Each October, the MWPA currently collaborates on the Iota Conference in Trescott, Maine.
Held at the Cobscook Institute, on October 15-18, the Iota Conference offers two multi-genre generative workshops, this year with-award-winning writers Penny Guisinger and Alexis Paige, and an optional multi-genre pre-submitted workshop with award-winning writer Lewis Robinson, not to mention readings, conversations, good food, and fellowship, over three days in beautiful Downeast Maine.. After the conference, there is also an add-on writing retreat with Suzanne Strempek Shea from October 18-22. For more information, rates, accommodations, registration, and more, please visit the conference page at the Cobscook Institute.
Penny Guisinger (she/her), above left, is the author of Postcards from Here and the award winning Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Guernica, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. Pushcart nominated, a Maine Literary Award winner, and a three-time notable in Best American Essays, she is a co-director of Iota Short Forms and a former assistant editor at Brevity. Penny is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program.
Alexis Paige, above at right, is the author of two award-winning memoirs: Work Hard, Not Smart: How to Make a Messy Literary Life, a memoir of writing craft and creativity; and Not a Place on Any Map, a memoir-in-flash about the geography of trauma—both published by Vine Leaves Press, where Paige is the Nonfiction Acquisitions Editor. Her work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Hippocampus Book’s Getting to the Truth: The Craft and Practice of Creative Nonfiction, Longform, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, and Brevity, where she was an Assistant Editor. Winner of the New Millennium Nonfiction Prize and twice a top-ten finalist of Glamour Magazine’s Essay Contest, Paige has also received two “Notable” mentions in Best American Essays and four Pushcart Prize nominations. She teaches in the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University and is an Associate Professor of English at Vermont State University.
Lewis Robinson, above at center, is the author of the novel The Islanders (Islandport, 2024), Water Dogs (Random House, 2009), a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and Officer Friendly and Other Stories (HarperCollins, 2003), winner of a Whiting Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Sports Illustrated, Tin House, The Baffler, The Boston Globe, The New York Times Book Review and on NPR’s program Selected Shorts. He has taught fiction writing at the University of Iowa, Colby College, the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, Phillips Academy, Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program, and is currently an associate professor at the University of Maine Farmington. He lives in Portland.