The Palouse Writers Guild is pleased to present the line-up for our 3rd Annual Palouse Writers Festival and Books & Brews events. This year’s theme is genre fiction and we hope to have a little something for everyone!
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022
Location:1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
Registration Page: Events and Workshops
Keynote Address
The Blissed-out Writer: letting go of struggle and finding your flow!
Presenter: Kerry Schafer
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 9:00 am
Cost: $10.00
Location: Lecompte Auditorium, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
As writers, we’ve been conditioned to believe that the writing life is difficult, which contributes to unnecessary and avoidable writer’s block, burnout, and disillusionment. Once upon a time, when we first started writing, it wasn’t this way. We wrote because we loved words and stories, or because we found release in putting words on paper. Shifting our focus, remembering our why, and letting go of pervasive myths about writing can help us approach our writing with joy instead of dread.
Kerry Schafer is a firm believer in writing what she loves and has gleefully reveled in fantasy, paranormal mystery, magical realism, and women’s fiction (written as Amazon Charts and Washington Post bestselling author Kerry Anne King). To date, she has published twelve books and her work has been translated into four different languages.
Born and raised in Canada, Kerry has been successfully transplanted into US soil and has lived in Washington for twenty-five years. In addition to writing, Kerry is the founder of Author Genie, through which she provides writer mindset coaching, online classes, and virtual assistant services. She has also been active in the podcasting community and is currently the host of Taming the TBR. When not absorbed in creative pursuits, you’ll find Kerry hanging out with her real-life Viking on their little piece of heaven just outside Colville, Washington.
Workshop Session 1
Workshop A
Finding your Voice: Mining the Writer’s Toolbox to Intentionally Shape Narrative Voice
Presenter: Annette Bay Pimentel
Cost: $10.00
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 10:00 am
Location: Arts Room, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
Editors and agents often say that the main thing they look for in a submission is a strong voice. But if you ask them to define what voice is, they usually flounder. This workshop explains voice, provides contrasting examples of writing elements and discuss how the differences affect narrative voice. Participants will also have an opportunity to write/revies their own work using techniques leaned in this workshop.
Annette Bay Pimentel writes true stories about real people for kids. She is the author of All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight for Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything (Sourcebooks: 2020), which was a Junior Library Guild selection; Girl Running (Nancy Paulsen Books: 2018), which received a Kirkus starred review and was a Junior Library Guild selection; Mountain Chef (Charlesbridge: 2016), which received the Carter G. Woodson Award; and the Do You Really Want to Meet a Dinosaur? series (Amicus: 2016-2020), which was an NSTA recommended title. She is represented by Andrea Brown Literary. She is the assistant regional adviser to the Inland Northwest Region of the SCBWI. She lives with her husband and her children who haven’t yet flown the coop in Moscow, Idaho.
Workshop B
Steal Like a Fantasy Author
Presenter: Voss Foster
Cost: $10.00
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 10:00 am
Location: Fiske Room, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
Fantasy authors seem like a bunch of unassuming wallflowers. Well-read, but harmless. But the truth is, every fantasy author is a thief. We steal history and legends and tropes from other genres. We let them sit and percolate as we brainstorm. We change a few names, add a sprinkle of magic, and then use our books to fence our ill-gotten gains. And you can too, with a little know-how. Come learn how to twist facets of the real world—from media to myth to the modern day—into the fantasy stories readers love.
Voss Foster lives in the middle of the Eastern Washington desert, where he writes sci-fi and fantasy from inside a single-wide trailer. His writing focuses on dark, political, and social themes, and always has a slant toward diversity and inclusion. He is the author of the Evenstad Media Presents series and the Office of Preternatural Affairs series. His short work is wide and varied, and has been featured by Vox.com and alongside timeless classics in Heroic Fantasy. He’s also been featured in the breakout Alternative Truths series of anthologies and is also the author of Write Short Fiction that Sells, a guide for short story writers.
Featured Presentation
Secrets to Great Writing
Presenter: Carrie Stuart Parks
Cost: $10.00
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 11:30 am
Location: Lecompte Auditorium, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
We want our readers to stay up late because they can’t put down our book. In this workshop, Carrie will show us how to create tension, which results in page-turning stories. It covers common mistakes that make your writing sluggish, how to craft your words for maximum impact, and how to put that polish on your manuscript that any agent or publisher seeks.
Carrie Stuart Parks is a multi-Christy, Carol, Golden Scroll, and Inspy award-winning author in addition to numerous other awards. She’s currently penning her tenth novel for HarperCollins Christian/Thomas Nelson. An internationally known forensic artist, she teaches courses in forensic art to law enforcement professionals across the US and Canada. Carrie is a popular speaker and presenter and has been the Special Guest at the Writer’s Police Academy, Early Bird Special Presenter along with Frank Peretti at the American Christian Fiction Writers, Keynote at the Oregon Christian Writer’s Conference, as well as presented at ThrillerFest, Daphne Du Maurier’s Kiss of Death, BlueRidge Mountain Christian Writer’s Conference, and numerous other conferences. As a professional fine artist, her paintings hang in a number of corporate and private collections. She has written and illustrated best-selling non-fiction art books for North Light Publishers.
Workshop Session 2
Workshop C
How to Create a Storyboard for Your Picture Book and Why You Should!
Presenter: Jessica Linn Evans
Cost: $10.00
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 1:00 pm
Location: Arts Room, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
Storyboarding is an effective way to see your whole manuscript at a glance: a visual outline. With a storyboard, you are able to quickly and simply identify the pacing, story-arc, action, and character development in fiction picture books, as well as themes, refrains, and building ideas in non-fiction and concept books. This workshop explains how to create four different storyboards (action, character, setting, and theme) as well as a simple illustration storyboard for author-illustrators. We will then learn to identify any trouble spots using storyboards as a guide. Participants will have an opportunity to create a storyboard from their own work, or a favorite picture book, and be given time to identify any trouble spots for future editing.
Jessica Linn Evans is an author-illustrator and SCBWI member. Her illustrations are rendered with traditional media including watercolor, graphite, and ink. Her debut picture book, Penguin Sets Sail, was released May 2020 from Canonball Books and Rainstorm Publishing. She has also illustrated Waiting Through Winter by Jason Farley (Jovial Press, 2015), Little Mouse Finds A Friend by Jeni Leidenfrost (Jovial Press, 2017), and Solar The Polar by Kim Constantinesco (MacLaren-Cochrane, 2017). Jessica is an elementary school art teacher, a school librarian, and a high school volleyball coach. She lives in the beautiful state of Idaho with her husband, her four delightful children, and a bunny named Bucky.
Workshop D
Temper Your Enthusiasm: The Art of Giving and Receiving Critiques.
Presenter: Crystal Carney
Cost: $10.00
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 1:00 pm
Location: Fiske Room, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
You’ve painstakingly written a short story, a novel, a chapter, a page—and now you’re ready to offer it to a group of readers to get those valuable perspectives every writer needs to be at their best. The thing is, not all feedback offered feels valuable. In fact, it feels as though you’ve thrown your hard work into the waiting maw of judgment where it’s slowly being torn apart bit by bit. Feelings of anxiety and regret are all too commonplace when your hard-earned words are being workshopped. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
In this interactive workshop with Independent Editor, Crystal Carney, participants to learn techniques and gain valuable insights into what it means to give–and receive–constructive criticism.
Crystal Carney is an independent editor living in the Pacific Northwest with her family. She has been writing creatively since she could hold a pencil and while in college, co-founded a Spokane-based writing group. Her creative work has been published in literary journals and won awards and recognition in her community. Most recently, she has studied book publishing at the Denver Publishing Institute and rediscovered a deep love for typewriter restoration. When she doesn’t have her head in a book, she loves to taste-test every loaf of bread her husband bakes and challenge herself with a new knitting pattern.
Workshop Session 3
Workshop E
Look! Listen! Do you smell something? Engaging the senses in horror.
Cost: CANCELED
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 2:30 pm
Location: Fiske Room, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
What does death smell like? What does primordial ooze feel like? What is the sound of the end of the world? What does revenge taste like? A writer’s job is to project scenes and feelings into the reader’s imagination. Often, the visual can fail us—Lovecraft’s infamous too horrible and unknowable to describe—and so we must go beyond our eyes and engage other senses to achieve our desired effect.
T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween, has worked as a journalist, horror movie columnist, haunted house monster, college instructor, and other less glamorous jobs. Tranchell has his master’s degree in literature from Central Washington University with, naturally, a focus on the horror genre. Tranchell published his first novel, “Cry Down Dark,” through Blysster Press in 2016. In 2017, Blysster released a collection of short stories, poetry, and film criticism titled “Asleep in the Nightmare Room.” 2020 saw the release of a second collection, “The Private Lives of Nightmares,” followed soon by his second novel “Tell No Man,” which he published under his imprint LAST DAYS BOOKS. He has also published horror short fiction and was co-editor of GIVE: An Anthology of Anatomical Entries, a dark fiction anthology from When the Dead Books. He is a rising star among horror scholars, having presented work on Stephen King at the Popular Culture Association’s national conference, and in 2021 at the Ann Radcliffe Conference on the “Great American Horror Novel.” He currently teaches English at a community college in Washington state.
Workshop F
Strategically Engineer your Romantic Fiction for Maximum Sales and Audience Growth
Presenter: Trish McCallan
Cost: $10.00
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 2:30 pm
Location: Arts Room, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
As the acknowledged behemoth of the publishing industry, romantic fiction accounted for 1.44 billion dollars of sales, along with one third of all adult mass market fiction sales last year. The romance audience is a voracious one, with many readers devouring multiple books every week. As early adopters to ebooks, the romance audience is open to both digital and self-published books, which makes it attractive to writers. However, while there is great opportunity in this genre, there is also great competition, which makes it difficult for new authors to stand out. This presentation will offer tricks and tips to strategically engineer your romantic fiction to appeal to this massive audience. I’ll cover the tropes and elements that romance readers love. Utilizing favorite tropes, romantic elements, and correct structure can help new writers stand out and connect with readers in a crowded marketplace.
Trish McCallan is the Amazon bestselling author of gritty, action driven romantic suspense. She is a three-time finalist for Romance Writers of America’s RITA award (RWA’s award of excellence) as well as an RWA honor roll alumni for three individual titles, surpassing 100,000 copies sold each. For the past ten years she’s made a good living off a sporadic publishing schedule.
Panel Discussion
Fighting Over Shelf Space: The Genre Vs. Literary Fiction Debate
Can lowbrow be hoity-toity? This panel discusses how genre fiction challenges literary gatekeepers, the nuances of literary merit, and the expansiveness of the literary ideal.
Presenters: Beth Torgerson, Delaney Daly, and Sanan Kolva
Cost: $15.00
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 4:00 pm
Location: Lecompte Auditorium, 1912 Center, 412 East Third St., Moscow, ID 83843
Beth E. Torgerson is a Professor of English at Eastern Washington University, where she teaches an Introduction to Genre class as well as upper-level literature classes, often with a focus on Victorian literature. Her book, Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire, and the Constraints of Culture, is published by Palgrave. Because of her interest in women writers, she has also published book chapters on Harriet Martineau and Willa Cather. Her work appears in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Literature, TheMartineau Society Newsletter, The Brontë Messenger, and Disability Studies Quarterly. She lives in Spokane, Washington, with her husband and two daughters.
Delaney Daly was born and raised in Central Florida but also spent much of her upbringing in Colorado, Georgia, and North Carolina. She studied English Literature at the University of Central Florida and is a published writer and poet. Her work can be found in Beautiful Losers Magazine, The Fictional Café, Public Services Quarterly, and most recently, North Idaho Wellness Magazine. In 2020, she graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Texas Woman’s University School of Library & Information Studies with a Master of Library Science degree and in August 2021, landed her dream job as the Children’s Librarian at Coeur d’Alene Public Library. Additionally, she is a proud member of the Kootenai County Young Professionals where she currently serves on the Board of Directors as the organization’s Events Coordinator. Her passions and interests include early literacy; mental health awareness; advocating for intellectual freedom, equity, diversity, and inclusion; spending time outdoors; creative writing and reading; traveling; and being mom to her 4-year-old Tabby cat, Abby.
Sanan Kolva is the author of the epic fantasy The Chosen of the Spears series and a steampunk fantasy series The Silverline Chronicles. Her short fiction appears in a number of anthologies. She works as a technical editor for an engineering firm and is a native of Eastern Washington. When not writing, she enjoys baking and decorating cakes, and appeasing her feline overloads.
Books & Brews
Join us in the Great Room for a festive close to the Palouse Writers Festival. During Books & Brews, workshop presenters and other participating authors will be on hand to meet with the public and autograph their books. This event is FREE, family friendly, and open to the public. Beverages will be provided by Hunga Dunga Brewing Company. Winners of the Palouse Writers Guild writing contests will be announced promptly at 6:30 pm. Entries and judges score sheets will be available for pick-up after winners are announced. Any entries not picked up the night of the event will be destroyed.