Writing for Health & Healing, October 2021

Writing for Health and Healing Online Retreat October 2-3, 2021 DOMINICAN UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Low Residency MFA in CreativeWriting 1

Saturday, October 2: 12:00-12:30pm PDT: Welcome Session Welcome to the WHH retreat. Meet faculty and other retreat participants. 1:00-2:00pm PDT: A Presentation with Ashley McMullen Black Voices in Healthcare: Audio Narratives from the Nocturnists. NAsohclteuPyrenMrifsoctrMsmupelodledbncya, MsJteDnse,ntriaifeelkrss\"MaBbalaorccuhkt her work hosting the Voices in Healthcare\". She'll touch on the creative vision and goals of this work as well as what makes for a compelling audio narrative. 4:00-6:00pm PDT: A Keynote Talk with Dean Rader Look, I am Living: On the Poetics of Repair. When we think of the notion of repair, we think of mending or fixing--putting back together. But, \"repair\" also has, as part of its etymology, a sense of return. In the 12th century, to repair was also meant to go back to a place you knew, to betake yourself back to a place or land from whence you came. In this keynote, Dean Rader will work through a series of poems that both map and mend. 2

Sunday, October 3: 10:00-11:30am PDT: Writing Workshops Workshop 1: Re-membering: Memory and the Senses with MFA Faculty, Nate Klug. Assisted by Kristan Ruona (MFA’23) Workshop 2: Ideas & Techniques for Generating New Work with Maw Shein Win, MFA Guest Speaker. Assisted by Abby LaPorte (MFA’23) Workshop 3: Knots, Breaks, Bumps, Lumps and Bruises. with MFA faculty, Marianne Rogoff Workshop 4: Back in the Day: The Element(ary) of the Body with Raina J. Leon, MFA Guest Speaker Workshop 5: Writing to Restore Yourself with Eliot Schain, Psychotherapist and MFA Guest Speaker Workshop 6: The Iambic Heart Poetry with Sandy White (MFA ‘22) and Robert Bradford, MFA Faculty 3:00-3:30pm PDT: Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Information Session 4:00-6:00pm PDT: Lecture and Workshop Sijo—Korean Poetry and Song with Wayne de Fremery and Chan E. Park, Guest Speakers Sijo is Korean musical tradition. It is also a Korean poetic tradition. Please join Chan E. Park of the Ohio State University, an expert on Korean performative traditions, and Wayne de Fremery of Sogang University, an expert on Korean poetic traditions, to learn how sijo lives today in Korea and around the world as music and verse. Participants will have a chance to hear sijo as it is has been performed traditionally, and also how the tradition is being adapted by contemporary singers. Participants will also have the opportunity to compose some sijo poetry. 3

Thank you to our speakers & workshop leaders! Bobby Bradford is an MFA writing mentor and an Adjunct Professor of English and Humanities at Dominican. He writes plays, stories, poems and songs. His work has been honored with two Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards. His writing has been published in Raven’s Perch, Strange Encounters, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. Wayne de Fremery is an associate professor in the Department of Global Korean Studies at Sogang University in Seoul and Director of the Korea Text Initiative at the Cambridge Institute for the Study of Korea in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2011, his co- translation with Brenda Hillman of poetry by Jeongrye Choi, Instances, appeared in Parlor Press. Nate Klug is a poet, translator, and essayist. He is the author of Rude Woods, a modern translation of Virgil's Eclogues (The Song Cave, 2013), Anyone, a book of poems (The University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Hosts and Guests (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2020). His writing has been supported by fellowships from the James Merrill House, the MacDowell Colony, and the Poetry Foundation. He lives and works in the Bay Area of California. 4

Raina J. León is Afro-Boricua and from Philadelphia. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. Her poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work has been published in well over 100 journals and anthologies. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California. Ashley McMullen, MD is a native of Houston, TX who ventured west to complete her residency training in internal medicine at UCSF, where she served as chief resident. Currently she is a primary care physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. Ashley is interested in exploring the role of narratives in medical education and as a tool for improving healthcare across differences. Chan E. Park is Professor Emeritus in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Ohio State University. She performs and researches Korean musical and oral poetic and narrative traditions. Her publications include Voices from the Straw Mat (University of Hawaii Press 2003) and Songs of Thorns and Flowers: Bilingual Performance and Discourse on Modern Korean Poetry Series (Foreign Language Publications 2010-2015). 5

Dean Rader Dean Rader has written, edited, or co-edited eleven books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, named a Best Book of the Year by the Barnes & Noble Review, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Marianne Rogoff is the author of the Pushcart-nominated story collection Love Is Blind in One Eye, the memoir Silvie’s Life, and numerous award-winning travel stories, short fiction, essays, and book reviews. She teaches Writing & Literature at California College of the Arts and in the MFA in Creative Writing / Narrative Medicine Program at Dominican University. During winter and summer breaks, she leads weeklong trips for writers. Eliot Schain’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Santa Monica Review, and Miramar, among other journals. He most recent collection, The Distant Sound, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2020. He has served as the program director for the Poetry Society of America, taught high school, and now works as a psychotherapist in Berkeley, CA. 6

Maw Shein Win was the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 - 2018). Her full-length poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, nominated for a Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry for 2021. Sandy White is a student in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Dominican. She has also studied Fine Arts/Painting at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her poetry has been published in numerous anthologies. She is presently seeking a publisher for her book, Terse Verse. Judy Halebsky directs the Low-Res MFA in Creative Writing at Dominican University of California. She is the author most recently of Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She also writes plays, performance texts, and does live storytelling. To learn more about the MFA program, write to her at: [email protected] 7

DOMINICAN UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Low Residency MFA in CreativeWriting Special thanks to Abby Laporte (MFA'23), Kristan Ruona (MFA’23), and Christina Lopez (MFA ‘22) for their assistance as workshop facilitators and Zoom meeting cohosts. This retreat is sponsored by the Low Residency Creative Writing MFA Program at Dominican University of California. Our MFA program fosters a supportive community of talented writers who are encouraged to experiment across genres and with new forms of writing. In addition to Poetry, Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, Dominican offers an optional track in Narrative Medicine, which allows students to embrace the special role that creative writing can play in the process of healing. Applications are currently being accepted for January admission. Contact Judy Halebsky at [email protected] for more information. Visit www.dominican.edu/mfa for more program information. 8