Quills 2018 - get excited!

Quills is less than a month away and I am excited! (Yes, I used an exclamation point, and italics, just now - that should tell you something.)


Quills is the new name for the League of Utah Writers fall conference and awards banquet. We renamed it because we’re changing it. We’re looking to make it an regional event not just local. To this end we’ve invited many guests the Utah crowd has never heard before. New voices and perspectives, opportunities galore. We have agents and editors and writers and scribblers, and the gang will all be there. 

It’s limited to 300 people, so it’ll be intimate and information packed. It’s the kind of event where you can sit with your future agent, chew the fat with with New York Times best seller and play games in the bar with an editor. It’s a conference. It’s networking. It’s a party.

The League of Utah Writers Quills awards banquet is Saturday and me, yours truly, will complete my many years coup of becoming president of the League. Big night.

There will even be a Thursday prequel full of half-day workshops that you can sign up for separately.

You can sign up to pitch your work to agents and editors.

If you are a writer or want to be and you are within traveling distance of this event you need to come.

This is the big one.

This is Quills.

Friday and Saturday, October 24th and 25th, 2018

(Prequel Thursday 23rd)

Salt Lake City Marriott University Park

480 Wakara Way

Salt Lake City, Utah 84108 

(801) 581-1000

Rooms are available at discount rate.

Follow this link to learn more and register.

Guests / Full Program

Poem of Worry

You have to let them try

You have to let them fail

You have to let them get hurt

You have to know you will not always be there

So they must

They might

They will

They can

Sad State

My glasses have taught me to ignore my peripheral vision. A heavy prescription, narrow lenses, loose frames are making me a cripple. Those side spaces are out of focus outside my eyes or closer, the frames. If I reacted to things out there, I’d be jumping in fear at every tilt of my head -the lens edge coming to get me, blur motion and structures.. It’s a terrible thing. It means I walk into low branches and break cups on other cups. It’s a terrible sign of my aging that I can only trust what I see right in front of me.

Musing on the Pure Amateur

I am always impressed by my creative writing classes. There is so much originality and energy that not a class goes by that I don’t say, honestly, “I wish I’d have written that.” It’s particularly true in the more amateur classes where writers haven’t been spoiled by the “rules of writing” the very poisons I’m spreading in my lessons. Free from the censorship of agreed-upon forms and strategies, marvelous things happen organically.

There’s Picasso’s old adage that one needs to learn the rules like a professional so they can break them like an artist. When you don’t know the rules, sometimes the same effect happens. It reminds me that the rules are misnamed. They’re not rules, not laws. Not even conventions. They are observations of pattern and attempts to define and quantify something that defies it. "X is beautiful therefore for something to be beautiful it must be like X." It is a cart before the horse thing. Shallow and uninspired.

In the publishing world where interns read for imitation more than for innovation, the rules are fixed and demanding mileposts, but in the peace and space of a creative writing class, pure expression from pent up artists is like new bird song on a safari.

I’m glad not everyone in my classes wants to publish. Without the rock tumbler commercialization rules their work can stay beautiful and unique, jagged edged and true. They can explore their voices and meanings. They listen to me however, as I tell them the rules of italics as I see them, show them to shave unnecessary words, develop disdain for passive voice and dialog tags and form them into a projectile more accessible to the masses. But I feel a little dirty for doing it. There’s a majesty in the untrained, unsoiled writer. One who has been taught be reading more than rote, expression more than convention.

The dream of course is that they can remain true to their visions, overcome the learning curve to join Picasso at the other end. True and effective.

I just hope that somewhere in their notebooks they keep those turns of phrase, sentences, paragraphs and words that move me in these classes to wish I had written them.