{"id":32,"date":"2006-10-08T15:48:47","date_gmt":"2006-10-08T19:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/?p=32"},"modified":"2006-10-08T15:55:55","modified_gmt":"2006-10-08T19:55:55","slug":"james-river-writers-conference-postgame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/?p=32","title":{"rendered":"James River Writers Conference (postgame)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I enjoyed my moderating duties. Both panels went well. The organizers of the conference went out of their way to advise moderators to maintain a low profile in the discussion. There was only one time I had to chew my moderating tongue. During the pacing panel Q & A one of the panelists advised avoiding dialogue as an enemy of good pacing because real conversation is filled with deadwood, giving a lengthy example of tape-recorded conversation. What about Chandler? Mamet? What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that dude\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name, Shakespeare? Who ever said dialogue is real<\/em> conversation? The words on the page are never what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s being represented there\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe description is not the countryside\u00e2\u20ac\u201deven when what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s being represented is words. The best advice I ever had about dialogue was from playwright and novelist Jim Pendleton who said good dialogue is<\/em> action. People are acting on each other when they talk. Every line of dialogue should be a significant action. Do you include every \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hi Bob\u00e2\u20ac\ufffd or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153well, uh\u00e2\u20ac\ufffd? Of course not. No more than you would describe every leaf or drop of blood. That doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean you avoid forests or murders.<\/p>\n

The social consciousness panel was a lively bit of serious fun with poet Elena Georgiou, Richmond Times-Dispatch<\/em> columnist Mark Holmberg, and GQ<\/em> staff writer Andrew Corsello coming at the subject from radically different directions and ending up at the same place: Socially conscious writing begins and ends with empathy, the experience of it and the desire to pass it on.<\/p>\n

I also attended a panel on the community of poets with Elena, Christian Peet, and Joshua Poteat, moderated by Cheryl Pallant. I always go to the poetry panels. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so easy to find a chair. Most of the people there could\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been up front. The audience was a who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s who of Richmond poets. I asked a question and got a page full of answers. Elena and Christian have a press and poetry journal, Tarpaulin Sky<\/a>, publishing some excellent poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I enjoyed my moderating duties. Both panels went well. The organizers of the conference went out of their way to advise moderators to maintain a low profile in the discussion. There was only one time I had to chew my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennisdanvers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}