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Fall 2023 Conference Lectures & Breakouts for Sat Sept 23

This page describes both the lectures for everyone and the 90-minute breakout sessions during the conference on Saturday, September 23. During the breakouts, you can choose the workshops that best suit you. For more on the day-long intensive workshops on Friday, Sept 22, see Friday Intensive Workshops.

Poetry Fiction Photography & Film Making Hands-On Arts Music/Songwriting

We’ll add additional workshops depending on both attendance and on proposals that come in. We welcome proposals for additional workshops, especially in categories not reflected here.

Submit a Workshop Proposal

Lectures

Art & Sentimentality: Can We Make the Good Believable? Ben Keyes

Our desire to make art is, in part, a desire to connect meaningfully with others; to communicate some aspect of reality others can identify with. There are many reasons why art succeeds or fails in making this kind of meaningful contact. One particular challenge for Christians is that our attempts to portray beauty and goodness are often dismissed as saccharine and sentimental. Is this simply a sign of the cynicism of our culture — something we can dismiss in turn? Or does this criticism carry some weight? Is sentimentality in art a problem worth addressing?

Christians are called to reflect the goodness and beauty of the Creator in their thoughts, words, and daily actions in the world — including our art. And yet, if our art fails to reflect the difficult and painful realities of real life, it lacks credibility in the minds of many. In many ways, Christian artists must walk a tightrope. How can we reflect the reality of the world’s fallenness in our art without gratuitously dwelling on dark themes? How can we portray true goodness in a way that’s plausible and attractive without sugar-coating reality? Every Christian artist should be willing to engage with such questions if we hope to connect with people through our art.

Singing In Babylon: Reflections on Christian Creativity in a Secular Culture, Daniel Taylor

The Jews in captivity wondered how to be faithful amidst a pagan culture. Christian writers and artists of all kinds face a similar challenge today. How does one navigate between propaganda and selling out, between sentimentality and cynicism, between cliches of belief and cliches of disbelief?  Can one be faithful both to craft and to God and the church? After reflections, folks will be invited to share their experiences and strategies.

Poetry

Imitation as a Wellspring for Creativity, Abigail Carroll

What if a key to writer’s block is as simple as imitating another writer’s voice? And what if imitating another writer’s voice is a key to finding and developing our own unique voice? In this workshop, we’ll look at poems by contemporary Christian poets representing a variety of styles, and we’ll explore possibilities for imitation as a writing technique as we in turn generate our own poems with spiritual themes.

Form, Freedom, & Writing New Poems: Can you sneak a sonnet out of yourself? Sarah Crowley Chestnut

We’ll examine several sonnets and notice continuity with, variation within, and deviation from the traditional rules of the form. Then we’ll write our own poem—which might become a sonnet!  All levels of experience are welcome.

Poets might also be interested in the “Nature Writing” workshop and in “Can Ambiguity Improve our Art?”

Fiction & Creative Nonfiction

Flash Fiction Workshop, Daniel Taylor

This workshop explores how writing flash fiction (that is, very short fiction) hones and develops the skills needed for longer works of fiction.

Nature Writing as Both Creative & Spiritual Discipline, Matthew Dickerson

Wendell Berry, in his essay “A Native Hill”, wrote, “It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.” Wendell Berry was following a Biblical exhortation and example. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus exhorts his listeners to “consider the lilies.” The poet and shepherd-king David notes in the 19th Psalm that nature reveals its Creator and His glory. In the 23rd Psalm, David writes about time spent in nature—resting beside quiet waters and in green pastures—as restoring his soul. The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Roman church, writes that visible creation reveals invisible attributes of God. The ancient Hebrew poet responsible for Psalm 104 seems to have intuitively understood all of this and took time to consider not only the lilies, but also the mountains, trees, rivers, and clouds as well as the wild creatures of the skies, the hills, and the oceans. Such contemplative experiences in nature played a significant role in the life of C.S. Lewis, not only pointing him toward Christian faith, but later helping to shape his faith. Lewis wrote frequently of sehnsucht, or what Welsh might have called hiraeth: “that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, . . . the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.” He describes such experiences as eliciting “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited,” or more simply, “the inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what.” These experiences were for C.S. Lewis pointers to Heaven.

This workshop explores nature writing as both a creative discipline that helps develop writing craft and a spiritual discipline that helps us know the Creator by reflecting on creation.

Photography & Film Making

Macro Photography: Revealing Details of Nature (and Beyond), Paul Rogers

While nature photography is a popular pursuit, successful close-up photography of natural subjects requires both an eye for aesthetics and an understanding of special tools and techniques. We’ll journey into the world of close-up photography through examples, equipment explanations (some simple and inexpensive), and hands-on demonstrations of the methods professional photographers use. Whether you use a big camera to capture tiny insects or use your smart phone for occasional flower snaps, you’ll bring home an understanding that will help you beautifully capture the small things in your life… and give God the glory for a revelation of His handiwork.

Landscape Photography, David Brueckner

description coming soon

Filmmaking: The Art and the Science, Matthew Crouch

Ever wanted to make a movie (short or long) but not known where to start? This workshop guides you through practical steps of writing, producing, and finishing a film along with insights on how to maximize your creative vision and welcome God’s guidance into the process.

Hands-On Arts

Pressed Flower & Clay Wall Hanging, Lori Beinlich

In this workshop, we’ll make a mini pressed flower & clay wall hanging (3"x4").

As we do this, we’ll learn various techniques of flower pressing, along with ideas for what to do with them once you have a collection of pressed flowers.

Each participant will be given air dry clay, a variety of pressed flowers to choose from, a rolling utensil, birch twig, and jute.  After rolling the clay, we’ll arrange flowers and press them into the clay along with a birch twig.

Suggested material donation for this workshop: $15

(For those who can’t afford the material donation, please don’t let cost deter you from this workshop.)


In this workshop, we’ll use the pinch pot hand building technique to create a personal sculpture. We’ll also explore other techniques — slab, coil, and extruding — to embellish our sculpture. No prior experience needed.

Suggested material donation for this workshop: $8

(For those who can’t afford the material donation, please don’t let cost deter you from this workshop.)

Air Dry Clay Sculpture, Gail Jones

Music/Songwriting

Can Ambiguity Improve our Art? Ben Keyes

The most moving and powerful art usually doesn’t tell us exactly what to think. Many of the best songs, paintings, poems, and short stories leave us with questions that linger in our minds. This doesn’t necessarily mean these works have no intended meaning. Rather, the artist — by leaving our questions unanswered and requiring our engagement — has left us room to enter their creative space. Because it leaves room, ambiguity in art functions as a kind of hospitality to the audience. How can we make art that leaves more room for our viewers and listeners? What are some of our misgivings about allowing a piece to remain ambiguous?

This session draws examples chiefly from songwriting, but the ideas apply to equally to fiction, and poetry (and really to any art).

Psalming with David: Interactive Songwriting Practicum, Alison McHugh

Curious how to make songwriting part of your daily life? Come learn the practical exercise of "psalming." Discover a simple way to spend time with God, stretch your skills in lyric and melody, and write songs full of Biblical truth.  We’ll try different translations of the Bible to help us find our own voices of praise, confession, or lament. We’ll explore the inherent melodies in spoken scriptural phrases and learn how to translate them into singable melody lines. Come ready to participate. Bring your voice and your Bible/Bible App. We’ll sing the Psalms and collaborate to write at least one song as a group. Instruments are welcome.