MICHAEL BYERS is a former Stegner Fellow, holds an MFA from the University of Michigan (1996) and is the author of three books: The Coast of Good Intentions, a book of stories, and the novels Long for This World and Percival's Planet. The Coast of Good Intentions won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, garnered a Whiting Writer's Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book, among other citations. Long for This World was also a New York Times Notable Book, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, won the Virginia Commonwealth University First Novel Award, and won the annual prize for fiction from Friends of American Writers. His stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.

A sample from Michael Byers work online:

Two short stories:
"Malaria" (from Bellevue Literary Review )
"Darver's Big Idea" (from fivechapters.com)

PETER HO DAVIES is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl (2007) and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World (1997) and Equal Love (2000). His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, among others, and his short fiction has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1998 and Best American Short Stories 1995, 96 and 2001. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its twenty Best Young British Novelists, and in 2008 he received the PEN/Malamud award for excellence in the short story. The Ugliest House in the World was awarded the John Llewelyn Rhys and PEN/Macmillan Prizes in the UK; Equal Love, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year was a finalist for the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2001 Asian American Literary Award. The Welsh Girl was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and the IMPAC award, and short-listed for The British Book Award Best Read of the Year. Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has previously taught at the University of Oregon, Emory University and Northwestern University.

Peter Ho Davies online:
An interview with Virginia Quarterly Review
Top 10 story collections as chosen for the Guardian Newspaper

Peter Ho Davies on the Workshop

My guiding approach in workshop is to try to first consider the aims of any story under discussion and then determine its strengths and weaknesses in light of those aims. I believe as writers we often learn as much from what we do well as what we do badly (and are often as unsure of both) so my classes focus on both problems and successes in the stories examined.

An Excerpt from Peter Ho Davies

from THE NEXT LIFE

The mourners were playing poker around the rosewood table the night before his father's funeral, and Lim was winning.

They had begun the game to help themselves stay awake during the vigil. Pang had produced the new deck from a pocket of his white mourning suit and asked Lim's permission earlier in the evening. "It'll amuse the ghost," he said, indicating the casket. "Being able to see all our cards."

Now it was almost dawn and Lim had been winning for an hour or more. It was uncomfortable. Where before they had talked softly among themselves now they played in silence. Lim wished he could get up and leave, but it seemed improper to end the game ahead. Every time he told himself to fold he would look at his cards and find a pair of aces, a wild card, four cards to a flush, something too good to turn down. He bet heavily on mediocre hands, hoping to have his bluff called, but the others were afraid of his good fortune now. When one of them did stay in, Lim made a hand with his last card and still took the pot.

He fanned his cards to study them and thought of the coffin over his shoulder.

NICHOLAS DELBANCO has published twenty-five books of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent novels are The Count of Concord and Spring and Fall; his most recent work of non-fiction is Lastingness: The Art of Old Age, which was published by Grand Central Publishing in 2011. As editor he has compiled the work of, among others, John Gardner and Bernard Malamud. Director of the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, he has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, twice, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship. Last year Professor Delbanco completed a teaching text for McGraw-Hill entitled Literature: Craft and Voice, a three-volume Introduction to Literature of which he is the co-editor with Alan Cheuse; in 2004 he published The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation.

"Now, that analogy breaks down of course as soon as you look at it a little more closely. First, it's pretty difficult to declare that anyone is a master craftsman, able to turn one's hand to whatever piece of work is commissioned. An athletic coach does not necessarily have to have been a better athlete than the person he or she is coaching; a vocal coach is very often a failed performer; and some of the great teachers of the violin, say, need not have been great violinists. So it's not clear to me that the best writers are the best teachers. It may be wonderfully invigorating to be in the presence of X, Y, or Z whose work you admire, but you may get nothing from them in class. And it may be dispiriting to be in the presence of someone whose work you have either read or liked, yet that person may be perfectly able to allow you to find your own voice and attain your own walking papers.

"My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table. I think that's a mistake, in obvious opposition to the ideal of teaching which permits a student to be someone other than the teacher.... The successful teacher has to make each of the students a different product rather than the same."

An Excerpt from Nicholas Delbanco

from "The Writer's Trade," The Writer's Trade and Other Stories

Mark Fusco sold his novel when he was twenty-two. "You're a very fortunate young man," Bill Winterton proclaimed. They met in the editor's office, on the sixteenth floor. The walls were lined with photographs, book jackets, and caricatures. "You should be pleased with yourself."

He was. He had moved from apprentice to author with scarcely a hitch in his stride. It was 1967, and crucial to be young. One of the caricatures showed Hawthorne on a polo pony, meeting Henry James; their mallets were quill pens. They were swinging with controlled abandon at the letter A.

Bill Winterton took him to lunch. They ate at L'Amorique. The editor discoursed on luck; the luck of the draw, he maintained, comes to those who read their cards. He returned the first bottle of wine, a Pouilly Fumé. The sommelier deferred, but the second bottle also tasted faintly of garlic; the sommelier disagreed. They had words. "There's someone cooking near your glassware," Winterton declared. "Or you've got your glasses drying near the garlic pan."

V.V. GANESHANANTHAN, a fiction writer and journalist, is a graduate of Harvard College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the M.A. program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in arts and culture journalism.

Her work has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Himal Southasian, and The American Prospect, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and former board member of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, she currently serves on the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson.

She previously taught creative writing at Skidmore College. She has been awarded fellowships from Phillips Exeter Academy, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony.

Random House published her first novel, Love Marriage, in April 2008. The book was longlisted for the Orange Prize and named one of Washington Post Book World’s Best of 2008, as well as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick.

LORNA GOODISON is one of the Caribbean's most distinguished contemporary poets. Her work appears in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces and her many honors include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Americas Region. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Travelling Mercies (2001) and Turn Thanks: Poems (1999), as well as two collections of short stories. Her work, translated into many languages, is widely published and anthologized.

LINDA GREGERSON 's fourth book of poems, Magnetic North, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and is about to appear in paperback (fall 2008). Her earlier books include Waterborne  (2002), The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996) and Fire in the Conservatory (1982), as well as two books of criticism, Negative Capability (2001) and The Reformation of the Subject (1995). Her awards include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, grants and fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Mellon, Rockefeller and Bogliasco Foundations. Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan.

Linda Gregerson on the Workshop

Our aim in workshop is at once very simple and very complex: we make it our business to become an adaptable and rigorous critical readership for one another's work-in-progress. We use the workshop as an occasion to broaden formal and thematic range, to refine editorial skills, to share questions, enthusiasms, and generous skepticism. Our primary focus is on the current work submitted by members of the class, but we also read selected work by other poets, generally contemporaries in mid-career.

This term, I asked each member of the workshop to teach a single 45-60 minute session on poetry that was neither her own nor that of another member of the workshop. Workshop members chose groups of poems or individual volumes of poems that raised questions or issues of urgency for us in our own writing. We tended to focus on work we admired, but we also considered poetry that seemed to us to fail in some major way, or to cheat, to take admirable risks with mixed results, or to explore unpredictable intersections of voice and form and subject matter. We also found this an invaluable opportunity to consider questions of structure and sequencing in book-length collections of poetry, questions of immediate relevance to those who are now assembling the MFA thesis.

A sample from Linda Gregerson's work:

From The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, "Fish Dying on the Third Floor at Barneys," published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

A. VAN JORDAN is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co.

Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a United States Artists Williams Fellowship. 

LAURA KASISCHKE has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels. Her novels include Suspicious River (1996), White Bird in a Blizzard (1999), and The Life Before Her Eyes (2002). They have been translated widely, and adapted for film.  She has been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, several Pushcart Prizes, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her other collections of poetry include Space, in Chains, Lilies, Without, Gardening in the Dark, Wild Brides, Housekeeping in a Dream , Fire and Flower and What It Wasn't . Her poems and stories have been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic , The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review and elsewhere.

Laura Kasischke on the Workshop

My workshop emphasizes the discussion of issues related to writing;  specifically, these issues will arise in response to the new work written and submitted by workshop members:

I state my definition in this round-about way because I'd like to emphasize that my approach to the workshop privileges the discussion of the elements, techniques, and troubles of writing over the goal of setting out to fix a specific piece of writing.  

In the rest of your writing life, you will learn primarily through struggle with your own work, alone.  In this brief period of your writing life, you'll learn, too, by struggling with the work of your peers.  It can be time- consuming, to be sure, but responding to the new work of others can be as great an act of creativity as writing one's own new work.  And, it's a great short-cut to learning how to read your own work objectively. With some conscientious effort, the graduate writing workshop becomes not only a place to practice and improve our craft, but a true community of writers.  We need to bring all the energy we can to each workshop, and an ambitious generosity.  There's no such thing as too much passion when it comes to making art or responding to it.  My goal for the workshop is that it will, eventually, become a sustaining memory of a place where serious insight and support were generated and shared--a place and time to which you can return again and again in your mind during the more solitary days of writing ahead.

A sample from Laura Kasischke's work:

From Dance and Disappear, "A Kitchen Song"
From The Life Before Her Eyes

KHALED MATTAWA is the author of four books of poetry, Tocqueville (New Issues Press, 2010) Amorisco (Ausable Press, 2008), Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable Press, 2003) and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1996).

He has translated nine books of contemporary Arabic poetry by Adonis, Saadi Youssef, Fadhil Al-Azzawi, Hatif Janabi, Maram Al-Massri, Joumana Haddad, Amjad Nasser, and Iman Mersal. Mattawa has co-edited two anthologies of Arab American literature.

Mattawa has been awarded the Academy of American Poet's Fellowship Prize, the PEN-American Center award for poetry translation, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Alfred Hodder fellowship from Princeton University, an NEA translation grant, and three Pushcart prizes.

His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies.

Prof. Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya and immigrated to the United States in his teens.

THYLIAS MOSS's most recent volume is Tokyo Butter, a collection of poems written during the gestation of Limited Fork Poetics, her theory of interacting language systems. In this sense, Tokyo Butter though arriving in 2006 (from Persea) arrives as artifact; its content reveals the history of LFP, not its current status. For if it did, it would not contain "poems"; following Tokyo Butter, she has not written "poems"; instead, makes Poams (boundary products of an act of making) and poams (contained products of an act of making), and these boundary and contained products are both boundary and bounded at the same time until reaching some Uber limit at each irreducible and unexpandable end. Not that these Uber limits are reachable or real (even within the imagination).

Before this (what she considers "welcomed" and "invited") upheaval in her work, she published nine other books including: Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse (Persea Books, 2004; a Village Voice best book of 2004), the memoir, Tale of a Sky-blue Dress (William Morrow, 1998), and the poetry collections: Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (Persea Books, 1997; finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (Ecco, 1993), Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky (Persea, 1991; winner of the 1991 National Poetry Series Open Competition and of the Ohioana Book Award), Pyramid of Bone (University of Virginia, 1989; finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award), and Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman (Cleveland State University, 1983; finalist for the Best of the Great Lakes First Book Prize). A 1996 Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, she has also received grants from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Kenan Charitable Trust.

Thylias Moss on the poetry reading : Reading may be part of the event; that is, there will likely be visual systems (of which text may be a part), sonic systems (whether or not brought to a range of human audibility), perhaps virtual systems, digital systems, and tactile systems, all of which may be "read" or perceived or interpreted by those experiencing them.

Thylias Moss on the workshop : So perhaps I can't dodge a notion that a workshop is the carpenter's delight; I want us to make things there, things whose making maybe isn't supported in other locations, things that can come out of explorations of the science of the impossible, things made of interacting language systems (visual [including text], sonic, tactile, virtual, architectural, digital systems may be language systems) in various stages of collapse, growth, and regrowth; I want to make with impunity until the limits of making are remade each time there is an act of making.

Sample of work by Thylias Moss:

Here is a P(p)oam by Thylias Moss. It is not offered as a way to define her work. It may not even provide a clear sense of her work. Better if there is no clear sense, if there remains something that needs resolving. Resist considering it representative (though it may be representative, of any number of things). This language system appears as undercurrent in Tokyo Butter .

Click here to go to the Quick Muse website and read dueling poems by Thylias Moss and Paul Muldoon.

EILEEN POLLACK is the author of two novels, Breaking and Entering, published in 2012 by Four Way Books, and Paradise, New York, published in 1998 by Temple University Press; two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and Other Stories, published in 1991 by Delphinium Books, and In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas, published in 2008 by Four Way Books; as well as a children's book about AIDS, Whisper, Whisper Jesse, published by Advantage/Aurora in 1991, and a book-length work of creative nonfiction entitled Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull, which was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2002 and was a finalist for the Willa Award in nonfiction in 2003. She is also the author of Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style, with Readings, published in 2008 by Cengage/Wadsworth, and Creative Composition, cowritten with Jeremiah Chamberlin and Natalie Bakopoulos and also published by Cengage (2013). Breaking and Entering was awarded the 2012 Grub Street National Book Prize and named a New York Times Editors' Choice selection; her other honors include the Edwin Lewis Wallant Award for the best Jewish fiction of 2008, an NEA Fellowship in fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, an appearance in Best American Short Stories 2007 (edited by Stephen King), a Michener Fellowship, the Lawrence Award, the Cohen Award and a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, and a year-long fellowship from the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. Her short fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, SubTropics, New England Review, and Agni, and anthologies such as God: Stories, Birth, and The New Generation, and her nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Fourth Genre and in newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Eileen Pollack on the Workshop

If my workshops have an overriding theme, it's that I want the authors of the stories or novels we consider to be told everything they need to be told, in ways they can hear and use. Since I am unable to listen to criticisms of my own work unless my critics first acknowledge what I've done well - even if I've done hardly anything well - I assume other writers are the same way. I also think that writers who are just starting out aren't always sure of what they're doing right, or why it's working. Someone takes a risk, and no one comments on how well that risk succeeded, so the person never tries that again. If writers figure out what works, they will do that thing more regularly. So, even though it sometimes seems Polyanna-ish, we always start by talking about what's working in a piece.

Then we move on to a descriptive phase in which we discuss the story or novel as a piece of literature. What do we know about the characters and their struggles? What is the writer trying to get us to feel or think as we read? Which scenes or meditative passages are particularly moving or provocative or original or funny or vivid? What is satisfying about the story? What are the strengths of the voice and style?

Finally, we discuss ways in which the writer might make the story or novel stronger, more effective, deeper…. I tend to be more prescriptive than a lot of teachers; I hate to think that a writer will go home knowing that his/her story is too X, as we've pointed out, but not have a clue as to how to solve that problem and make it less X and more Y. No one has to follow the workshop's advice, but I do urge people to get specific in providing possible solutions to the problems we've discussed. I try to give a lot of examples as to how a writer goes home and approaches a specific kind of revision. No matter what anyone says or does, most writers who've just had a story workshopped feel as if they've been punched in the gut. My goal is that by evening's end, all the students in the class go home feeling as if they've learned something about writing, and the authors of the pieces we've discussed feel able to struggle to their feet and go home, increasingly excited about the prospect of making their stories and novels better.

Each student is required to put up a completely new story or novel excerpt for workshop once a term, and a second story/excerpt that can either be new work or a revision. A third story is required, with the understanding that the writer will use this as an opportunity to take a risk so audacious that merely to contemplate it makes him or her queasy. This story will be seen only by me. Even if it bombs, the student's grade won't be affected, so long as he/she tried something new and important and scary. I ask each student to bring in a question of craft or content that is truly perplexing him/her at that moment, and we discuss that issue as a group; most times we meet, we also discuss a published story or two.

A Writing Excerpt from Eileen Pollack

This excerpt is from "Past, Future, Elsewhere," the first story in The Rabbi in the Attic. The narrator is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives a few miles from Bethel, New York, and is hiding in her basement to avoid the mobs of kids who have descended on her town for the music festival called Woodstock.

"All week the newspaper had been lurid with photos of the naked barbarians who had overrun our town - sunbathing on car hoods, dancing to music at this 'festival' of theirs - but an inky strip covered each interesting part, like a gag on a mouth. I scraped at those boxes, even turned the page over to see from the other side what was masked on the front. I felt the reporters had found out my future and printed it here, but blotted out the facts I most wanted to know. At the same time I wished that every inch of those bodies had been blacked with ink…."

Later, she allows herself to be lured outside by three kids who want her to show them a place to swim away from the crowds. She goes with them, and is particularly fascinated by a shaggy, overweight young physicist who is wearing a jumpsuit. In the excerpt below, he begins to take it off so he can go skinnydipping with his friends.

"'I won't look,' I promised, though I found when he started to pull down his zipper I couldn't turn away. As he stepped from the jump suit I expected to see a heavy black rectangle blocking his crotch. Instead, what I saw was my first naked man, layered in fur so he seemed like an animal, a burly brown bear. Poking from the pouch that hung between his legs was a separate little animal - a baby, a pet, like a baby kangaroo peeking out shyly and waving its arm. And what I felt then wasn't love at first sight, but my first sight of love, of what it could mean to love someone else, a stranger, not family, and how risky this was, loving a pitifully weak, naked man."

Keith Taylor has written or edited some thirteen books or chapbooks, including Marginalia for a Natural History, Ghost
Writers (co-edited with Laura Kasischke), If the World Becomes So Bright and Guilty at the Rapture.  His work has appeared widely in journals, magazines, anthologies and newspapers in the United States and in Europe. He has received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and support from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs.

Links to on-line examples of his work can be found at his web site: www.keithtaylorannarbor.com .

DOUGLAS TREVOR is the author of the novel Girls I Know (SixOneSeven Books, 2013), and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press, 2005). Thin Tear received the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was named a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. His short stories have appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Black Warrior Review, Epoch, Fugue, The Notre Dame Review, Glimmer Train, The New England Review, and The Ontario Review. He also has work forthcoming in New Letters and The Minnesota Review. His stories have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is currently at work on another collection of stories, and is beginning a novel about a family that disintegrates and then is reconstituted in a much different form. Trevor received a BA from Princeton University and a PhD from Harvard. He also teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels on early modern literature, particularly the works of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton.