Sewanee Writers' Conference
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I am honored and excited to have been accepted to the Sewanee Writers' Conference! (For information about Sewanee, click here .) For those who aren't familiar with conferences and workshops in the writing world, Sewanee is a big deal and an important opportunity for me to get professional feedback on writing and to network with writers, editors, and publishers of national and international prominence. I applied for this conference for the first time last year and didn't get in at all. It has a very low acceptance rate, so when I got in this year, I was amazed--but I didn't get funding to go.
If you know me, you know that I teach ESL part-time and English at a career college part-time, I run a writing organization on a volunteer basis, write a blog, do some editing on the side, and I moved in with my 82-year-old dad to help with what he needs right now. After I earned my MFA in 1998, I didn't apply for grants or fellowships or conferences or anything--I was brought up to believe that writing was not a way to make a living and was a bit of an indulgence, a nice one but it shouldn't get in the way. I bought into it. I didn't believe I was that good anyway, even though I had been on scholarship and had won several prizes.
My dad and me, at the Superstition Mountains this April.
So I got sidetracked by work that was rather emotional—working with teenagers and with refugees and immigrants. I spent weekends camping out in the southern Arizona desert to help distressed border-crossers with food and water and medical help and spent weekdays at a bank. I worked at a high school in Warsaw, and taught Jewish education to a small Jewish community from the Sefwi tribe in Ghana. I worked with disenfranchised youth—gang kids and new immigrants and refugees—in a youth center in Boston. We focused on skills that would help them as they re-entered the formal school system and basic education that gave them the confidence they would be able to keep up, and we discussed social justice and community organizing. I also taught in low-income charter high schools in Arizona, including classes that discussed how literature addresses human rights. My students created a campaign within the school to educate other students on the effects of uranium mining in the Grand Canyon and the Navajo Nation and short film on devisive language. I earned an MPA in non-profit management and, while there, I developed a program for refugees to help them attain citizenship and worked on the support team for the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights.
My ESL class at the YWCA.
I was insecure about coming back to writing in my 40s. I questioned whether I still had any talent or skill. I questioned whether my voice was relevant anymore. I was embarrassed that I had stopped writing. In the back of my mind, I actually thought I would be ridiculed for not having the perseverence to insist on making it happen and it took me many years to get back to writing. Creating a more active writing community around me has been part of what helped my writing become a habit again and helped me pull through a draft of my novel.
If you know my writing life, you know I'm fighting with my current novel's structure. I'm hoping that professional insight from great writers and teachers will help me see through thousands of words I have written to make this book and beautiful and funny and heartbreaking as I believe it to be.
Transparencies: one of my many attempts to make sense of all my characters' plotlines... It's not so easy.
Tuition for this conference is $1800.00 and airfare to Chattanooga is around $500. I am hoping to raise this in the month of May, before payments are due. Amounts as little $5-10 can help a lot in getting me to Sewanee.
Source attempts: I have contacted the AZ Commission on Arts and various funding institutions, universities, and organizations, but the grant cycle works much slower than the acceptance date (May 15) to conference date (July 18) and funds to support the arts are low right now and emerging writers are not generally pereceived to be middle-aged. Please help me get to this conference.
Robin Israel’s fiction has been published in The Adirondack Review, Watershed Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She is Assistant Fiction Editor at Newfound, a nonprofit publisher that explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and experience.
If you know me, you know that I teach ESL part-time and English at a career college part-time, I run a writing organization on a volunteer basis, write a blog, do some editing on the side, and I moved in with my 82-year-old dad to help with what he needs right now. After I earned my MFA in 1998, I didn't apply for grants or fellowships or conferences or anything--I was brought up to believe that writing was not a way to make a living and was a bit of an indulgence, a nice one but it shouldn't get in the way. I bought into it. I didn't believe I was that good anyway, even though I had been on scholarship and had won several prizes.
My dad and me, at the Superstition Mountains this April.So I got sidetracked by work that was rather emotional—working with teenagers and with refugees and immigrants. I spent weekends camping out in the southern Arizona desert to help distressed border-crossers with food and water and medical help and spent weekdays at a bank. I worked at a high school in Warsaw, and taught Jewish education to a small Jewish community from the Sefwi tribe in Ghana. I worked with disenfranchised youth—gang kids and new immigrants and refugees—in a youth center in Boston. We focused on skills that would help them as they re-entered the formal school system and basic education that gave them the confidence they would be able to keep up, and we discussed social justice and community organizing. I also taught in low-income charter high schools in Arizona, including classes that discussed how literature addresses human rights. My students created a campaign within the school to educate other students on the effects of uranium mining in the Grand Canyon and the Navajo Nation and short film on devisive language. I earned an MPA in non-profit management and, while there, I developed a program for refugees to help them attain citizenship and worked on the support team for the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights.
My ESL class at the YWCA.I was insecure about coming back to writing in my 40s. I questioned whether I still had any talent or skill. I questioned whether my voice was relevant anymore. I was embarrassed that I had stopped writing. In the back of my mind, I actually thought I would be ridiculed for not having the perseverence to insist on making it happen and it took me many years to get back to writing. Creating a more active writing community around me has been part of what helped my writing become a habit again and helped me pull through a draft of my novel.
If you know my writing life, you know I'm fighting with my current novel's structure. I'm hoping that professional insight from great writers and teachers will help me see through thousands of words I have written to make this book and beautiful and funny and heartbreaking as I believe it to be.
Transparencies: one of my many attempts to make sense of all my characters' plotlines... It's not so easy.Tuition for this conference is $1800.00 and airfare to Chattanooga is around $500. I am hoping to raise this in the month of May, before payments are due. Amounts as little $5-10 can help a lot in getting me to Sewanee.
Source attempts: I have contacted the AZ Commission on Arts and various funding institutions, universities, and organizations, but the grant cycle works much slower than the acceptance date (May 15) to conference date (July 18) and funds to support the arts are low right now and emerging writers are not generally pereceived to be middle-aged. Please help me get to this conference.
Robin Israel’s fiction has been published in The Adirondack Review, Watershed Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She is Assistant Fiction Editor at Newfound, a nonprofit publisher that explores how place shapes identity, imagination, and experience.
Organizer
Robin Israel
Organizer
Scottsdale, AZ