Arts
For this Third Thursday, we thought we'd take a moment - in the middle of the month, in the middle of the year - to talk about the dreaded middle. As writers, we spend lots of creative energy thinking about the beginning of a project. We agonize over and draft and redraft our endings. But it's the middle, more often than not, where we find ourselves stuck. Join us for a conversation with Charlotte Gullick, Donna Johnson, and ire'ne lara silva as we ponder how best to tackle the highs and lows of a writing project's hump. The conversation was be moderated by WLT ED Becka Oliver. Charlotte Gullick is Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College. She holds BA in Literature/Creative Writing from UC Santa Cruz and a MA in English/Creative Writing from UC Davis as well as a MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her awards include a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship for Fiction, a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry, and residencies at MacDowell and Ragdale. She is the author of the novel By Way of Water. Donna M. Johnson is the author of Holy Ghost Girl, a critically acclaimed memoir deemed “enthralling” by the New York Times and “compulsively readable” by Texas Monthly. Oprah named the book to her Memoirs We Love list. Holy Ghost Girl won the Mayborn Creative Nonfiction Prize and took top honors at the Books for a Better Life Awards in Manhattan. Donna has written for Huffington Post, The Rumpus, Shambhala Sun, Psychology Today, and other publications. Donna is a Ragdale Fellow and was recently awarded a fellowship at the Lucas Artist’s Residency. She is currently at work on a memoir that combines investigative reporting with person narrative. ire’ne lara silva is the author of three poetry collections, furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010) Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), and CUICACALLI/House of Song (Saddle Road Press, 2019), an e-chapbook, Enduring Azucares, (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), as well as a short story collection, flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013) which won the Premio Aztlán. She and poet Dan Vera are also the co-editors of Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands, (Aunt Lute Books, 2017), a collection of poetry and essays. ire’ne is the recipient of a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. ire'ne is currently working on her first novel, Naci, and a second collection of short stories titled, the light of your body. Website: irenelarasilva.wordpress.com.