Denene Millner and Tim Seibles will be starting their residencies at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center for the final week of the season with a faculty reading at 3:30 p.m. Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy.
Throughout the week, Millner will be leading a workshop — called “The Business of Writing” — focused on understanding the publishing business, getting the support of potential editors, and winning over an audience.
“The workshop is geared toward helping writers realize success with their published work,” said Millner. “It is about how to get your work seen, recognized and out into the world.”
Millner designed the workshop in three parts. The first part will focus on how to write a proposal to help prospective authors understand how to market their work to editors. The second part will be about marketing and promoting to audiences, bookstores and publishing houses. The third part of the workshop will be about how to market and promote your work via social media.
“The social media aspect of it is so important now, because it is the easiest way to touch as many people from here to Alaska to Nigeria,” she said. “Anybody can tune into an Instagram Live from anywhere in the entire world, and engage with you.”
Millner is an award-winning journalist and author of six New York Times bestselling books and was nominated for an Emmy for her work as a TV show host. She is a MacDowell Fellow and the editorial director of the award-winning imprint Denene Millner Books. She hosts the podcast “Speakeasy with Denene.”
Thanks to her experience as a writer, Millner is well-versed in the workings of the publishing industry and how to make a book successful. She is looking forward to sharing her knowledge and giving workshop participants the tools to succeed.
“If you want to write for a living, what better way to learn how to do that than to show up somewhere where someone has experience, and has succeeded in the process?” said Millner. “Spaces like Chautauqua are these phenomenal jewels that allow people to come in and … be able to sit and learn from authors and ask questions and engage in meaningful conversation … and take that information back to your home, back to your computer and execute.”
On Sunday, Millner will be reading from her latest novel, One Blood. Also at the reading, poet-in-residence Seibles will be reading poems that represent different tones and emotions as he explores tonal approaches.
Seibles was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018 and writes about all the aspects of life, ranging from the romantic to the sociopolitical to the mystical. He has written poems for two monuments, one in Norfolk, Virginia, dedicated to the Norfolk 17 and one in Dallas, Texas, addressing race-based lynchings in the area. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellow.
During his workshop this week — titled “Pitbull or Poodle: Tone and Its Effects in Poetry” — Seibles hopes to focus on tone of voice when writing a poem, and approaching different tones and dive into the different levels of emotions poetry can reach.
“People write poems thinking poetry is the dominion of sorrow, and that’s simply not true,” he said. “ People sometimes get stuck in a certain pitch of voice. … If you’re always writing mildly sad, somewhat reflective poems, there’s all kinds of territory you just will never enter.”
For writers to reach more places, Seibles wants his workshop to encourage them to increase the variety of tones they explore and to cover a wider emotional territory than they usually do in order to feel more at home in their poetry.
“Everyone needs a place where they feel safe and even encouraged to experiment and to try new things. If you’re trying to figure out a way to express yourself, you need a place that is kind of sanctioned for that,” said Seibles. “The workshop is a safe place for people to play and to make mistakes and to have success, and to just understand that everyone in the room is trying to do similar things.”
