Meet the Workshop and Panel Presenters at the 2024 WWW Conference
Intensive Deep Dive Workshop
Is an Author Limited to Writing Books? What about different channels such as screenplays, songwriting…
This Workshop provides information on how to get your name out there as an author besides publishing books. It touches the topic song writing even if you are not a musician/singer and how to get them recorded and played. The main focus will be on the possibility of how to turn your book into a script and from there into a movie or how to turn your song into a video.
Do I need a big studio? How can I convert text into a script? What if the budget is low? How to film and produce a movie? Where do I find actors, locations? And using book trailers as micro movies to promote books.
This is an Add-On Workshop which will take place on Thursday, October 10. Requires preregistration.
Manuela Schnieder
As someone born and raised in Germany, author Manuela Schneider’s love of Western history might be surprising to some. But her fascination with pioneer life, cowboy heroes, and treacherous outlaws have been her constant companion for as long as she can remember. Schneider fuels her deep interest in the American West by traveling to the US numerous times and visiting historic sites. Schneider penned her first Western novel in 2017. To date, Schneider has published eight books in English and five in German and won over thirty different awards. Six new books are in the publishing process at present. Her debut as songwriter and her produced short western/music video has achieved great recognition in Arizona, Texas, California, and Europe including the Will Rogers Silver medallion. Schneider has just wrapped her second movie production and is working on a new script which will be shot in late 2024. She co-wrote songs with different singers/songwriters which are being played worldwide already. http://www.manuelaschneider.com
Workshop
Exploring Women’s Lives Through the Beauty and Complexity of Persona Poetry
This lecture explores the complexity of persona poetry by delving into the origins, evolution, and ethical considerations of persona poetry, as well as highlighting examples of successful persona poems and their impact in giving voice to marginalized communities, and women in particular.
Lisa Hase-Jackson
Lisa M. Hase-Jackson is author of Insomnia in Another Town (Clemson University Press, 2014) which was selected by Clair Bateman for the 2023 Converse MFA Alumni Book Prize, and Flint and Fire (The Word Works, 2019) which was selected by Pulitzer prize-winning poet Jericho Brown for the 2019 Hilary Tham Capital Collection Series. Her award-winning poems appear or are forthcoming in Chiron Review, Cimarron Review, The South Carolina Review, and Midwest Quarterly. Lisa is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Workshop
Get Your Article Published
Learn how to find a magazine for your work. Learn how to query the editor and learn how to form relationships in the world of journalism. Mona Neeley is a retired editor for Colorado Country Life magazine and this year’s judge for The DOWNING Journalism Awards. Corinne Brown has written numerous articles for local and national magazines for many years. Linda Wommack is a Contributing Editor for True West magazine and the Chair of The DOWNING Journalism Award. Panel Moderator is Carolyn Dufurrena.
Linda Wommack
Linda Wommack has been writing magazine and newspaper articles, as well as History Journal pieces for over thirty years. She currently has a recurring column in the Wild West History Journal and is a contributing editor for True West magazine and a staff writer for the Tombstone Epitaph. She also is the Chair for the Women Writing the West DOWNING Journalism Awards. Linda Wommack was inducted into the Colorado Authors Hall of Fame in 2023.
Mona Neeley
Mona Neeley, who recently retired as publisher and editor of “Colorado Country Life” magazine, has written articles for publication since high school. Her mother was a local correspondent for a north Iowa area newspaper and Mona filled in for her during the summers of her junior and senior years of high school. That led her to study journalism at the University of Minnesota. After graduating, she wrote for local Minnesota newspapers before moving to Colorado in 1990. She freelanced for a few years before going to work for the Colorado Rural Electric Association’s statewide magazine, Colorado Country Life. Named publisher and editor in 2000, she led the magazine staff until she retired in 2023.
Corinne Joy Brown
Colorado native Corinne Joy Brown is an award-winning author dedicated to historical fiction set in the American West, exploring the themes of identity, adaptation and survival. She also freelances for a variety of print publications, including “Colorado Horse Source,” “Cowboys & Indians” and “Western Art & Architecture” magazines with a special focus on design, fine art, popular culture and lifestyles. Corinne also writes non-fiction and middle grade fiction and has published a series of art books for young readers who love horses. She is a past president of the Denver Woman’s Press Club, a founding member of Women Writing the West, a member of Western Writers of America, the editor/publisher of an academic journal serving the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, and is a Fellow of the University of Colorado History Dept at CU/Colorado Springs. She is agented by Terri Wolf/AKA Literary.
Carolyn Dufurrena, Moderator
Carolyn Dufurrena is a rancher, retired educator, and award-winning author. She has written regularly for RANGE magazine and other publications. She was associate editor for the Will Rogers Medallion-winning Face to Face with the American West in 2022. Dufurrena was a regular for many years at Elko’s National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. She is Secretary to the Board of Directors of Women Writing the West. www.carolyndufurrena.com/.
Workshop
The Sisterhood of Archetypes
Women’s stories are peopled with women—a sisterhood of best friends, mentors, mothers, and tricksters, and through an understanding of the archetypes and inherent framework of each, we can imbue our characters with larger than life, page stealing qualities readers will recognize and adore.
Elizabeth Boyle
Elizabeth Boyle is a New York Times bestselling author of 25 novels, several novellas and a couple of short stories. Her books have won the Romance Writers of America RITA award, the RT Love and Laughter Award, and garnered starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, as well as appearing on the USA Today bestseller list. A writer who loves to dig into the nooks and crannies of storytelling, she shares her passion for the craft of storytelling with writers from all over the world. Her current novel, O Little Town of Bethlehem, a story of unlikely friendships, starting over, and a fair bit of knitting and baking, releases in October.
Workshop
Power Tips for Writing Memoir
For women writers, a memoir records the well-lived (or often unrecognized) life. It creates a living history, a window to one’s life through the actions of our ancestors. Topics for discussion will include: Emotional vs. factual truths, Writing for a larger audience; World-building through research, letters, physical objects, details; Voice, authenticity, tone; Writing to a specific audience; Memoir vs. journaling, revenge writing, discretion, protecting personal details and professional integrity.
Anne Schroeder
Anne Schroeder’s love of the West was fueled by her Norwegian grandfather’s tales of bandits and rock-blasting in Southern California. She served as WWW Past President and WILLA Chair. A 2024 SPUR finalist, she has won the Will Rogers Medallion Award and LAURA Short Fiction Award. She teaches and speaks about Memoir and the woman’s journey from her home in Southern Oregon, where she lives with her husband, dogs and several free-range chickens.
http://anneschroederauthor.com
Workshop
Power Girls in Kidlit: Creating Compelling Characters in Children’s Books
Building a compelling character in a book for young readers means understanding that today’s audience is hungry for girls who take action, assume roles as leaders, and drive the story engine. This presentation will examine how writers can create those characters, in stories from picture book through young adult.
Janet Fox
Janet Fox is an award-winning author with a deep passion for the magic of storytelling. Her writing journey began at age 8 with a poem published in the town newspaper, setting the stage for a career dedicated to writing captivating tales for young readers. As a writer, Janet strives to create books that can help grow young hearts and minds. Her 12 award-winning books span the spectrum of picture books through young adult, in a broad variety of genres. As a mentor and book coach with 25 years in publishing, her mission is to guide writers through the twists and turns of their creative odyssey, turning struggles into triumphs. Janet has helped scores of writers to achieve their dream of writing, revising, and, yes, publishing their children’s books.
Workshop
Arrows, Bullets, Stampedes . . . and Skirts; A woman’s vision for keeping the West alive. How to incorporate frontier medicine into your writing
Without a full understanding of internal anatomy and how the body functioned, women on the frontier used natural remedies and crude surgical techniques passed down through generations. Be it poultices, herbs, tinctures, and rough surgical procedures, this knowledge was critical for keeping family and fellow travelers alive during their Westward migration.
Deborah Swenson
Deborah Swenson is an award-winning author of Till My Last Breath, Book One in the Desert Hills Trilogy, and Till My Last Day, Book Two in the Desert Hills Trilogy. New England-born and Northwest-raised, she is at home writing from an island in the Pacific Northwest. Her love of writing Western fiction began years ago, spurred on by memories of watching the wonderful classic Western movies. When she writes, the stories seem to evolve naturally, like a movie playing out in her mind, allowing her to fall in love with her characters. She has undergraduate and graduate degrees as a Registered Nurse and as an Advanced Nurse Practitioner specializing in high-risk obstetrics, which gave her the opportunity to write for nursing text publishers and magazines. When she’s not writing, she enjoys spinning fiber, quilting, photography, and reading a great Western romance.
Workshop
Deep Dive Into Fiction
What takes a story from shallow waters to moving depths?
Jayme Mansfield
Jayme H. Mansfield, author of four award-winning novels, invites you to explore essentials to take your storytelling into a deep dive:
- Determine the why of the initial story seed
- Develop characters with believable feats and flaws
- Allow the setting to move and grow the story
- Navigate plot hurdles with grace and determination
- Use impactful voice and deep point-of-view for an emotive experience
- Bravely and courageously revise and edit
Whether you’re bouncing ideas off the cerebral walls, already dipped your feet into shallow or deep writing waters, or forged ahead to the other side of manuscript writing and ready to edit and publish, get ready for a deep dive into fiction.
Workshop
The Land: Through a Woman’s Eyes
Page Lambert, with authors Lynne O’Connor, author of the memoir Elk Love, Sandra Dallas, author of over 30 books inspired by the Mountain states, and Kathryn Winograd , photographer, poet, and essayist, all with literary works set in the West, discuss how their own relationship to the western landscape informs and inspires their creative work, even daring to ask: Do women writers see the land differently?
Page Lambert
A founding member of Women Writing the West, and leader of creative retreats for twenty-seven years, Page Lambert’s writing is found inside monumental sculptures at the Denver Art Museum, online at Huffington Post, and in dozens of anthologies about the West. Page is the author of the Wyoming memoir In Search of Kinship and the novel Shifting Stars. Writing recognitions include nominations for the National Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, contributing author to the WILLA award-winning anthology Writing Down the River, finalist for the Mountains & Plains Fiction Book Award, Fellowships for Literary Excellence from the Wyoming Arts Council, AROHO Orlando Nonfiction Award, and Writer’s Studio Best Fiction Award. Page writes the blog All Things Literary/All Things Natural from her mountain home west of Denver. Her agent is currently shopping her contemporary novel, Lake of Longing, and she is back at work on her second Wyoming memoir, New Moon on the Horizon. www.pagelambert.com
Lynne O’Connor
Lynne Spriggs O’Connor, author of Elk Love: A Montana Memoir, spent ten summers on northern Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation while conducting research for her Ph.D. in Native American Art History at Columbia. After moving to Montana, she curated a three-year project called Bison: American Icon, a major permanent exhibit for the C.M. Russell Museum on bison in the Northern Plains. For the past fifteen years, she has lived with her husband on a cattle ranch in an isolated Montana mountain valley east of the Rockies. Her life centers around writing, family, and animals—dogs, horses, and cattle—as well as elk, mountain lions, beavers, bears, and other species in the surrounding National Forest. The ranch’s old-growth grasslands also provide habitat for over ninety bird species. In 2021, O’Connor and her husband partnered with the National Audubon Conservation Ranching Initiative, utilizing regenerative grazing practices to help sustain this increasingly threatened habitat. In a modern world where listening is rare, Elk Love explores an intimate place where loneliness gives way to wonder, where the natural world speaks of what matters most. Elk Love is her first memoir. https://lynneoconnorauthor.com/
Sandra Dallas
Sandra Dallas is the author of 18 adult novels, five mid-grade books, and 10 nonfiction books. Her next novel, Tough Luck, will be published next year by St. Martin’s Press. A former Denver bureau chief for Business Week magazine (and the magazine’s first female bureau manager), she covered the Mountain States, often writing about environmental and land development issues, as well as contemporary polygamy, alternative energy sources, and gold, silver, and copper mining. A three-time winner of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s Wrangler Award, a six-time winner of the Women Writing the West WILLA Award, and a four-time recipient of the Western Writers of America Spur Award, she won the Colorado Book Award last year for her novel Little Souls. She considers the land to be a character in her novels. The mother of two adult daughters, she lives with her husband in Denver and Georgetown, Colorado. https://www.sandradallas.com/
Kathryn Winograd
Kathryn Winograd, Colorado essayist, poet, and photographer, divides her time between a high-mountain meadow cabin above Phantom Canyon and the suburbs near the South Platte riparian. Her books include Air Into Breath, an alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets and a Colorado Book Award winner, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which received a Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 IPPY Awards, and her most recent hybrid book, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye. Her essays have been noted in Best American Essays and published in numerous journals including Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and Terrain.org, where her essay, “Mist Nets: After the Uvalde Shooting,” was a finalist for the Terrain.org’s 13th Annual Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her award-winning poetry has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations and been published in places as diverse as The New Yorker and Cricket Magazine for Children. Just as Winograd seeks organic form in writing, she seeks organic form in photography that arises out of the boundlessness of landscape and the temporal shapes of what inhabits them. Through brief moments of juxtaposition, the inner life of being arises, beautiful and spartan in its temporality. https://kathrynwinograd.com/
Workshop
The All Seeing Eye or Deep Research = Deep Perspective
As a woman, are you able to portray male as well as female characters effectively? Protagonist or antagonist, female or male, have you created a believable view point? Regardless of setting or era, are you writing with an authentic voice? Is your dialogue relevant? Deep research brings deeper perspective.
Dawn Newland
Dawn Newland is author and illustrator of the well documented historic novel series, Of Men and Horses. As a rancher living in the three-state corner of Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota, she has spent a lifetime immersed in old time cowboy culture. As a historic reenactor, an artist, and writer, Dawn’s desire to correctly portray the real people of the late 1800’s has spurred her to also become an avid and well respected researcher of frontier America. She writes what she knows, and she knows the old west and its characters. She was a presenter at the 2023 Arizona History Conference and at the West River History Conference.
Workshop
Willa Cather and Surviving the Zeitgeist: How Our Writing Can Endure (and get published!)
People’s views change over time. This is a challenge for every author. So how can we write works that endure? While getting published?! Using Willa Cather as an example, we’ll look at why this matters for our writing and reading—and getting published. Then we’ll talk about our takeaway: how we can use this to become the best writers we can possibly be, transcending limitations (and getting published!).
Julie Kaewert
Julie Kaewert became a bookworm as a child, sitting on the floor of her neighborhood library in Omaha reading whatever book appeared next on the shelf. Her dream was always to become a writer, but she pursued a career in book publishing, working for Addison-Wesley in Boston and then London. It was there, in Bedford Square, that she learned about the people, places, and book lore that led to her write a series of Mysteries for Booklovers. Unsolicited, Unbound, Unprintable, Untitled, Unsigned, and Uncatalogued are set in the world of rare books and British book publishing and are published by Penguin Random House. But Julie’s lifelong dream was to write a paean to Willa Cather’s writings and her beloved Nebraska. Like her other books, Season of the Crane: Migration of a Cather Scholar explores the often dangerous intersection of books, history, and real life—including secrets thought safely forgotten in dusty manuscripts.
Workshop
Laugh Lines: A Workshop on Adding Humor to Your Stories
Whether creating a comedy or adding a little joy to a serious piece, most writing can benefit from humor. Humor grabs a reader’s attention, improves a story’s pace, and makes characters more relatable. This workshop will provide examples of the different types of humor and practical methods to add a chuckle to any writing.
K.T. Blakemore
K.T. Blakemore is the author of the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Finalist The Good Time Girls, The Good Time Girls Get Famous, and The Good Time Girls Strike It Rich (coming late 2024). Writing as Kim Taylor Blakemore, her award-winning historical suspense and young adult novels include The Deception, After Alice Fell, The Companion, Bowery Girl, and Cissy Funk. Awards include the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award in Historical Fiction, Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award, and Women Writing the West Willa Award. She is also a book coach and developmental editor and teaches editing and craft workshops in the US and UK.
Kimberly Burns
Kimberly Burns grew up in a family of storytellers high in the Colorado Rockies and now enjoys sharing tales about the colorful characters of the Old West. Her debut novel The Mrs. Tabor won numerous awards including the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award for Best First Novel, a gold medal for Best Regional Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a silver medal from the Colorado Independent Publishers Association EVVY Awards. Her latest novel, The Redemption of Mattie Silks, is a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award and the CIBA Laramie Award.
Workshop
Endnotes, Footnotes, or a Bibliography?
What kind of nonfiction book are you writing?
Writing nonfiction requires authors to research their subjects accurately and broadly and present that research in an eloquent narrative, all the time keeping the audience in mind. Is your book’s intended reader a tourist looking for an entertaining history lesson, a teacher looking for supplemental classroom materials, or fellow researchers searching for new documentation and perspectives? My presentation will explore nonfiction, touching on the process from concept to bibliography.
Julie VanLaanen
Julie VanLaanen is the owner of Filter Press, a small Colorado based publishing house that has been publishing books about Colorado’s vibrant history since 1956. Filter Press’s catalog includes over 80 active titles, many of them award-winning books.
Julie is also the author, J.v.L. Bell. Her nonfiction book Women of the Colorado Gold Rush Era won the 2024 Colorado Book Award for history. Her Colorado cozy mystery series intertwine historical facts and lore around an entertaining murder and include The Lucky Hat Mine, Denver City Justice, and Murder at Buckskin Joe.
She is a Colorado native who lives in Westcliffe and loves to hike, climb, cross-country ski, and raft with her husband and two daughters.