The Fall 2023 edition of Spalding’s Business of Writing Seminars takes place 11:15 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. ET Saturday, September 9, 2023, for students and alumni of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. Four virtual sessions offer extracurricular instruction in the world of professional writing, editing, and publishing.
The seminars are freely available to School of Writing students and faculty and are open to alumni for $25 for the day. Alumni register online. The registration deadline for alumni is September 7.
All sessions will be recorded and the recordings will be available for one month after the event for students, faculty, and registered alums.
Here’s the program for the September 9 event:
11:15 a.m.–12:15 p.m. ET / 10:15–11:15 a.m. CT / 9:15–10:15 a.m. MT / 8:15–9:15 a.m. PT
The Publishing Poet by Kathleen Driskell
Kathleen shares her strategies for publishing poetry in literary magazines. She'll also discuss various book publication options including chapbooks, full-length collections, and poetry book competitions. After short presentations, she'll open the session to publishing questions from students and alumni attending this session.
12:30–1:45 p.m. ET / 11:30 am.–12:45 p.m. CT / 10:30–11:45 MT / 9:30–10:45 a.m. PT
Promoting Your Scripts by Charlie Schulman & Larry Brenner
Charlie Schulman discusses how to create your own new play development pipeline, and Larry Brenner discusses different types of pitch meetings. Read on for more details about Charlie and Larry's discussions!
Charlie Schulman: Create Your Own New Play Development Pipeline: (From $50 – $500,000—How to Raise Money to Get Your Play Professionally Produced, Published and Licensed.)
No new great play or work of theater arrives fully formed. Plays need to be workshopped and nurtured in collaboration with theater artists, producers, and audiences before they can realize their full potential. In the past couple of years, Covid has decimated new play development in the United States and the pipeline for discovering new plays and playwrights has been greatly diminished. What is a playwright to do? Create their own new play development pipeline. It starts with inviting some actor-friends over to read your new play and it ends with an empowered playwright controlling the timeline, the creative process, becoming a job creator and the master of their own destiny.
Larry Brenner: "I’ve got a pitch meeting. Now what?"
Not all pitch meetings are the same, and it’s normal to have anxiety before taking one. In this lecture, we will discuss different types of pitch meetings, and how to prepare for each in turn. What is expected from the writer in a pitch meeting? How much preparation should you do? What questions should you ask a producer when going after an assignment? How is pitching different for film and television? What role does your representation play in any of this?
2:00–3:00 p.m. ET / 1:00–2:00 p.m. CT / 12:00–1:00 p.m. MT / 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. PT
7 Steps to Publishing: by Jeff Kleinman
Literary agent Jeff Kleinman will walk participants through the process of getting published by trade publishers, including writing query letters, contacting agents, and the process of getting a book deal.
3:15–4:30 p.m. ET / 2:15–3:30 p.m. CT / 1:15–2:30 p.m. MT / 12:15–1:30 p.m. PT
Care and Tending Panel
Tiffany Golden (’20), Patricia Hudson (’19), Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan ('03), and Jonathan Weinert (’05) (left to right in the photo above).
Naslund-Mann alums discuss the care and tending of their books after publication.
Spalding’s Business of Writing Seminars, presented virtually each spring and fall, have three main goals:
To help Spalding writers learn more about working with agents, literary magazines, presses, and theaters and production companies.
To help students better understand how to market work once it’s published or produced.
To provide enriching instruction to Spalding writers interested in writing in the professional workplace. Sessions include advice on how to break into new freelance markets; work as a copywriter, editor, speechwriter, or grant writer; and write for nonprofits or for-profit organizations.
To learn more, email schoolofwriting@spalding.edu.
Larry Brenner’s screenplays include Bethlehem (purchased by Universal Pictures), Labyrinth (Walt Disney Pictures) and Angelology (SONY/Columbia Pictures.) Most recently, his stage play First Bite was performed as part of Theatre Three's Short Play Festival and Periphery, or the Plagiarist, won first place in the 2023 Nantucket Short Play Competition. Brenner earned his MFA at Spalding and has a PhD in educational theatre from NYU.
Kathleen Driskell is chair of the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of four collections of poetry including Blue Etiquette, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, winner of the 2018 Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller. Her poems and essays have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, River Teeth, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and Appalachian Review, and have been featured in anthologies and online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry.
Lynnell Edwards is associate programs director for the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing, where she is also faculty in poetry. Her five collections of poetry include, most recently, This Great Green Valley (2020); Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop, Covet, The Highwayman's Wife, and The Farmer's Daughter. Her book reviews, poems, and short stories have been included in numerous journals including Pleaides, New Madrid, American Book Review, Sou'wester, and Waccamaw.
Tiffany Golden (’20) is an author, illustrator, and educator. She writes picture books, middle-grade, and YA fiction, mostly inspired by her experiences as a Black, disabled woman. She also won the Lee and Low’s New Visions Award for 2021. She teaches creative writing to third-to-eighth-grade students, is a member of SCWBI, and received the Judith Tannenbaum Teaching Artist Fellowship. www.tiffanygolden.com
Patricia Hudson (’19) focused on fiction while earning her MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, after spending the previous three and a half decades as a freelance writer, working for magazines ranging from Women’s Sports and Fitness to Southern Living. She was a contributing editor at Americana magazine for fifteen years, a job that allowed her to combine two of her favorite things—history and travel. Her book credits include a volume in the Smithsonian Guide to Historic America series, and an anthology, Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia. Her debut novel, Traces, is a retelling of the Daniel Boone saga from the women’s perspective, and was published in 2022 by the University Press of Kentucky. Traces was chosen by the Kentucky Book Festival as one of four featured novels for 2023, and was also a finalist for the 2023 Weatherford Award.
Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan ('03) is the author of seven nonfiction books about Alaska and the people who live there. In addition, Kaylene has been published in anthologies, online poetry journals, The North American Review, and The Louisville Review. Her essays and articles have earned national recognition from the National Federation of Press Women and Best American Essays. Current projects include a historical novel set in World War II Germany, as well as a memoir in letters to her young granddaughter through the 2020 pandemic. Kaylene is a CNF alum of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, graduating in October 2003 with the program’s inaugural class. She lives with her husband on a small horse farm in Palmer, Alaska. www.kaylene.us
Jeff Kleinman is a literary agent, intellectual property attorney, and founding partner of Folio Literary Management, LLC, a New York literary agency. He’s a graduate of Case Western Reserve University School of Law, the University of Chicago, and the University of Virginia. As an agent, Jeff feels privileged to have the chance to learn an incredibly variety of new subjects, meet an extraordinary range of people, and feel, at the end of the day, that he’s helped to build something—a wonderful book, perhaps, or an author’s career. His authors include the New York Times bestsellers The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein), The Eighty Dollar Champion (Elizabeth Letts), The Snow Child (a Pulitzer finalist; Eowyn Ivey), Widow of the South (Robert Hicks), Mockingbird (Charles Shields), The Marsh King’s Daughter (Karen Dionne), Ginny Moon (Benjamin Ludwig), and Only Child (Rhiannon Navin), among other books. Jeff is also a custodian of the storied literary agency Harold Ober Associates, which became a part of Folio in 2018. He upholds their legacy, representing iconic titles such as Rosemary’s Baby (Ira Levin) and Watership Down (Richard Adams).
In the past ten years Charlie Schulman has written and produced two Off-Broadway Musicals and raised over one million dollars. The Fartiste (Outstanding Musical NYC/FRINGE) Goldstein (Nominated for Best Musical 2018 by The Off Broadway Alliance.) Charlie’s new show The Relationship Plays (Married Life and Sibling Rivalry) will be presented in Cincinnati LAB Theater's New Works Festival this July and performed at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival August 5-12th. He is a three-time winner of The Avery Hopwood Award and recipient of The Charles Macarthur Award for comedy. He has written for film and television including three seasons for The Apollo Comedy Hour and has sold pilots to CBS and Twentieth Century Television. Charlie’s brand new feature-length screenplay The Adjunct is in the comedy/thriller/horror genre.
Jonathan Weinert (’05) is the author of A Slow Green Sleep (2021), winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, In the Mode of Disappearance (2008), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Thirteen Small Apostrophes (2012), a chapbook. He is co-editor of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin (2012). Recent prose and poetry appears or will appear in Harvard Review, Blackbird, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. An MFA holder from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing (2005), Jonathan lives and works in Stow, Massachusetts.