SBWC June Conference
June 2010
What is the summer Santa Barbara Writers Conference? It’s a week you will undoubtedly never forget. You can count on working hard, meeting dozens and dozens of other writers, learning from professionals who are passionate about writing, and being inspired beyond your wildest imagination.
The conference is held at the Hotel Mar Monte on the beach in Santa Barbara. The hotel features beautiful ocean and mountain views, and amenities that include a heated outdoor swimming pool, heated outdoor Jacuzzi, fitness center, spa and massage, Bistro 1111 Restaurant, and air conditioned rooms with refrigerators, microwaves, data ports for online access, and in-room coffee makers, hairdryer and plush robes.
The intent of SBWC has always been and continues to be to give fledgling writers the opportunity to improve their craft, to associate with helpful professionals and to mingle with other writers. Your highly credentialed workshop leaders will talk about everything from characterization, plot and scene-setting (for fiction writers) to how to pitch a story idea to editors (for nonfiction) to selling a script (for screenwriters). We offer workshops that tell you how to make your humor writing really funny, how to make your poetry more poetic, and how to navigate the lure, intricacies and pitfalls of getting published.
We are proud of our many successful alumni — like Fannie Flagg, Dr. Spencer Johnson, Gayle Lynds, Gillian Roberts, Catherine Ryan Hyde, Jean Harfenist, Karin Finell and Christopher Moore, to name just a few.
Our workshops are the heart of the conference, and we are pleased to offer a faculty that is unrivaled.
Here’s how the conference works. We offer more than 20 different instructional workshops each day on everything from fiction (all genre) to nonfiction (biography, memoir and travel writing), to screenwriting, playwriting, poetry, children’s lit and young adult, marketing and ways to get those creative juices flowing. You can wander from one to another to sample them all, or you can settle down in a couple of particular workshops each day. We welcome and encourage (but never require) writers to bring their current work to read aloud in the workshops, where they will get feedback from workshop leaders and class participants.
In the late afternoons we have a special event — either a speaker or a panel, and every evening we have a major author speaker. We have a day dedicated to agents and editors, and you can sign up to pitch an idea, screenplay, short story, novel — whatever it is you think is ready for prime time.
After the last speaker, we keep going! We offer "pirate" workshops for those stalwart souls who want to get some really in-depth critiquing. They start at 9 p.m. and have been known to go into the wee hours.
During the conference we also hold several writing contests in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Fannie Flagg said in a recent interview: "Winning first prize at the SBWC contest was the first time anybody recognized me as a writer. What a thrill!"
"The conference was fabulous. Lauren and I learned, were critiqued and encouraged, stimulated and wowed. And by week’s end, a little exhausted. Nothing to compare, I’m sure, with how exhausted you must have been. You did such a wonderful job pulling it all together. A smashing success. Thank you so much!" — Christine Beebe, who attended with her teen-age daughter, Lauren
