On Friday and Saturday, October 12-13, the third annual Auburn
Writers Conference will open its doors to aspiring, emerging and established
writers and readers.
This year’s theme is “The Winding Road: Travel, Identity, and theSearch for Voice.” Embracing the broadest definition of “travel”—whether in our
heads or on the road—the conference invites writers and readers who “hear the
beckoning call of discovery and new cultures, as well as those who believe that
the greatest voyage may be an exploration of the places we call home.”
Sponsored by the Auburn University Department of English, the
Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities and the Collegeof Liberal Arts, AWC features talks and workshops on craft, publishing and promotion
for poets and fiction and nonfiction writers.
Among this year’s presenters are Barbara Brown Taylor and Debra
Moffitt, both contributors to Circling
Faith: Southern
Women on Spirituality. Edited by poet
Jennifer Horne and writer-producer Wendy Reed, Circling Faith is a volume of essays on the joys and struggles of spiritual
life.
Taylor, the Butman
Professor of Religion at Piedmont College in rural northeast Georgia, is the
author of twelve books, including the New
York Times-bestseller An Altar in the World and the acclaimed memoir Leaving
Church: A Memoir of Faith. Taylor
studied at Yale Divinity School and Emory University and was ordained as an Episcopal
priest in 1984.
Moffitt is
the award-winning author of Awake in the World: 108 Practices to
Live a Divinely Inspired Life and the forthcoming Garden of Bliss: Cultivating the
Inner Landscape for Self-Discovery. Her work has appeared in Faith and Form: The
Journal of Religion, Art and Architecture, The European, Venture
Inward and other publications
in the U.S. and Europe. Awake in the
World presents spiritual practices from around the world from meditation to
walking labyrinths, pilgrimages and retreats.
On Friday, October 12, Moffitt will lead a workshop on the creative process from the birth of an idea
to its launch into the world. It will include tools to tap into powerful
resources of creative energy, get structured and create a writing discipline.
Both writers will
appear, along with the editors, on a Circling
Faith panel on Saturday. A third contributor, singer-songwriter and memoirist
Marshall Chapman, will perform on Friday night.
