A Few Last Minute Items:
We are delighted that you will be joining us for the 49th Annual Community of Writers Workshops. Roughly 120 other participants will join you here this summer.
Registration will be held in Olympic House between 1:00 – 4:00 pm on July 8. If you cannot avoid arriving late, please call and let us know.
This page contains links to documents and sites that will help you prepare for your week with us. Please bookmark it on your smart-phone for reference.
You will receive a full packet on arrival.
Workshop Manuscripts
Unless you are scheduled for the first day (and you know who you are), make sure to have your copies ready to go, and with you at registration.
- 5000 words or less, double-spaced
- Book projects should include a 1-page plot summary
- Make sure your name is on the manuscript and is the exact same document you provided us with earlier.
- 15 copies, stapled
Travel & Directions
Squaw Valley (also known as Olympic Valley) is located near the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, a four-hour drive from the Bay Area, and a one-hour drive from the Reno Airport.
Directions:
Be careful when you use internet mapping services such as Siri, Google Maps, or MapQuest or you might end up in Fresno, a house in Alpine Meadows, or taking the long way around Lake Tahoe!
We recommend you print our directions.
Air Travel & Shuttle: If you expect to take the shuttle, you should have received an email with shuttle details. If you haven’t, please contact us.
When you reach the valley, there will be a volunteer greeting each van who will help you store your luggage and show you to registration.
If you are renting a car at the airport, please download the driving directions from the Reno Airport.
Contact
Office: 530-584-6136
Brett’s Cell: 530-205-8779 (Urgent calls only.)
We do not get email on our phones. Email is the best mode of communication.
Weather Forcast
View forecast
Dinner Menu:
View and Print our menu for the week.
Schedule of Events:
View and Print our Event Schedule for the week. You will receive your Workshop Schedule on arrival. Please note: You will receive a final version at registration.
Teaching Staff Bios:
View our Teaching Staff & Special Guest bios.
Please note that Richard Ford and Howard Norman are unable to attend.
Staff Changes:
Richard Ford and Howard Norman are unable to join us this year.
We are happy to announce that Greg Bills will join us as Special Guest, Julia Flynn Siler will serving on our teaching staff and alum Grace Talusan will join us for the published alumni reading series.
Bios:
Greg Bills received a BA from the University of Utah, his home state, and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He has published two novels: Consider This Home (Simon & Schuster) and Fearful Symmetry (Dutton/Penguin), and his fiction and essays have appeared in the Santa Monica Review, Fairy Tale Review, and the anthology Brothers and Beasts, among others. He has served on the fiction staff at the Community of Writers conference and as a visiting professor at Wake Forest University. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Redlands. www.gregbillsbooks.com
Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her most recent book is The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Knopf, May 2019) which The New York Times Book Review chose as an “Editors’ Choice” for recommended new books. Her other books are Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. Her first book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, was a finalist for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting. A veteran journalist, Siler is a longtime contributor and former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and has been a guest commentator on the BBC, CNBC, and CNN. www.juliaflynnsiler.com
Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. A graduate of Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, she is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Talusan teaches the Essay Incubator at GrubStreet and at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. She is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, is her first book. She attended The Community of Writers in 1998.
What to Bring:
View and Print our List of what to bring for the week.
Social Media:
This week join us on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter (@commofwriters). Tweet during the week at #CommunityofWriters2019. Join our Writers Workshops Alumni Group.
See you here!
PARTICIPANT LOGISTICS & MANUSCRIPTS
Print Information Letter/Schedule (Letter #2)
Reprint Acceptance Package (Letter #1)
This page contains the same information as the Information Letter above. Please bookmark it in your browser on your computer and smartphone. Later you can use these links to jump to essential information:
Important Dates
Tuition & Fees
Manuscripts
Special Workshops
Housing & Meals
Travel & Directions
What to Bring List
Important Dates:
Workshop Week: July 8-15, 2019 (Monday-Monday)
June 24th:
- Deadline for paying your balance. (See invoice emailed to you.)
- Deadline to submit flight information
- Deadline to submit digital version of your workshop manuscript
- Deadline to submit replacement manuscript for individual conference, if desired.
July 8th: Registration (Opening Day). You will travel to Squaw Valley.
Registration is Monday, July 8th, from 1:00 – 4:00 PM in the Olympic House, our headquarters for the week. If you cannot arrive during that time-frame, please let us know.
Registration consists of distribution of information packets, schedules, housing assignments, and other business. Once you have visited your room and settled in, you will return to the the Olympic House for the 5:00 PM Opening Meeting and dinner.
July 15th:The closing day is Monday, July 15th, with a closing talk by writer and literary critic, and founder and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tom Lutz.
Goodbyes take place immediately following talk. Travel home.
Tuition & Fees:
Thank you for paying your nonrefundable deposit. The balance of your tuition and housing fees will be due on or before June 24. You may pay online or mail a check today to our Olympic Valley address. (A 3.25% service fee applies to online payments.) Please refer to your invoice for the balance amount.
Pay Your Balance Online
Or to avoid the 3.25% service charge, mail a check today to:
Community of Writers
PO Box 2352
Olympic Valley, CA 96146
All payments must arrive by June 24, 2019
YOUR WEEK WITH US
Squaw Valley
Squaw Valley, located in the California Sierra Nevada, near the north shore of Lake Tahoe, is a ski resort (www.squawalpine.com), and was the location of the 1960 Winter Olympics. In summer, the weather is changeable; days are usually warm (75˚- 88˚F) and nights are cool (35˚- 50˚F). Brief mountain rainstorms are a possibility, though in general it is very dry. The elevation of the valley floor is 6200 ft. Although participants will spend much of their time reading workshop manuscripts, there will be opportunities to hike to the local waterfalls, take nature walks up the mountain, swim in Lake Tahoe, take tram rides, roller skate, or visit the Truckee River. When checking the weather online, please note that California has two Squaw Valleys. (The other is close to Fresno, whereas our Squaw Valley (Olympic Valley), is close to Lake Tahoe.) For weather: http://www.noaa.gov and enter the zip code 96146. Weather permitting, dinners and a few evening events will he held outdoors.
Registration Day: July 8
Registration will be on Monday, July 8th, from 1:00 to 4:00 PM in in the Olympic House, our headquarters for the week, 1990 Squaw Valley Road. (Please refer to the directions.) If you cannot avoid arriving late, please call and let us know. Registration consists of payment of fees due, distribution of information packets and schedules, housing assignments, first-day workshop manuscripts, and other business. As you can see, it is very important to plan your trip so as to arrive on time. Once you have visited your condo/house and settled in, you will return to The Olympic House for the 5:00 Opening Meeting and dinner. After dinner there will be an Opening Talk by author Vanessa Hua. Workshops will begin the following morning at 8:30 sharp.
What to Bring
View and Print our list of what to bring for the week.
Teaching Staff & Guests
For the full list of Staff & Guests, visit our Writers Workshops page.
Staff Changes:
Richard Ford and Marcia Butler are unable to join us this year. We are delighted to welcome alum Grace Talusan to our published alumni reading series.
Bookshop
There will be a bookshop featuring staff books and Community of Writers T-shirts, sweatshirts, etc. The bookshop accepts cash, major credit cards or personal checks.
Communications
We will have several computers with internet service which we make available to participants who wish to check their email during the week. If you prefer to bring your laptop, Wi-Fi is available in The Village on the valley floor and at the conference center.
You may give this office phone number for messages: 530-583-5200. We will post any messages on our Message Board.
What to Expect
Regular workshops are held each morning from 8:30-11:30. Each afternoon there will be talks on editing, publishing, agentry, and literary craft starting at 1 pm. View our Tentative Schedule of Events. As you can see, the schedule is very full; you may want to budget your time to allow for reading manuscripts for workshop, which is a priority. You should not plan on producing new writing during the week.
Schedule of Events
Print Tentative Schedule of Events
You will receive the final Schedule of Events and the Workshop Schedule on arrival.
Special Workshops
The Alchemy of Adaptation: From Book to Screen
You have been notified if you are enrolled in this class. If so, a $250 fee has been added to your account. You will be receiving more information in the weeks to come. It will meet most days from 4 to 5:30. Places are still available. Email me as soon as possible if you would like to be enrolled.
Open Workshop
Open Workshop with Sands Hall will meet most days at 4:00. Plan to bring a very short piece of writing (one poem, or two pages of prose) to read aloud, if you plan to attend these informal sessions. Advance enrollment not required. For those who are enrolled in the Adaptation Class, Sands will offer a special session at 12:30pm on Thursday for you if she gets enough signups.
Friday Naturalist-led Hike
Naturalist Will Richardson will lead a hike up the canyon on Friday during the week. You may sign up at registration.
Manuscripts
As you know, there are two main ways your work will be read:
- The Individual Conference.
- The Morning Workshop.
To get the most out of the week, we recommend you use a different manuscript for each.
Manuscripts for Individual Conference:
The Individual Conference (IC) with a staff member, twenty minutes in length, is instituted to provide participants with yet another perspective on their work. Your IC manuscript will be e-mailed in advance to the staff member to whom you have been assigned. We will automatically use the manuscript you submitted for acceptance for your IC, unless you told us you plan to submit a replacement. Once you arrive in Squaw Valley, you will be notified of the staff member with whom you have been paired, and you will be able to set up an appointment for your individual conference.
If you plan to submit a replacement manuscript for your Individual Conference use the Submission Form to do so. The deadline is June 24.
Submit Manuscript for Individual Conference
Manuscripts for Workshop: We ask that you provide your Workshop Manuscript to us in two ways.
1) Please use the Writers Workshops Workshop Manuscript Submission Form to submit an identical digital copy of the manuscript you are photocopying. Deadline on or before June 24. (This is a new necessity by the request of our teaching staff.)
Submit Manuscript for Morning Workshop
2) Please duplicate the manuscript you would like treated in the workshop (15 copies) and bring these photocopies with you to Squaw Valley on July 8.
We recommend that you bring a different manuscript to the week of workshops than the one you are using for Individual Conference. In order to get the most out of the workshop system, your manuscript should not necessarily be a final, perfected draft, nor a rudimentary first attempt either, but a draft which might now benefit from criticism.
- Manuscript must be 5,000 words or less, double-spaced, 12 pt. font. Please do not bring more. If excerpted from a novel, please include a concise one-page synopsis, recounting the larger plot, so that your readers may provide more pertinent criticism of your excerpt.
- If short fiction, only one story can be treated. (It takes just as much time for the workshop to discuss a six-page story as it does a longer one.)
- Photocopy, collate, and staple 15 copies of your manuscript. Make sure your name appears on each copy, and please paginate.Please note: You were accepted into the workshop with a particular manuscript. When selecting the work you will bring to the conference for workshop, we hope you won’t make too much of a shift in tone and content. For instance, if you applied with serious literary stories, we hope you won’t take this opportunity to bring a genre novel for workshop. We make pairing and other decisions based on what you submitted.
Open Workshop: In addition, throughout the week, there will be extra offerings of Open Workshops, so you may want to bring a copy of other very short work to put forward should the opportunity arise.
Code of Conduct
The Community of Writers will not tolerate any instances of discrimination, harassment, or any other form of mistreatment in conjunction with any of our programs. Respect and consideration for others, both within and outside workshop sessions, are core values to be upheld by all participants and teaching staff. Harassment or disrespect of community members on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, age, marital status or disability is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Should a staff member, volunteer or program participant be found to violate any aspect of the organization’s code of conduct, the Community of Writers reserves the right to dismiss her or him from the program.
Housing & Meals
Accommodations: If you asked us to arrange your accommodations, you will be assigned a room in a condominium or house with other participants. Each unit will have a full kitchen in which you can prepare breakfasts and lunches. Each house comes equipped with a washer and dryer. You will receive your housing assignment at registration. Keep in mind that the bedrooms do not have locks; the keys you will be given open only the front door of the house or condo where you stay. We will provide linens, TP, soap, and trash bags; however, you will need to bring your own shampoo and toiletries. In order to keep costs down the Village Condos and Houses will not have daily housekeeping.
Meals: Your tuition includes six evening meals. Thursday afternoon and evening are free time; you are on your own for dinner that night. We accommodate most vegetarian diets; however, we can’t guarantee that each meal will be vegan. If you have a particular food allergy or aversion, we cannot prepare special meals for you. (In a few weeks, we will send out a menu of the dinners so you can plan your meals with care.) Again, you are on your own for breakfast and lunch, which you can prepare in your house or buy at the cafes on the valley floor. If you want to keep your food expenses low, we highly recommend planning to make bag lunches. If you are driving, we suggest you stop at the Trader Joe’s in Roseville or the SaveMart supermarket in Truckee on your way, for breakfast and lunch provisions. The SaveMart is on Highway 89, just after you get off I-80. Our neighborhood, here in the valley, also has a small outlet for natural foods, which we will be happy to point you toward; however, prices are high in the valley.
Dinner Menu
View and Print our menu for the week. (Coming soon.)
Travel & Directions
Squaw Valley (also known as Olympic Valley) is located near the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, a four-hour drive from the Bay Area, and a one-hour drive from the Reno Airport. If you requested carpooling information we will send you a Carpool Network list for your use. We provide this list for your convenience: we have no knowledge of drivers’ safety or insurance, nor can we take responsibility for the safety of the journey or the quality of discourse in the carpools.
Send Us Flight Info Now
Directions:
Be careful when you use internet mapping services such as Siri, Google Maps, or MapQuest or you might end up in Fresno, a house in Alpine Meadows, or taking the long way around Lake Tahoe! We recommend you print our directions.
Air Travel & Shuttle: If you will be flying into the Reno Airport and you haven’t yet made your airport shuttle reservations, I hope you will do it now and send the information to me soon. Please refer to your Acceptance Package for more information. When you reach the valley, there will be a volunteer greeting each van who will help you store your luggage and show you to registration. I will be in touch later in July with more details about the shuttles. If you are renting a car at the airport, please download the driving directions from the Reno Airport.
What to Bring
- 15 copies of your workshop manuscript, collated and stapled. (Make sure your name is on every copy.)
- An additional, short manuscript for Open Workshop, if desired.
- An alarm clock, if needed.
- Bring a warm jacket and casual clothes that can be layered in the evenings for warmth.
- Hiking or walking shoes.
- You may also want to bring a sunhat, sunglasses, sunscreen, lip balm and mosquito repellent.
- A small flashlight is also useful.
- You may want to bring a swimsuit for swimming in Lake Tahoe or the Shirley Canyon Waterfalls.
- A water bottle, as we discourage the use of disposable plastic bottles.
- A computer is not necessary, as we have computers for participants to use for email.
(See Communications, above.) - A cell phone and charger.
- If bringing a bike is easy, bring one.
- If it promises to be hot and you are driving, consider a personal fan for evenings at your lodgings.
Registration will be held in Olympic House between 1:00 – 4:00 pm on July 8.
Try to avoid arriving late. If you cannot avoid arriving late, please call and let us know.
Please feel free to email or call us if you have any questions or concerns.
Lisa Alvarez, Louis B. Jones and I along with the rest of the staff look forward to meeting you.
Sincerely,
-Brett Hall Jones
Executive Director
(530) 584-6136 office
(530) 205-8779 cell (Urgent call only)