

Meet our writers


  • T. Greenwood
  • David Huddle
  • Verandah Porche
  • Tom Smith


  • Director YVONNE DALEY has published more than 5000 works of fiction and non-fiction and has contributed to National Public Radio. Her most recent book, "Octavia Boulevard," was published in February, 2011. "Octavia Boulevard" is a neighborhood memoir that explores the clash between progressive politics and capitalism, the legacy of the counter-culture, and the idiosyncracies, both good and bad, of San Francisco. A previous non-fiction book "A State of Mind: Writing in Vermont," profiles 21 Vermont writers who open their tool boxes and share the tricks of their trade with readers and developing writers. Daley is also the co-author of "An Independent Man," the biography of Senator James M. Jeffords, and contributed many chapters to Fodor's Travel Guides. The recipient of more than 40 regional and national awards in journalism, Ms. Daley writes for the Boston Globe, the Rutland (Vt.) Daily Herald, Vermont Sunday Magazine, People, Time, The Washington Post, The San Jose Mercury News, West, The Milwaukee Journal, The New York Daily News, Sunset, Caribbean Life and Leisure, Stanford Magazine and other publications. Ms. Daley is a graduate of Barry University and the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. She was the recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship in Journalism at Stanford University and a Freedom Forum Fellowship at Indiana University. Ms. Daley lives in Rutland, Vt., and San Francisco, where she is a Journalism professor at San Francisco State University and a docent at Stanford University's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Her areas of emphasis this summer will be on memoir writing, telling truth in different genres, creating character in fiction and non-fiction, as well as self-publishing and using the Internet and social media to promote and disseminate one's work.



    ELIZABETH INNESS-BROWN is the author of two short-story collections, "Satin Palms" and "Here," and the novel "Burning Marguerite." Her stories have won a Pushcart Prize and have been published in North American Review, Boulevard, and The New Yorker. She teaches writing and runs the writing center at Saint MichaelŐs College, and she lives with her family on one of the Lake Champlain Islands. One of the remarkable elements of Inness-Brown's work is the ability to tell a big story compactly, to bring several lives and deep stories to the reader in both an intimate and starkly succinct language. Those participants who remember her workshop from several years ago remember how deftly she got participants to free themselves of preconceived themes to write freshly about unanticipated subjects. She'll share some of her new work with us, work informed from her years of living close to the land on a remote Vermont island located near the state's largest city.



    DAVID HUDDLE is the author of sixteen books of poetry, fiction, and essays, including "Only the Little Bone," "The Story of a Million Years," "La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl," and "The Writing Habit," Huddle has lived in Vermont for the past thirty-eight years. His poetry frequently appears in the New Yorker and his fiction has won many prizes, all of which makes him an invaluable mentor for those who love words and whose work spans the genres. Indeed, Huddle's book on the writing craft, The Writing Habit, has remained a favorite of writing students, teachers and practitioners for more than a decade. A lesson from David Huddle is an exercise in opening up the brain to words, to word play, to word experiment and the joy in finding the right combination of words to express an idea, make a person come alive on the page, establish mood. He'll also read to us from his new book of poetry and his latest short stories.




    T. GREENWOOD was born and raised in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and many of her six novels are set there. She has received grants from the Sherwood Anderson Foundation, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and, most recently, the Maryland State Arts Council. TWO RIVERS was named Best General Fiction Book at the San Diego Book Awards last year. Four of her novels have been BookSense76/IndieBound picks; THIS GLITTERING WORLD is a January 2011 selection. She teaches creative writing at both UCSD's Extension Program and at The Ink Spot. She and her husband, Patrick, live in San Diego, CA, with their two daughters. She is also an aspiring photographer. In bookreporter, Greenwood says, "The only way to succeed as a writer is to write. You have to write when you're happy. You have to write when you're sad. You have to keep writing when not a single person thinks what you're writing is worthy. You have to write when you are sick, when you're only getting two hours of sleep a night because you're up with a newborn, you have to write when you're fighting with your best friend or your husband, when your mother dies, when your house burns down." She's our kind of writer; I'm sure we'll learn a lot from her, especially the mandate, if you want to be a writer, write.

    VERANDAH PORCHE is a poet, performer and writing partner whose work explores the relationships between individuals and communities. Based in rural Vermont since 1986, she has published two books of poems, "The Body's Symmetry" and "Glancing Off." A new collection,"Sudden Eden," spans work from the last two decades. Porche has published in Ms., The Atlantic, The Village Voice, The New Boston Review and Vermont Organic Farmer, among others. During the past thirty years, she has traveled from her home in rural Vermont, writing with and for people in grange halls and garages, elementary schools and Elderhostels, nursing homes and daycare centers, mansions and soup kitchens, board rooms and basements, homes and jails, literacy programs and colleges. In so doing, Ms. Porsche has developed a practice called "told poetry" or shared narratives that enable people who need a writing partner to create, preserve and share personal literature. She has been engaged in residencies at Real Artways in Hartford, CT., and Gifford Medical Center in Randolph, Vt. Her project with Hartford, Ct. resulted in a published collection of her poems, In 1998, the Vermont Arts Council awarded her its prestigious Citation of Merit, honoring her contribution to the cultural life of Vermont. Ms. Porche lives in Guildford, Vermont. She will lead us in writing two sessions of writing poetry.

     



    CHUCK CLARINO has worked as a journalist for 25 years, writing for the Rutland Herald, Vermont Sunday Magazine, Vermont Life, Varsity Sports New England, the Green Mountain Journal, Velo News and other publications. A recent inductee into the Sportswriters Hall of Fame, he has appeared frequently on television and radio as a sports commentator and analyst and, with his wife, Yvonne Daley, has published many travel stories. He is also an essayist and memoirist whose family stories and personal recollections delight the reader with historical detail and humorous anecdote. Mr. Clarino's short stories have been published widely, including in New Mellennium, which awarded his memoir pieces, "Randazzo: Jewels of Memory," and "Farley Binkey."



    GARY MARGOLIS is executive director of the Middlebury College Mental Health Services and Associate Professor of English and American Literature. He was a Robert Frost and Arthur Vining Davis Fellow and has taught at the University of Tennessee, Vermont and Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences. His third book, "Fire in the Orchard" was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His poem, "The Interview" was featured on National Public Radio's "The Story" and Boston's ABC Channel 5 interviewed him on the Middlebury campus reading his poem, "Winning the Lunar Eclipse," after the 2004 World Series. He was awarded the first Sam Dietzel Award for Mental Health Practice in Vermont by the Clinical Psychology Department of Saint Michaels' College. His clinical articles have appeared in the Journal of American College Health Association, Adolescence, the Ladies Home Journal, Runner's World Magazine and he has been interviewed on his work with college students by Time Magazine, ABC and CBS News. His new book of poems, "Below the Falls," is a book that responds to the loss of Middlebury student Nicholas Garza, our country's wars, and the search for things that sustain us.



    TOM SMITH is a poet, short story writer and novelist. His most recent work, "The Christmas Shopper," won the 2008 Long Story Contest Internatioanl and the 2009 A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, and was published by White Eagle Coffee Store Press as a limited edition chapbook. Smith has been publishing poetry since 1959 in such magazines as Virginia Quarterly Review, Chicago Review, American Scholar, Beyond Baroque, Beloit Poetry Review, Iowa Review and New York Quarterly. A graduate of SUNY-Albany and Rutgers-New Brunswick and professor emirtus at Castleton State College where he taught from 1964 to 1995, Mr. Smith has published one novel, A Well-Behaved Little Boy (1993), and seven volumes of poems: Some Traffic, Singing the Middle Ages, Traffic, The Broken Iris, Waiting on Pentecost, Cow'sleap: a Nightbook, and Trash: the Dahmer Sonnets. He has given frequent readings of his poetry at the Beyond Baroque Foundation in Venice, Ca., at Notre Dame in Illinois, at West Point and the Citadel, at the Poetry Society of America in New York City, at annual conferences of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts at Fort Lauderdale, at Canterbury's Christ Church College, England, and elsewhere. Smith is also an actor who has appeared in many roles in summer stock. This summer, he'll share his observations about writing across the genres of prose and poetry and share some of his most recent poems, including ones written about iconic figures such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. He'll also talk to us about working with editors at small presses.


     



    About the conference | Our writers | How to register
    Green Mountain Writers Conference
    Tinmouth, Vermont | Aug. 1 - Aug. 5, 2011