On this episode of The Front Row, Glenn Aaron discusses the upcoming, three-day Permian Basin Writer's Workshop that will be help at Midland College Sept. 15-17.
How did you form the Permian Basin Writer’s Workshop?
The Permian Basin Writer’s Workshop was actually created by the Midland County public library foundation three years ago as a startup. Once it blossomed, their whole idea was to hand it off to the writing community, this is that handoff this year. We’re looking at 450 attendees and we’re flying in experts in just about every genre from New York City, Los Angeles, from all over the nation. So we think it’s going to be quite unique for this year.
What do you try to do with these workshops? What are you looking for in the people who come? And what do you want them to have when they’re finished?
What we are looking for is anyone who has an interest in writing. They don’t have to be good, or they can be great. WE have a wide variety of authors throughout the Permian Basin. Lubbock is really fortunate to have some of the talent that it has. But there are a lot of people who have always thought that they had a story but didn’t quite, couldn’t get past that point of putting pen to paper. So that’s why we want to be sure to have our Lubbock friends there. We’ll have Abilene, San Angelo friends there. We even have people coming from Dallas to attend. So you can be a great published writer and still improve, or you can never have written anything and would like to. That’s what the workshop is for.
What genres are there that you’ll explore?
We’ll be covering all fiction genres, which is romance, suspense, thrillers, just about anything you can think of that is fiction. We will not be covering non-fiction. That takes a pretty good effort in a different direction. Friday, a week from Friday, the 15th, Chuck Sambuchino, from Los Angeles will be teaching all day long, writers bootcamp and he really puts you to the test. He’s hands on. You’ll learn a great deal. He was once an editor for a major magazine. He has also been a literary agent. He’ll be teaching Friday.
On Saturday we’ll have breakout sessions and there will be fifteen breakout sessions that cover all these different genres that I’m talking about, in addition to having agents there and publishing houses there where people who have written a book can pitch agents and publishing houses to try to get their book, or their article printed. Then on Sunday, we’re having something really unique, Sunday is dedicated to Christian writing. The Christian writing aspect of it covers memoirs, spiritual, inspirational and novel. We will have a number of really successful Christian writers coming in and teaching that. Then one addition to that uniqueness, we’ll have a film producer there that teaches script writing and film production. So that’s the three days.
If somebody wants to attend, what do they need to do?
All they need to do is go online. They can either register online or at the door there at Midland College. Online it’s permianbasinwritersworkshop.org.
