On Thursday, November 7 and Friday, November 8, Millersville University will host its annual Literary Festival. This year’s theme is “Writing in Community.”
The event will start on Thursday in McComsey’s Ford Atrium at 4 pm. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni are welcome to attend and read at an open reading following featured faculty member Sarah D’Stair.
At 7:30pm, Meghan Kenny will give her keynote address in Myers Auditorium. Meghan Kenny is the author of the short story collection Love Is No Small Thing (LSU Press, 2017) and the novel The Driest Season (W.W. Norton, 2018), which was an honorable mention for the 2019 PEN/HEMINGWAY Award. She lives in Lancaster.
On Friday the 8th, the Literary Festival will continue in the McNairy Library from 9am to 4pm. Individual sessions will take place in Room 100 where you can learn how to:
Write fiction and short stories
Write thrillers and suspense novels
Write free verse and traditional poetry
Find work in writing-related fields
Find what publishers want and get your work published
The Literary Festival in November 2nd was a great success! If you didn’t have a chance to attend, the theme was “The Writing Life” and there were myriad presentations spanning fiction, poetry, nonfiction, publishing, and everything in between. The guest writers and presenters showcased writing as a means of self-exploration and engagement with the world around us.
The winner of the Flash Fiction Contest was Nichole DiGirolamo, a sophomore Psychology major with a minor in Art — congratulations!
Nichole’s piece, “My Mother’s Closet,” is about childhood memories, specifically memories about the items and colors inside her mother’s closet. Nichole explains, “How I miss being a child and seeing the colors and fabrics and not having a care in the world about anything going on. I wrote the piece because of all of the wonderful memories I had in that closet trying on my mothers shoes that are always way too big. Wearing her jackets that fell to the floor and always seeing the artwork she has kept from all those years. She reacts and treats each one like a million dollar piece of art even though it was terrible.”
An excerpt from her story:
A drawing made by a girl of a house on the hill. It was made with oil pastels, greens, blues, yellows fill the page. The house small but full of windows and doors so there’s a never ending amount of light to enter the home. A bush outside the shape of a cat with a tail longer than a mile it had what looked to be roses growing on it. There’s a walk way with bright pineapple colored stepping stones and in between each stone was smaller lemon colored stones. The sides of the house rough made out of bricks and cement. In the front yard a family, I tall tan man with a mustache the size of the titanic, eyes greener than limes and scribbles on his arms to mimic tattoos. A woman short with blonde hair above her ears with beautiful greenish blue eyes and a girl with long brown hair and straight across bangs giant eyes like pools of chocolate.
This is Nichole’s favorite part of the piece because of the sentimental value: “The picture is me and my family and all the colors and the details used to describe the picture was exactly how it Is described. I drew the photo when I was about 6-7 and remember every moment of making it.” To write the piece of fiction, Nichole describes that she “sat in my mom’s closet and just took a look around at the height level I would be when I was younger. I closed my eyes and touched things and smelled things to get a better sense of my surroundings and to give better detail. I looked at things that had the most meaning, like the shoes and the money. The money showed the trips we took as a family and showed how many memories we had on those trips.”
Here are some photos from the festival on November 2nd:
Poet Le Hinton (on left) with Matt Kabik
Thanks to:
Festival Chair William Archibald and Assistant Chair Jeff Boyer for their work organizing the event
Curtis Smith, Le Hinton, Jenny Hill, Michele Santamaria, Mitchell Sommers, Barb Strasko, Alex Brubaker, Megan Phillips, Phillip Benoit, Jamie Beth Cohen, Jen Hirt, Laura English, Timothy Mayers, Katarzyna Jakubiak, and Michael Deibert for agreeing to present
Graduate Assistant Andie Petrillo for creating the WordPress site and assisting with general planning
Millersville University is hosting a Literary Festival in the McNairy Library Room 100 on November 2nd from 9am to 5pm with a keynote speaker at 7pm. Guest writers will hold sessions on writing fiction, poetry, memoir, creative essays, and journalism throughout the day. Check out the full event schedule here.
The Millersville University Literary Festival is sponsoring a Flash Fiction contest!
Submission Criteria:
Millersville students only
1,000 word limit
Submit here (click on the “Submit Here” link) by October 15th at 11:59pm
The night before the festival (November 1st), the student fiction prize will be awarded at an open mic event in Saxby’s from 7-9pm. The winner will win a $100 prize and a spot in the George Street Press literary magazine.
Please submit your stories and come out to the open mic on November 1st!
Millersville University is hosting a Literary Festival in the McNairy Library Room 100 on November 2nd from 9am to 5pm with a keynote speaker at 7pm. Guest writers will hold sessions on writing fiction, poetry, memoir, creative essays, and journalism throughout the day. Check out the full event schedule here.
Session 1 of the Literary Festival will focus on Fiction and Flash Fiction. Presenters Curtis Smith and Don Helin will discuss writing fiction from 9-9:50am. Here is some more information about the presenters:
Curtis Smith has been featured in over seventy literary journals and is the author of five books of fiction. His work has been cited by The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Spiritual Writing and the recently released WW Norton anthology New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction. His most recent book is Lovepain, a novel from Braddock Avenue Books.
Don Helin is the author of five thrillers that draw from his military experience serving in a number of stateside posts as well as overseas in Vietnam and Germany. His novel, Secret Assault, was selected as the best Suspense/Thriller at the 2015 Indie Book Awards. Don is a member of International Thriller Writers, Military Writers Society of America, Penwriters, a state-wide writers group in PA.