Dipping Into the 2026 Santa Barbara Writers Conference

Just once, I am going to be able to report that I took advantage of every possible presentation, class, and panel at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Unfortunately, as inevitably happens year after year, I didn’t get to experience nearly as much of last week’s Santa Barbara Writers Conference as I would have liked to. However, the handful of things I was able to attend were entertaining, inspiring and motivating.

Here are a few of the highlights.

The Five Genres Panel, moderated by workshop leader Karen K. Ford (short fiction) and featuring Jesse Krenzel (legal thrillers), Anita Perez Ferguson (YA novels), Jann Winford (humor), Ginger Swanson (poetic picture stories), and Stephanie Barbé Hammer (magical realism), was engaging from the get-go as writers discussed a broad range of topics including how they chose their genre.

“I’ve always loved fairy tales,” said Barbé Hammer, who is a professor and poet in addition to writing fiction. “I’ve always loved the imposition of unreal elements into the real world.” That, as pointed out, is the primary difference between magical realism (inserting unreal elements in the existing universe) and fantasy, which may create the entire world from unreal things. 

Perez Ferguson said that she herself was “always a reluctant reader and writer” and was motivated to create things to stir young students who were similar.

Winford said she’s more of a storyteller than a writer. “When I was a child, I learned that telling stories would serve you very well. In other words, ‘No, Mom, I didn’t eat the cookies,’ and I found that bending the truth was really, really a nifty thing to have.” Almost every writer in the room related to her comment, “I hate to write but I love to have written” — at least sometimes.

Discussing the audience for their books, Perez Ferguson said that in her case, with YA, “the buyers (parents, teachers, librarians) and the readers (teenagers) are different people.”

“Well, you’ve got to give the publisher the name of your genre, right? You can’t submit something and say, ‘Well, I don’t know what it really is, you’ll have to tell me,’” said Krenzel, an attorney. “I kind of jumped at the legal thriller idea, because the first first novel is pretty intense … I think that the publishers really want to keep you in a box, you know. So there’s a bit of negotiation that goes on there, but I think it’s just, it’s just the world we live in, so we do it when we do, hopefully as best we can.”

“I think we are all put in little boxes repeatedly throughout our lives, and this is no exception,” said Swanson. “I found that I really wanted my little story to get out into the eco psychology world, because it’s about human kindness; it’s about the environment; it’s about sensitivity to other living beings on earth, and so the box of children’s writing, people don’t realize that this is just as much for Grandma and Grandpa as it is Mom and Dad, as it is for the children, so it’s really wonderful to think of breaking the boxes, and I’m just encouraging box breaking in the genre world.”

Before each of the evening panels they feature poetry readings and I was fortunate to hear Santa Barbara Poet Laureates Paul Willis and Melinda Palacio (who also writes the Independent’s Poetry Connection column) read and discuss some of their work.

Asked about their use of humor, Willis said, “I never set out to be funny. The humor is inadvertent. I myself, I think it’s pretty mild, but I think part of trying to be an observer is noticing incongruities around us, and I think that’s the basis of a lot of humor.”

“I’m glad that Paul was able to answer that question, because I don’t think I’m necessarily funny,” said Palacio. “But I grew up in a big family, and humor was a way to cope with the long line for the bathroom and when when your uncle would eat your dinner, because you were taking too long, and with all the growing pains, and they would make fun of everything, fun of me for looking like an awkward teenager, and so humor was important.”

Described, very aptly, by Marianne Dougherty who edits the Writers Conference’s daily bulletin, as, “a very shrewd observer of the American experience,” novelist Jess Walter gave an excellent talk about his work and his career. A friend described him as a writer of “stand-up tragedy,” said Walter, the author of eight novels, including his latest, So Far Gone, the bestsellers The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins, and a National Book Award finalist for The Zero. He’s a former journalist, which may have something to do with that finding the humor in tragedy part.

He grew up in a blue-collar family in Spokane, Washington, where, “Bing Crosby is the most famous person from my hometown,” Walter said. “So, I’ve launched all of my books with a reading at the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane, and my dad was there for one of those events, and he saw 600 people in the crowd, and he just kept looking around, rather surprised.”

He continued, “I remember at one point I told my dad I was heading out on a book tour, and he said, ‘Well, what do you do on a book tour?’ I said, ‘Well, I go to universities sometimes, I go to theaters, I go to writers conferences, I go to bookstores, and I give readings. And he got this funny look, and he said, ‘You wrote the goddamn thing, and you have to read it to them too.’”

But, Walter confided, once he saw the crowd at my book signing my dad never brought me the want ads to get a real job again — and he never bought lunch again either.

For more information about next year’s conference, see sbwriters.com.