A Poet Writing Historical Fiction?
After writing and publishing five books of poetry from Crying in the Cheap Seats (University of Massachusetts Press) to Duhamel: Ideas of Order in Little Canada (BOA Editions Ltd.) inside of twenty years, Bill Tremblay began in 1991 to research the history of Larimer County, Colorado, and discovered the figure of Joeseph Antoine Janis, the first white man to receive a legal deed in this area through the Homestead Act in 1864. Tremblay will discuss the process of transforming historical research into the stuff of fiction through at least four stages of the composing process, illustrating his points with selected readings from his novel, The June Rise: the Apocryphal Letters of Joseph Antoine Janis. He'll also answer questions regarding how he found a literary agent, his negotiations with various presses, and his attempts to turn The June Rise (the novel) into "The June Rise," the film-script.