(Fiction/CNF) KAREN GETTERT SHOEMAKER’s first collection of short fiction, Night Sounds and Other Stories, was published in the United States by Dufour Editions in 2002 and republished in the United Kingdom by Parthian Books in 2006. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the London Independent, Prairie Schooner, Fugue, Foliage, West Wind Review, South Dakota Review, Kalliope, Arachne, The Nebraska Review, and has been anthologized in A Different Plain: Contemporary Nebraska Fiction Writers, Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry, and Times of Sorrow, Times of Grace. Her novel, This is Now, is polished up and ready to be discovered. She currently teaches in the Writer’s Workshop at UNO. She has taught literature and writing at the University of Nebraska, both Lincoln and Omaha campuses, and has conducted writing workshops through Hastings College, Chadron State College and the Nebraska Humanities Council. She received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska Lincoln in 1997.

“I started out my professional writing life as a journalist for a small town newspaper. It was there I learned the importance of paying attention to smallest detail. (Small town truism: If the man you’ve written about doesn’t catch your mistake, his neighbors will.) I took up (intentional) fiction writing a little more than 20 years ago and fell completely and immediately in love with the craft. Learning to create the kind of stories I loved to read cracked open the world for me. I took up teaching because I wanted to pass that transcendent experience on to others. In the years since then I’ve received numerous awards for my writing and my teaching. However, my favorite award is an 'almost' award. My story 'Playing Horses' was short-listed in Best American Short Stories 2002. Series editor Katrina Kenison described the difficulty of selecting stories in the aftermath of 9/11. 'Preoccupied with the unfathomable changes in our world at large, it was almost impossible to focus on the details of the smaller picture. . . . I came to see that the kind of connection I’d been seeking was actually right in front of me, in stories that remind us that whatever happens, we aren’t alone in the world, that our own fears and concerns are universal, that the details of our ordinary everyday lives do matter.' It is that spirit I hope to bring to all my writing and to every teaching encounter. My philosophy about teaching writing is quite simple: I believe you learn to write by writing; you learn to write better by considering what you've written. My approach with students is to enter into a dialogue: Where are you? Where do you want to be? Then I dig in my big black bag of experience and education and offer some ways to get there. My goal is to keep you writing, writing carefully and truthfully, always seeking the writing that matters.”

(Fiction/CNF) MARK HASKELL SMITH is the author of three novels— Moist, Delicious, and most recently, Salty which was a Book Sense Notable Book. His books have been translated and published in Russia, Norway, France, Italy, and England. He has worked extensively in film and television; his credits include the feature films Playing God and the Brazilian film A Partilha which won the Audience Award for Best Picture and the Crystal Lens Award for Best Screenplay at the 2002 Miami Brazilian Film Festival. He has also done uncredited work on such films as Anaconda, Excess Baggage, and Inspector Gadget, among others, and created original pilots for ABC and CBS television. He teaches novel writing at UCLA Extension’s Writers Program and at the Book Passage Mystery Writer’s Conference. www.markhaskellsmith.com

“I like writing that fills the page with energy and invention. I like stories chock-full of incident, with passionate characters that have what Iggy Pop might call a ‘Lust for Life.’ I can’t teach talent, but I can give you ways to look at your work that can help you elevate your writing and, most importantly, discover and amplify your original, authentic voice. Finding that unique voice is the single most important step you can take towards getting your work published. This is true whether you’re writing novels, short stories, or creative nonfiction. It’s equally important that you learn to be a critical reader—developing an ability to see and articulate what works and doesn’t work in writing other than your own. We’re all adults, so there are no taboos or restrictions of any kind in what I hope will be a constructive, dynamic, and fun experience.”

(Fiction)  BRENT SPENCER, novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter, is the author of a novel, The Lost Son (Arcade Publishing), and a collection of stories, Are We Not Men? (Arcade Publishing), which was chosen by the editors of The Village Voice as one of the best books of the year. He teaches creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, where he also coordinates the Film Studies Minor. Among his awards are the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, where he was also a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing, and the James Michener Award at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he earned an MFA. He has also been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and The Millay Colony. His fiction, poetry, and articles have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Literary Review, Epoch, The Missouri Review, GQ, Writers Digest, and elsewhere. With his wife, novelist Jonis Agee, he is the co-author of the screenplay Speedway (New Horizons Picture Corporation). His screenplay Coultergeist was a finalist for the Slamdance Film Festival’s screenwriting competition. His short story “The True History” appears in the current edition of Best American Mystery Stories, edited by Carl Hiaasen.

“I think teaching creative writing is a process of helping to bring out the voice and subject matter that are already in the writer but that the writer may not yet have fully embraced as his or her own. Once that happens, it’s a matter of helping the writer find the best techniques for the writer’s particular voice and subject matter. Writing well means getting in touch with the truest part of yourself. Strangely—maddeningly—the writer is not always the best judge of when that’s happening. As D.H. Lawrence says, 'Trust the tale, not the teller.' It helps to have a close reader who can keep you on track. At its best, this kind of relationship between a writer and reader can save years in a writer’s development. I like to think my taste is so broad that I can be a good reader for most any kind of writing. Call me crazy but I get jazzed about the long-term intense give-and-take of the writer-reader relationship, as both watch the work grow to perfection. It seems to me that the model embodied by Nebraska’s program is made-to-order for a writer’s real development."

(Fiction/CNF) MARY HELEN STEFANIAK, a native of Milwaukee, is a writer of fiction and essays. Her work has appeared in many publications, including EPOCH, Short Story, The Yale Review, AGNI, and The Antioch Review, and in several anthologies, including New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best (Algonquin Books); In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary NonFiction from the Heartland (Indiana University Press); and A Different Plain (U. of Nebraska Press). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and fifteen-year veteran of the Iowa Summer Writing Festivzal faculty, she is currently Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Creighton University in Omaha. She has also served as a commentator on Iowa Public Radio, a columnist for The Iowa Source, and as Contributing Editor for The Iowa Review. Her collection of short fiction, Self Storage and Other Stories (New Rivers Press), was selected by the Wisconsin Library Association to receive the 1998 Banta Award for Literary Excellence, and her novella, “The Turk and My Mother" (EPOCH, Fall 2000) was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. Her first novel, also entitled The Turk and My Mother (W.W. Norton, 2004) received the 2005 John Gardner Book Award, was named a favorite book of 2004 by The Chicago Tribune, and has been translated or is forthcoming in six languages. She is currently working on her second novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia.

“I agree with Flannery O’Connor when she says, ‘The time to worry about technique is when you have the story in front of you,’ but also with William Faulkner who advises us to ‘Read, read, read everything . . . and ask yourself how they do it.’ Maybe poet Marvin Bell puts it best: ‘Learning to write is a simple process: Read something, then write something. And show in your writing what you have read.’ The teacher’s role in all this—whether she is the official instructor or a writer-colleague in the writing workshop—is not to ‘fix’ the draft under discussion, but to help the writer discover its gifts and identify its problems (which are also opportunities), i.e., to empower the writer to revise with enthusiasm.”