Sewanee Writers' Conference -- Day 5

Suddenly, Sunday. Yesterday was a packed day. Some people went out on a bird-watching hike led by Jim Peters. I'd love to do that, but I had preparation work for my workshop and couldn't go. But after breakfast there was a terrific staff reading featuring Erica Dawson, Juliana Gray, and Dan Groves--all wonderful poets.

I also stayed on for Charles Martin's craft lecture which dealt with issues in translation. I found that very interesting and we went through several translations of an ode by Horace--metaphrase (or more or less exact translation), paraphrase (translation with some latitude), and imitation. Since I've done a little translation of Chinese poetry, and have read the book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, I enjoyed Martin's talk a lot.

I did NOT stay for Gail Hochman's talk, only because I've heard her here three times before. She seems like an amazing agent--full of energy, very well connected, and among the fastest talkers you'll meet anywhere. I'm sure the people hearing her for the first time got a lot out of it.

The Powell/Schutt workshop met in the afternoon and I thought we had very good discussions about the three pieces under consideration. But following that we had the reading by poet Daniel Anderson, and then "cocktails on the lawn" (and, yes, there were cocktails, but the food was not as wonderful as I remember from previous events of that kind) where we were given our first opportunity to buy t-shirts.

The evening reading was Jill McCorkle, who read a story from her newest collection, and after that we had the mid-conference "dance" at the pub. It's a good thing we get a little later start on Sunday . . .