The 18th annual Winter Wheat Festival drew skilled writers from all over the region to the Bowen-Thompson Student Union the first week of November. Named as a metaphor for planting seeds to later take harvest in the spring, Winter Wheat provides University students, faculty and visitors with an environment to learn more about creative writing, often directly from professionals.
Winter Wheat 2018 was separated into three days, offering a book fair and six different 75-minute workshop sessions for guests to hone their creative writing skills. Each session offered seven or eight different workshops, where participants can select anything they want. They are useful for self-improvement, according to Abigail Cloud, the festival’s coordinator.
“The workshops include writing time within them. You walk away with new writing to work with over the next months and then hopefully have some sort of harvest of creative work down the road. The writing time, especially, makes Winter Wheat different from most other conferences,” she said.
There was also a roundtable session, where people spent around an hour asking questions to three Mid-American Review editors. Mid-American Review is a publication literary journal of the English department, but it is staffed primarily by the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing students. According to Cloud, undergraduate creative writers in the creative writing program, or sometimes the English program, help to keep the festival running smoothly.
“They volunteer, give presentations and help to keep things cohesive during the event,” she said.
The annual Winter Wheat Festival started when Cloud was a University graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts Program of Creative Writing in 2001. She has had a close connection with the event from its conception on campus and has always played a role in it. Before settling on “Winter Wheat” as a metaphor for sowing seeds, the festival’s creators played around with several different names, one of which was “Wheatstock,” a play on Woodstock.
“I have very distinct memories of being at the lounge in East Hall, talking about the creation of a new festival. It was the brainchild of Karen Craigo, who was the Mid-American Review poetry editor at the time, later associate editor and then co-editor-in-chief. Craigo’s idea was to have a sort of Bohemian-style festival but something that would be open to the public and would bring in people from outside as well so sort of merging our community of writers,” she said.
The festival is moderately-sized, but it attracts people from all over the region. Sometimes, guests come to Winter Wheat from as far out as the coasts.
“We’ve had people from UCLA come out, folks from the New York side and Boston. We have some connections, actually, with folks in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois, and occasionally from the South, we’ll get folks from West Virginia and Kentucky, occasionally Tennessee, and so on,” Cloud said.
Each year, the Winter Wheat Festival is free of charge to attend, although donations are accepted. For more information, Winter Wheat staff can be contacted via email at [email protected] or by phone at (419) 372-2725.