Susan Orlean is the 2019 North Words Writers Symposium keynote speaker. (Photo from nwwriterss.com)
Registration for the North Words Writers Symposium is now open.
The week-long writing event will celebrate its 10-year anniversary in May. Jeff Brady organizes the symposium in Skagway. He says it all started when Buckwheat Donahue approached the Borough Assembly to create a literary conference to draw writers to the Upper Lynn Canal.
“There was really one other one in Alaska, in Homer,” Brady said. “There had been one in Sitka before and one in Fairbanks, but those had gone away, so it was a good time to start up a new one.”
With help from writers around the state, Brady, Donahue and Haines author Dan Henry joined forces to turn the idea into a reality.
The first symposium drew only 16 people but has since grown to 40 participants each year.
Throughout the week participants attend discussions with successful authors on how to create compelling writing.
“We’ll have two or three authors who will talk about a certain topic about their writing. If we have some historians on the panel it could be writing about history and how to make facts appealing to the general audience to read. For fiction, it could be developing characters. For poetry, it could range from writing haikus to how you structure poems,” Brady said.
Northwords organizers recently announced that Susan Orlean will be the keynote speaker for 2019. Orlean is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Orchid Thief which inspired the Academy Award-winning film Adaptation.
Orlean was tapped to be the keynote last year,but she backed out due to scheduling conflicts related to the release of her new novel The Library Book.
You can find registration information at the symposium’s website. 40 spots are available on a first come first serve basis.
