The Guy Writers Conference
Get Plugged In
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Tickets are sold online through Brown Paper Tickets. Admission is $15, which includes a catered lunch.
About The Guy Writers Conference
Part of the 2008 National Queer Arts Festival, the Conference will be held on Saturday, June 21, 2008, from 10:00 PM to 4:30 PM at The Center, 1800 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94102 (Click Here for Map and Directions)
Despite the richness of queer arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, many of us writers are left scratching our heads: Why is there no conference serving gay writers? What happened to Outwrite? What happened to San Francisco as a center of queer literature and publishing?
Is there still a there there?
To revitalize the gay literary movement, GuyWriters calls all gay and bisexual male poets, prose writers, and playwrights to gather for a one-day conference. Featuring workshops by Jay Frazier, Joel Tan, Kirk Read, Jaime Cortez, Matthew Graham Smith, John Fisher and other home-grown talent, the GuyWriters Conference offers participants the chance to pick up new skills, learn about the craft and the business of writing, and network with some of the most prolific gay writers in the Bay Area.
This is where the action is, boys.
Be there. Plug in.
The Conference will be followed in the evening by All Tricked Out: The GuyWriters Performance at NQAF
Schedule
| Time | Session | Session | Session |
| 10:00 | Keynote John Fisher |
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| 10:45 | Joël Tan Show Me Sexual Storytelling |
John Fisher Spontaneity and Craft in Queer Writing |
Kirk Read Get Up |
| 12:00 | Lunch | ||
| 1:30 | Jaime Cortez Funny That Way - Bringing Humor Into Your Writing |
Matthew Graham Smith Physical Writing: Using your body to Un-block |
Jay Frazier Writing from a Place of Ignorance, Ambition and Desire |
| 3:00 | Panel and Discussion | ||
| 4:30 | Adjourn | ||
| 8:00p | Don't miss: | All Tricked Out: The GuyWriters Performance at NQAF |
:ssim t'noD |
Keynote
John Fisher
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John Fisher, the Executive Director of Theatre Rhinoceros, is the author of the following plays: The Joy of Gay Sex, Medea: The Musical, Combat, Partisans, Amnesia, Barebacking, Queer Theory, Titus!, Napoleon: The Camp-Drag-Disco-Musical Extravaganza and Schönberg, among others. They have been produced in New York (Off-Broadway), San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and on HBO. John is the only two-time winner of the Will Glickman Playwright Award for Medea: The Musical and Combat! He is also the recipient of the NEA Grant, the GLAAD Media Award for Best L.A. Theatre, the L.A. Weekly Award for Best Musical and Best Script, the BackStage West Garland Award, two Cable Car Awards, a San Francisco Guardian Goldie Award and ten Bay Area Theatre Critics' Circle Awards. He studied at the Yale School of Drama and received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2001 and has taught at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Santa Cruz. This year John is teaching in the Graduate Play Writing program at the Yale School of Drama. He is currently working on a script about the Mahdi and the Sudan that is funded by a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant. Recent directing projects include Red Scare on Sunset for the American Conservatory Theatre and What the Butler Saw and Boston Marriage for Theatre Rhinoceros. His new play Special Forces, set in Iraq in 2003, opened in San Francisco in May 2007 and enjoyed an extended run. Most recently, John wrote and directed There's Something About Marriage at the New York International Fringe Festival. |
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Kirk Read
Get Up
At some point, writers read their work in public. In this interactive workshop, we'll do some physical and writing experiments that explore ways to make reading your work dynamic and playful.
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Kirk Read is the author of the memoir How I learned to Snap. He has been published in over 30 anthologies and is working on a novel about the Book of Revelation, as well as a collection of humorous essays called This is the Thing. He recently received a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission to develop a solo show that will premiere in June of 2008 at the San Francisco Queer Arts Festival. www.kirkread.com/ |
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Joël Tan
Show Me Sexual Storytelling
Burning to spin a hot and dirty yarn? Editor and writer Joël Tan discusses his (mis)adventures in editing three volumes of Queer Erotica. Tan will facilitate creative exercises in sexual storytelling that will incorporate music and visual art. Premised on the idea that all art genres are drawn from a central source, Tan will facilitate exercises that incorporate writing, visual art and music. Come prepared with drawing materials.
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Joël Barraquiel Tan was born in Manila in 1968. He is currently the Director of Commnunity Engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Joël is also the author of two collections of poetry, Monster and Type O Negative, and the editor of three highly-praised collections of sexual storytelling, Best Gay Asian Erotica Vols. I & II and Inside Him. His essays, short fiction, and verse have been translated in several languages and appear in numerous academic and commercial venues including: Total Chaos: The Art & Aesthetic of Hip Hop (Perseus), Ala Carte: Food and Fiction (Anvil Press), Fresh Men: New Gay Fiction (Carroll & Graf), etc. Joël holds a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University. |
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Jaime Cortez
Funny That Way - Bringing Humor Into Your Writing
Have you ever sat on the bus laughing uncontrollably at a funny book you were reading? Has this ever happened while you were sober? What makes good humor happen? In this interactive workshop, participants will explore the elements of successful humor writing and presentation. Utilizing brief writing samples, video clips, and a lively discussion format, we will take the subject of humor and break it on down. Our goal is to explore these and other questions:
- what makes humor work?
- what functions can humor perform in our writing?
- what types of humor can we use?
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Jaime Cortez is a San Francisco Bay Area artist, writer and cultural worker based in Oakland, CA. Jaime's writing has been anthologized in over a dozen anthologies including Besame Mucho, 2sexE, and Queer PAPI Porn.. He has edited the groundbreaking Latino anthology Virgins, Guerrillas & Locas for Cleis Press (1999). He is the writer and illustrator of a graphic novel, Sexile, which was nominated for a National Library Association Award. Jaime received his MFA from UC Berkeley and is currently working on a new graphic novel on the theme of gang violence. |
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Matthew Graham Smith
Physical Writing: Using your body to Un-block
Sometimes as writers we get stuck in our heads and often this leads to getting literally stuck and blocked in our work. Director/playwright/actor Matthew Graham Smith introduces students to several simple methods for getting out from behind the writing desk, onto our feet, where words can flow through the body, characters emerge, dialog is born, and creativity plays dynamically. Using our bodies to explore themes, characters and situations can lead to unexpected, creative, and playful solutions to the most difficult writer's block. If you've ever been stuck, this class is for you. Wear clothes that allow you to move freely.
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Matthew Graham Smith is the Artistic Director of Precarious Theatre, San Francisco's critically acclaimed ensemble theatre company. He is a core member of the Dell'Arte Company, a group focusing on classical and emerging physical theater forms. As a playwright, Primary Stages in NYC honored him with an award for his first play STRIP. Philadelphia's physical theatre ensemble Hotel Obligado commissioned his play BEAUTY IS, about the crystal meth drug crisis in America's Gay Communities, which toured to San Francisco in January 2008. His new play NEVERBOY deconstructs the myths of Peter Pan with a queer twist and opens premiered April 2008. He recently won the SFAC individual artist grant for his upcoming LOVEPROJECT which premiere in SF in October 2008. An accomplished educator, Graham currently teaches at A.C.T.'s Master of Fine Arts program in San Francisco as well as continuing work as a guest teacher at San Francisco's New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco State University, and Assumption University in Bangkok. His teaching incorporates principals from many different physical disciplines and traditions from around the world in the service of developing a dynamic creativity. |
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John Fisher
Spontaneity and Craft in Queer Writing
Exercises include instant writing, using props as archives in the creation of solo-work/auto-biography, and an exercise in spontaneity and breaking down creative boundaries.
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John Fisher, the Executive Director of Theatre Rhinoceros, is the author of the following plays: The Joy of Gay Sex, Medea: The Musical, Combat, Partisans, Amnesia, Barebacking, Queer Theory, Titus!, Napoleon: The Camp-Drag-Disco-Musical Extravaganza and Schönberg, among others. They have been produced in New York (Off-Broadway), San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and on HBO. John is the only two-time winner of the Will Glickman Playwright Award for Medea: The Musical and Combat! He is also the recipient of the NEA Grant, the GLAAD Media Award for Best L.A. Theatre, the L.A. Weekly Award for Best Musical and Best Script, the BackStage West Garland Award, two Cable Car Awards, a San Francisco Guardian Goldie Award and ten Bay Area Theatre Critics' Circle Awards. He studied at the Yale School of Drama and received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2001 and has taught at U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Santa Cruz. This year John is teaching in the Graduate Play Writing program at the Yale School of Drama. He is currently working on a script about the Mahdi and the Sudan that is funded by a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant. Recent directing projects include Red Scare on Sunset for the American Conservatory Theatre and What the Butler Saw and Boston Marriage for Theatre Rhinoceros. His new play Special Forces, set in Iraq in 2003, opened in San Francisco in May 2007 and enjoyed an extended run. Most recently, John wrote and directed There's Something About Marriage at the New York International Fringe Festival. |
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Jay Frazier
Writing from a Place of Ignorance, Ambition and Desire
Poets are often instructed very early on in their careers to “write what you know”. In this workshop we will talk and write about the unknown. We will explore individual and collective territories that seem vexing or mysterious. Some questions we will consider: How can one write with authority about the things which seem most unknown? How can one see a familiar condition with new eyes? What is truth in poetry? Do poems have agendas that are distinct from their poets?
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Jay Frazier's work has been published in many journals including The New Republic, The Antioch Review, The Massachusetts Review, Presence Africaine and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. He has been a MacDowell fellow and most recently received a writing fellowship at The Marcel Breuer House in New York. |
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Contact Us
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Send e-mail to guy (at) guywritersconference.org for further questions.