SASFest

Come experience true Southern hospitality in the beautiful courtyard of the Historic BK House. Mingle with fellow writers and avid readers as you begin your evening in the French Quarter at this historical landmark. We’ll have hors d’oeuvres, spirits, and a specialty cocktail to get you started. Melodic stylings of singer & guitarist Salvatore Geloso will add to the ambience.

Thank you to BK House for sponsoring and hosting our welcome party!

Join this year’s contest winner Charlie J. Stephens (“For the Birds,”) our runners-up Ariadne Blayde (“The End of the World”) and Alfred P. Doblin (“Holy Communion,”) along with finalists Edward Cahill, Marco Carocari, Chyx, Jay Michaelson, and Patrick Earl Ryan for an evening of appetizers, cocktails, and readings from the Saints and Sinners 2024: New Fiction from the Festival (you’ll get a copy!) hosted by Co-editor Amie M. Evans with comments from our finalist judge Trebor Healey.

Sponsored by the John Burton Harter Foundation.

Admits you to any one SASFest Literary Discussion of your choice!

Explore the life cycle of a book from creation, to query, to publication, to publicity, to sales. We will have an interesting discussion about the various ways that agents and authors come together and how they work as a team to shape a career, especially when they team up after a first book is already with a publisher. Beth will discuss a range of topics, such as contrasting “the dream of a book deal” with the reality, how the “niche” markets of queer or POC have evolved (or not), writing/selling in multiple genres, and how to parlay small press success into a Big Five deal for the follow-up book.

Beth Marshea is the owner of Ladderbird Literary Agency (www.ladderbird.com). She has a BA in Literature and a Masters in Business Administration and is always looking for new and exciting ways to bring more diversity into publishing and beyond.

Though perhaps the love poem has long been queer (think of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Sappho’s fragments), in this generative session we’ll discuss contemporary examples that further (or differently) queer and complicate the love poem—and indeed, love itself. How can a love poem also be a political poem? A protest poem? Or a political poem for how it reimagines relationships of all kinds? A queer love poem may be about a speaker and a beloved (or beloveds), but it may also be about friendship, community, family both blood and chosen, self-love, caring for the planet, and speaking back to the social systems that limit agency, that attempt to erase queerness. We’ll read work by Essex Hemphill, Natalie Diaz, Jericho Brown, Charif Shanahan, Muriel Leung, Justin Chin, F. Douglas Brown, Yanyi, and others as models for our own writing from and into queerer forms of love.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors.

Many writers experience dry spells when the writing just doesn’t seem to flow.  Must we sit and wait to be touched by a temperamental muse, or can we take control of sparking our creativity?  In this workshop, we’ll share our experiences and engage in writing exercises designed to provide strategies for breaking through writer’s block.

Jaffe has led similar workshops  in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, as well as for the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. He’s taught creative writing for 30 years.

Although ekphrasis is most commonly posited as a poetic tool—poetry responding to visual art—the practice of ekphrasis at its heart is a merging of worlds in which an artist of any medium interprets a work in a different medium. Likewise, a Tarot reader interprets imagery and symbolism through the medium of speech, applying old archetypes and images to unique, new problems or questions. In this generative workshop, author and multi-disciplinary performer Jacob Budenz will give a primer on Tarot and discuss its uses as an ekphrastic writing tool. Participants will pull a Tarot card and do their own freewrites, and then Jacob will read a work from their mythopoetic debut short story collection, Tea Leaves.

Jacob is a queer writer, multi-disciplinary performer, and witch with an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins University.

Join writer and editor Jerry L. Wheeler in this sequel to last year’s guided erotica writing workshop. We’ll be exploring erotica with all of our senses as we use prompts and situations to invent a paragraph or two of perfectly arousing prose. Shy and retiring? You won’t be after we get through with you. From the icebreaker to the final read-through, it’s nothing but smut. Pure, unadulterated trash. We guarantee you’ll love it. Bring whatever you use to write with or on and your fevered imaginations, and we’ll put both through their paces.

Wheeler is the editor of seven anthologies of gay erotica for Bold Strokes Books, Wilde City Press, and other publishers. His own collection of short fiction and essays, Strawberries and Other Erotic Fruits was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award.

What makes for a break-out protagonist? Why do we want to follow a new one through a series? In this talk, Author Margot Douaihy answers those questions and explores the development of her protagonist, Sister Holiday in Scorched Grace. Douaihy discusses how she created a character who captures hearts with a punk rock sensibility, tattoos and gold teeth, and who is clearly way outside of any closet. She reveals how she set this character up to make a difference in her religious order, her city, and in the lives of New Orleans women. Join Margot Douaihy for helpful insights and effective approaches to creating engaging, exciting, and unforgettable protagonists.

Margot teaches creative writing at Emerson College and is the author of the crime novel Scorched Grace, which was named a best book of 2023 by Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, BookPage, and Marie Claire, among others.

Setting can be more than just the backdrop for your story—setting can shape and breathe life into your plot, conflict, and characters. Choosing and highlighting the right details about a place, really situating your reader in a certain time and geographical space, can determine whether the story comes alive for the reader or not. This workshop will focus on how to add unique setting details into your story that capture the mood and flavor of the setting of your story and how to create characters who couldn’t have come from any other place than the one you’ve chosen for them—this is evident in the things they like, the way they talk, and the beliefs they hold. Workshop participants will learn how to incorporate details of place during the drafting and revision stages of their writing.

When not writing, she’s assistant editor of Louisiana Literature and editor of the magazines, Louisiana Life and Acadiana Profile.

You have the characters, the narrator, the setting, the conflict – but what defines that indefinable quality that turns incident and anecdote into a novel? What role does plot, voice, and drama play? What’s the difference between a novel rich in sentiment and one that’s sentimental? On the occasion of The Titanic Survivors Book Club (April, 2024) his new novel about novels, Timothy Schaffert contemplates the form, the industry, and the imagination that determine a novel’s novelness.

Schaffert is Director of Creative Writing and Co-editor, ZERO STREET, the LGBTQ+ fiction series at U of Nebraska Press. He is the author of The Perfume Thief (Knopf Doubleday), a Penguin Random House International “One World, One Book” selection.

How do we, as writers, choose what story works best in what form? These are of course questions of character and conflict, and how much we need to develop them, or how large our array of characters and conflicts will be in a given story. Setting is a consideration as well, in terms of how much time will elapse and how many places will we be juggling in a given story. Additionally, we might ask how any story idea we have could be adjusted to fit in each of these distinct forms. Sometimes experimentation can reveal how best a story wants to be told. We often don’t know until we start writing. We will discuss plotting, outlining and thematic issues – both by starting small and expanding the scope of a story, as well as by starting big and condensing or reducing a story to get to its essence.

 Trebor Healey teaches creative writing for UCLA and has authored several award-winning novels, a recent novella and numerous short story collections.