The message from President Obama is to cut back and simplify.

The folks at the Whidbey Island Writers Association followed his lead when organizing this year’s Whidbey Island Writers Conference.

Fortunately, the annual conference is going back to basics without losing any of its wow factor.

Registration is open for what previous conference participants have called one of the best writers conferences this side of the Mississippi. It all happens on Friday, Feb. 27 and Saturday, Feb. 28.

This year the newly shortened two-day conference will focus on five main areas of writing, including fiction, writing for children/young adult, nonfiction, poetry and screenplay writing.

Basics aside, the conference has managed to shorten the length of the event without losing any of the excitement.

Each year a talented cast of presenters sweeps into Langley to share a love of writing and help aspiring writers hone their craft.

This year, conference organizers have found just the right group of the literary world’s shining stars to cast their glow on Whidbey’s writing community.

Writers such as Karen Fisher, whose first novel “A Sudden Country,” based on a smattering of facts from her ancestors’ migration to Oregon in 1847, wowed the critics and won her several awards, including a place among the 2006 finalists chosen for the prestigious Pen/Faulkner Award.

In an excerpt from the book she writes:

He carried his girl tied to his front, the trapsack on his back, the rifle balanced like a yoke along his shoulders. He walked all day on snowshoes, lost in effort, in steady breathing. The snow drove thick and clotted on his eyebrows, filled his beard. It cluttered his drawing breath.

Fisher will present a session entitled “Time Travel.”

Here Fisher deals with one of the most challenging aspects of telling a story — deciding where (in time) it should begin, how much to tell and how to handle information from the past. She’ll first talk about story shape and linear stories, and then discuss nonlinear techniques such as flashbacks/flash-forwards, memory and dialogue.

“Winter is such a solitary time for me,” Fisher said.

“So I look forward to the charge that comes from mingling, talking, sharing ideas, sharing stories, sitting in new chairs, drinking too many cups of coffee.”

Enhancing that charge is writing success story Philip Margolin.

Since 1996, this former criminal lawyer has been writing full-time.

All of Margolin’s novels have been New York Times bestsellers and most have been major bookclub selections. His most recent thriller, “Executive Privilege,” has been described by one reviewer as “twisted and brilliant.”

Margolin’s short story, “The Jailhouse Lawyer,” was selected for the anthology 1999, The Best American Mystery Stories.

At the conference, Margolin will lead the session “How to Write a Novel in Your Spare Time.”

This self-taught writer wrote his first five novels while practicing law full-time and while raising two children with his wife. He will talk about the technique he developed for writing a novel while working and raising a family.

One local writer who may not have had the same time problems as Margolin, talks about other challenges, such as just letting the book come out.

Whidbey Island writer Lawrence Cheek will be sharing a bit of his non-fiction writing tribulations with conference goers.

Cheek is the author of “The Year of the Boat: Beauty, Imperfection, and the Art of Doing It Yourself,” published last year.

After a missed deadline, Cheek’s project to build a boat in his garage became an inquiry into the nature of beauty, a struggle with obsession and perfectionism and finally a question of character. “The Year of the Boat” is the story of how one man built a boat in spite of himself.

His session entitled “The Essay: Window onto a Mind at Work,” will explain how to use the writing of an essay as a mechanism for figuring things out, bringing readers along through the process.

On the practical side, one romance novelist gets into plot.

Lisa Hendrix writes romance novels, among other sundries. She has published six novels and is currently writing a multi-book paranormal/historical romance series for Berkley Books.

Hendrix said that she regularly attends and presents workshops at regional and national romance conferences, but that this will be the first general writing conference she’s attended in about 10 years.

“I’m looking forward to the cross-pollination of ideas that you get when writers from different genres sit down together,” Hendrix said.

“And I’m looking forward to learning from my workshop participants. They challenge me to think more deeply about the subject. There’s nothing quite as focusing as trying to explain the craft of writing.”

Hendrix will present “How to Avoid the Plotless Wonder — Goals, Conflict and Story Structure.”

Characters and their goals provide the basis for all plots. Hendrix shows how to use a conflict grid to ferret out the diciest internal and external conflicts and turn them into a page-turning story.

Non-fiction writer Wendy Call is happy to be ferrying over to Whidbey Island.

“I am looking forward to seeing and hearing and smelling one of my favorite islands in early springtime,” Call said.

“OK, late winter, but I’m trying to be optimistic,” she added.

Call said she enjoys the time spent talking books with “fellow word nerds,” and sitting around a table with a circle of dedicated writers on Saturday night, freewriting in blissful unity.

Call is the 2009 Distinguished Northwest Writer in Residence at Seattle University. She also teaches creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University and Seattle’s Richard Hugo House.

She is co-editor of “Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide.” Her narrative nonfiction, essays and poem translations have appeared in more than 30 magazines and journals in seven countries.

Call will speak on the “Self-Editors Toolkit: Improve Your Own Prose.”

She’ll talk about how to gain powerful tools to improve your prose at all stages of the writing process, from revising a first draft to putting the finishing touches on a nearly completed work. Examples from well-known writers and an extensive handout will allow writers to take home a personalized, self-editing tool kit.

Some other authors attending the conference are Whidbey Island resident and “Loving Frank” author Nancy Horan; poets Oliver de la Paz, Richard Robbins, Gary Thompson and Carolyne Wright; authors of young adult and children’s books Suzanne Selfors, Carmen T. Bernier-Grand, Deb Lund and George Shannon; and a long list of authors from all genres too long to print here.

Besides the excitement of meeting the writers, workshopping and engaging in the Friday night fireside chats that everybody who attends the conference raves about, participants have the chance to meet with agents, editors and publishers. If you’re ready to pitch your work, be sure to sign up for a consultation with an agent or editor.

You might want to brush up on your poetry skills or practice Scrabble; the Friday Night Fun events include a Poetry Slam, Word Games and Bedtime Stories.

Though the conference has been sheared down to two economical days, participants can join in post-conference workshops on Saturday night.

Saturday night post-conference workshops require an additional fee and are open to non-attendees. Click here for registration information and the full schedule of events.