The Writing University Podcast

For this talk, we - together, you and I, audience and speaker - will explore maximalist writing as an aesthetics of excess that, according to Will Hertel, strives to "submerge readers with informational deluges, utilizing a variety of subject material and literary techniques and genres to maintain attention." However, chief among our discussion will be the question: what if one is a writer who only wants to use this technique occasionally, and elsewhere engage in a less elaborative style? Can this be achieved by crafting excess—that is, attending deliberately to pacing, use of figurative language, and/or a robust narrative voice? I believe so. Writers of any genre and experience can benefit from our discussions, which will include examinations of prose works from Richard Wright, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Original lecture date: July 19, 2023

To borrow a cliche, let's go down the rabbit hole. But on the way down, let's observe the dirt, the worms, the twists, the darkness, the sacred and the profane. For a writing project, whether a short story or a novel, trope can be an entry point. Think: a locked room mystery, dark academia, a midlife crisis. Similarly, on the sentence level, cliche can be relatable and point the writer in the direction of deeper truth. Finally, identifying generic language and abstraction can guide revision. This session will draw from popular novels and explore how literary writers use character and voice to successfully subvert trope and cliche to create meaning. Original lecture date: July 10, 2023

However creative and brilliant you are, your work is evaluated (consciously or not) for its style. We write in different styles, but all writing needs correct grammar and appropriate punctuation. Good writing is characterized by the clarity and felicity of sentences. Almost everyone has "tics" that mar style, such as problems with noun/pronoun agreement, clumsy clauses, dangling participles, and unclear antecedents. Sometimes, passages sound like transcriptions of talk. What to do? Add style-review to your writing process. Know the rules, and develop self-consciousness. This session will give you models, ideas, and resources for improving your style.

Is peace the absence of conflict or a state that can exist within conflict? How can writing cultivate, reveal, practice, and advance personal and shared forms of peaceable assembly? What's the relationship between peace and protest, politics and private experience? This lecture will consider diverse poems that help us think about these questions, including work by poets such as Ghayath Almadhoun, Yehuda Amichai, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kenneth Koch, Hayan Charara, Jane Hirshfield, and others. We'll consider how literature can help us make peace, again and again, and what can be made from that.

Most of us who write feel the need to remember our dead in elegies, memoir, or fiction, a task that can be more difficult than we at first expect. Often our first challenge is to speak at all, to find language adequate to our grief. Then come other questions: given the injunction not to “speak ill of the dead,” and our own love for those we’ve lost, how do we avoid unrealistically idealizing them and thus stripping them of their complex humanity? How do we convey, in the short space of a poem or an essay, how our mother or grandmother or child or spouse was different from anyone else’s? How do we make the work about the person we remember and not primarily about us and our pain—should we even be trying to do so?—etc. In this Eleventh Hour we will consider these and other questions, looking at samples of successful elegies, considering how they succeed, and doing a bit of free-writing towards work of our own. Although the samples we will consider will consist primarily of narrative poems, lessons we can take from them will apply regardless of genre.

We often think about the tool of reflection in writing as a mode of thought or tone of voice we employ when we ruminate, meditate, contemplate or explain—in short, when we provide what Phillip Gerard calls, “finished thought.” But we might also think about reflection as a turning, as a sometimes distorting, but transformational power. In this talk, we’ll look briefly at four qualities of reflection that might encourage artistic transformation in our writing and try some short exercises that will give you some practical tools to “think” about yourself differently on the page.

Many book editors and agents say that they read the first paragraph of a manuscript, and if they like it, they skip ahead to read some dialogue. If the dialogue is strong, they go back to page one and keep reading. If the dialogue is weak, the editor or agent sets down the manuscript, and the chances for publication (with that particular house or agency, anyway) end there. Knowing how to write good dialogue, then, is crucial to publication—and readership (and of course, if anything, is even more crucial in the arts of playwriting and scriptwriting).

As a painter, I am constantly recognizing ideas about composition in art that speak directly to what I do as a writer. One concept that is especially useful is Notan, a Japanese term that means "light-dark balance." We can also think of positive and negative space, or symmetry and asymmetry--all ideas about shapes and patterns that are the foundation of composition. Consider the ways that you, too, can utilize this ancient mindset to heighten the quality of composition in your work.

The “central channel,” a somatic and energetic space well-known for centuries in contemplative disciplines, is rarely discussed in connection with writing. Understanding the central channel, and how to apply it to writing, can reveal much about us as artists, and it can open up our craft. This will be an informative, and often humorous presentation—from a poet, essayist, and editor of dharma texts—with examples from many genres, and ample space for discussion.

The memory curve, on a most basic level, means the reader’s attention is highest at the beginning, dips in the middle, and goes up again at the end. When putting pen to paper for the first time, most writers don’t think about a reader’s memory curve, nor should they. But when considering structure after the fact, during revision, it is of paramount importance. Structuring a story or a novel has everything to do with managing the retention dip in the middle of the curve. This requires a focus on beginnings, endings and transitions. This lecture will focus primarily on transitions, their power and how they can become intermittent beginnings and endings when used effectively.

“The present moment is all you have,” as author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says, and nowhere is this more the case than in writing. Successful narrative writing allows the reader to virtually experience a series of present moments through the magic of language and imagination. Mary Allen shares what’s she’s learned as a writer and a writing coach about how to create present moments on the page, why it’s important to do so, and what learning how to do so can teach us about living our lives.

No one wants your story, essay, or poem to read like Fast and the Furious 9. But Hollywood formulae reflect a kind of science of narrative satisfaction, which can be transformative for a piece that isn't coming together in precisely the right way. We'll apply a number of hallowed screenwriting maxims to works of nonfiction and fiction, from overall structure down to the level of the scene. This session will give you resources for revising work in any genre.

We’re all voyeurs when it comes to the habits and practices of other writers. Do they churn out a certain number of pages each week? Do they have a day job? A cat? A room of their own? What does the desk look like? After peeking into several artists’ practices, we’ll turn to our own—not just with our writing, but our everyday lives: doing the dishes to walking the dog; vegetable gardening to schlepping kids to hockey; playing drums to serving at the church soup kitchen. We will explore the nature of dailiness and how such activities can shape our art. What does it take to create a whole life, one that will nourish us and allow our writing to flow out of it rather than squeeze into it? Come with questions and a niggling sense of possibility.

Poets and songwriters utilize aspects of language that are essential for prose writers to know. Take the slow, repeated vowels and consonants Joyce uses in “The Dead”: “…his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe…” or the hasty sibilance alive in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Oh wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets!” Sound and rhythm help create sense and emotion, and by paying close and purposeful attention to the words we use—the beginnings of them, the interior sounds of them, the rhythm of them—we can evoke and ignite those senses and those emotions. In this Eleventh Hour you’ll hear (and practice) how techniques used in the sung and the spoken can help us create magic on the page.

The most intimate, powerful, and fraught relationships in our lives are often with the limited inner circle we call family. For that reason, those relationships often feature heavily in our writing. However, to write about family relationships means putting its players on a public stage, and this can bring a whole set of unique issues, both practical and emotional. In this lecture and discussion, specific difficulties a writer faces in writing about family members will be addressed, including concerns about ethical treatment of your subjects, family responses to publication, the writer’s fear of repercussions, discrepancies in memory, and research challenges.

Transforming life into writing is an individual process, as individual as the art we create. Another way to think about this is how do we understand and explain the relationship of the real or actual, what some people might call, what really happened, to the stories, poems or essays we put on the page. Much of what I have to say will be a practical guide for helping writers access stories from their own lives and the lives of people they know, with pointers on bringing that material into full blossom on the page. In addition, drawing on my experience in writing a forthcoming novel/memoir, I’ll address an issue I know many ISWF students struggle with: should this be fiction or memoir.

Chiaroscuro, in art, is a technique that uses bold contrasts of light and dark in painting to create vivid scenes and evoke emotion. It renders images almost three-dimensional. In writing, the bold use of light and dark has a similar effect. The balance of the serious with the humorous allows readers the chance to enter a story more fully, to laugh and cry, and connect with writing in a way that writing straight serious prose or simply humorous doesn't allow. This Eleventh Hour talk will look at examples from writing and art that perfectly balance the dark with the light to create hilarious and heart-rending work on the page.

In creative writing, truth isn’t everything, but emotional truth almost is. Whatever the genre, however familiar or strange the situation or action, readers need to believe that the emotions in a piece of writing are true. And nothing conveys emotional truth more powerfully than mixed feelings. Combining different emotions, including conflicting emotions, can strengthen their intensity as well as deepening our sense of their authenticity. In this talk and conversation we will explore some of the ways in which mixed feelings work, looking at examples from various genres and considering occasions when mixing emotions might fail us.

This lecture will consider memoirs and essays written about events that are still unfolding. How can you tell a story when you don't know how it will end? How can you write about yourself when your relationship to time, memory, language, the body, and the self are changing? We'll discuss memoirs from the middle of things by authors such as Laura Hillenbrand, Caren Beilin, Audre Lorde, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kazim Ali, Lily Hoang, and others. We'll ask how close attention to thresholds, brinks, and passing moments can lead to lasting discoveries.

In this lecture, we’ll consider some recent poems in which gratitude emerges from or exists alongside difficult experiences. How do moments of acute gratitude interact with loss, grief, memory, and ongoing complexity? What are some ways in which a poem can break into thanks, however briefly? Perhaps poetry of gratitude goes beyond “finding a silver lining;” perhaps it offers an ethics of reflection that, through ways of speaking that become ways of being, intricately connects a poem to culture and community. We’ll discuss work by poets such as Kazim Ali, Ross Gay, Lauren Haldeman, Carl Phillips, Juliana Spahr, and others, as we think closely about what it means for a poem to say thank you.

Getting a story onto the page is a necessary first step. Then the heavy lifting, both outer and inner, can begin. While the facts of a real-life or fictional event may remain static from draft to draft, the author's interpretation of those events is likely to change with each iteration. That's where the real magic comes in. The workshop setting with its directed questioning is an ideal site for new insights to emerge. This Eleventh Hour combines literary craft and narrative therapy to explain how re-vision can promote lasting artistic and personal benefits.

We often think about the tool of reflection in writing as a mode of thought or tone of voice we employ when we ruminate, meditate, contemplate, or explain—in short, when we provide what Phillip Gerard calls “finished thought.” But we might also think about reflection as a turning, as a sometimes distorting, but transformational power. In this talk, we’ll look briefly at four qualities of reflection that might encourage artistic transformation in our writing and try some short exercises that will give you some practical tools to “think” about yourself differently on the page.

Death has haunted the work of countless authors. And even if we’re not writing about death directly, it often overshadows our creations, as we deal with the loss of loved ones and the inevitability of our own mortality. These struggles can be paralyzing, or they can usher in new insights. Lori Erickson will talk about how wrestling with questions relating to loss, grieving, and mortality can provide rich inspiration for our writing.

During workshops, it often becomes clear how heavily the “feminine” voice—characterized by multi-angled, expansive prose and a focus on the emotional realm—is criticized in writing, and the “masculine” voice—characterized by straightforward, sparse prose and a focus on the physical realm—is pushed. Editors and the work they publish reinforce this aesthetic preference, which affects our culture in a feedback loop. Yet, male, female, and gender-neutral writers alike reflect varying degrees of traditional masculinity or femininity in their authorial voices. We will interrogate the assumptions about the masculine voice versus the feminine voice, and discuss how it relates to our writing.

Writers frequently confront taboos—cultural, religious, and sexual—in their work. These taboos are also reinforced by the publishing process. When is it OK to offend? When is it gratuitous? Are you being honest, or are you being a jerk? Who decides? In this Eleventh Hour presentation, Charles Holdefer will talk of recent trends and describe some of his own experiences in regard to these thorny questions.

Giving a piece of writing a title is a proper and necessary act—otherwise we’d have, “Untitled,” by Homer, not to be confused with Leo Tolstoy’s great work, “Untitled.” Yet titling is not generally spoken of at any length or depth. Naming anything—a book, a boat, a racehorse, or a child—is at once a craft and an art. There are spectacular titles, serviceable titles, and failed titles; but beyond that there are types of titles we can look at. Usually there’s only one best title for something, and new writers often shirk the task of finding it, or override it with cleverness or extravagance. This Eleventh Hour talk will be full of examples, suggestions, and exercises designed to help us think about titles.

Lord Byron said, "We of the craft are all crazy." Maybe, maybe not. This talk will examine the forces that influence what we write, why we write, when we write, and where we write. Drugs, drink, depression, joy, compulsion, imagination, dreams, secrets, dollars—we'll cover the bitter and the sweet aspects of the act of creation. Caution: Gordon Mennenga is a writer not a doctor.

Much of my favorite work to read and to teach can be considered “resistant narratives”—work that responds to and rewrites the narratives we have received from a culture that often wishes to reduce and limit our very souls. To become an artist is to write oneself back into being. A book can be a place where the individual remakes the world. In this talk, we will consider writing as political resistance, a tool to counter the limitations of cultural, societal, and familial expectation. Contemporary writers have long created literary spaces of resistance and possibility, taking the status of outsider and expanding the project of literature.

Beneath our writing is a deep sense of self that informs the way we organize experience and shape meaning. Autobiographical writing heightens our awareness of life's patterns and themes, concepts that in turn feed fiction, creative nonfiction, essay, and poetry. This discussion will draw on contemporary thinking in narrative psychology and narrative theory, as well as models from literature, in the framework of incorporating the story lens of life experience into our creative work.

Talent is important in creative writing, but resilience is critical. Writing is a lonely endeavor with much rejection. Even worse, our projects are often so long-term that they require the staying power of a marathon runner. So how do we develop that sort of endurance—that stubborn persistence? Tim Bascom will discuss tried-and-true habits from practicing writers who have refused to quit.

This lecture will consider the act of naming. How do we choose the names we give to the characters and figures in our stories and poems? How does a name give a character charge, or mark it, or erase it, or illuminate it? How can a name be used as a veil or a cape? An echo or a halo? What are the joys and pitfalls of using the names of the living and the dead inside acts of the imagination?

The best essays, according to John D’Agata, Director of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, are a “mind on a page.” According to Bernard Cooper, they magnify “some small aspect of what it means to be human.” But what does this mean, exactly? It means the best essayists harness a very particular and personal truth to speak to larger experience. Amy Butcher shares how a New York Times Sunday Review Op-Ed on the startling lack of diversity in our universal emoji set (while male emojis engaged in work and industry, female avatars had their nails painted, received haircuts, or enjoyed flamenco dancing) inspired Google technicians and international change.

We often think of writing as something we’ll really get to do later, when life slows down and we have more time to devote to it. Writing retreats, those programs or places that offer endless space to write and think, couldn’t be nicer. But we don’t have to wait for an official writing retreat to make a peaceful opening for writing in our daily lives. Not only that, we can use writing itself as a way to slow down and become more aware, so that our daily lives can become less hurried and cramped and more open and spacious. Mary Allen will share what she’s learned about creating everyday writing retreats as well as using writing to make the most of every vacation, retreat, and ordinary moment.

This lecture will consider what is at the heart of critique and discuss the relationship between the workshop and places of worship, confessional boxes, crying rooms, hospitals, wombs, therapist offices, museums, and trash cans. When the writer brings her stories and poems into workshop, should she disappear? Replace her body with the page? And why do we bring our poems and stories into workshop anyway? To air them out? To rescue and repair? To heal them from our loneliness? What are we after and what are we given back? Sabrina Orah Mark will share her experiences with the traditional academic workshop, and the workshop she leads out of her garage.

In this Eleventh Hour, poet Michael Morse will discuss how a work of writing can inhabit its contemporary situation by addressing a distant practitioner or piece—as an inspiration, a model, or even a foil. We’ll look at and discuss some model poems and engage in an invigorating circuit of generative exercises suitable for writers of any genre.

Readers and writers often refer to novels in a binary way. They think of them as being either commercial (popular) or literary (artful). It’s a false dichotomy that sets you up to feel defensive, no matter what you write. It fails to recognize the extreme (and exciting) diversity in contemporary writing. And it underestimates readers. Quality of writing and quality of story make magic when they are the right mix at the right time, but quality is as hard to pin down as beauty or talent. Wherever your tastes and talents are on the continuum, from bestselling romance to winners of Le Prix Goncourt, there’s something to be learned at every interval, from Elmore Leonard to Paul Auster, from Shades of Gray to The Underground Railroad.

From Conception to Delivery: The Birth of One Novel w/ Amy Hassinger

Writing for Strangers: A Question of Audience w/ Lon Otto

The Poet As Collector w/ Sabrina Orah Mark

Please, Just Don’t Call It Journaling: Writing for Self Versus Others w/ Sarah Saffian

The Power and the Place of Place w/ Eric Goodman

Against Ideas w/ Paula Morris

Actually Writing: The Outer, Inner & Secret Practice w/ Diana Goetsch

Writing in the Digital Age w/ Ned Stuckey-French

Hybrid Writing w/ Elizabeth Robinson

Mysteries of Love and Grief: The Long Way from Impulse to Family Story w/ Sandra Scofield

Ghosts, Battlefields and Hallucinations: Creative Writing from Research w/ Lauren Haldeman

Clarity and Depth: Writing between the Lines w/ Venise Berry

How to Write the Ten-Minute Play: Kelly Dwyer

Where Experience Starts: The Image: Juliet Patterson

Nerve: Some Kinds of Courage Necessary for Writing: Lon Otto

Same Content / Different Form: Jim Heynen

The Art of Play: Jeffery Renard Allen

Until the early 20th Century, almost all literary artists, including essayists, felt compelled to picture recognizable figures and images that seemed “factual.” The famous surrealist artist René Magritte began to break down that barrier by putting two unrelated objects in juxtaposition, challenging viewers to see an object differently than how it was originally perceived. We’ll look at images from Magritte and others to see how visual art might be used as inspiration for text on the page, and allow writers to recognize freedoms they may not have fully realized.

A single lecture compressed from a popular weekend workshop: you have your favorite story, poem, limerick, song, theater piece, and you keep getting close—so close—to completing it. Then the dog gets the measles, you worry that your mom will read it, you get divorced, married, a new job, you take up fantasy football or water polo, you give up smoking, you try to live without the internet and everything grinds to a halt. You never finish the thing. Beau O’Reilly will use his psychic bulk, creative moxie, and his own experiences in playwriting to help you Finish the Thing.

In this Eleventh Hour, authors Hope Edelman and Naomi Jackson will engage in an informal conversation about the joys and challenges of writing about family relationships. With many years of experience between them writing about family in both fiction and nonfiction, the Hope and Naomi will address the landmines that many writers face, or attempt to avoid, when writing about family and loss. They will explore the sticky issues of truth and responsibility germane to writing about real people in nonfiction and contrast it against writing fiction inspired by real-life events. This conversation will help writers navigate the rocky terrain of using family content—including ethical concerns—and move you toward completion of your own family-related writing project.

Has anyone ever told you, “I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you,” only to discover that you are not laughing at all? While some people don’t realize just how much of a joke they are to us, the vast majority of people who consider themselves to be funny are not funny. Amber Dermont is that rare genius and comic wit who is actually funnier than she thinks she is (I know this because I am Amber Dermont). In this craft talk, Amber will offer up a variety of strategies for creating occasions of narrative delight by injecting your writing with unexpected humor.

New technologies, such as iPhones, free editing software, and YouTube, have made possible a new literary form: the video essay. In this Eleventh Hour, Ned Stuckey-French will screen some video essays and discuss their form, as well as ways to consider how text might be used as interplay with image, and how video essays might be employed across genres, such as in print, film, and documentary. We will review the elements of composing your own essay, including how to develop a script, edit, use animation, sound, incorporate found footage, and chose a strong title. We will also consider how to share your video essays, in classrooms, curated for online magazines, as well as other ideas for pairing visuals with your literary text.

All good fiction is built around a writer’s fascination with made-up people. And as practicing writers, we’re well aware that our characters should be more than “talking heads”; they should have depth and range and complexity. But how does this happen? Part of it—the unteachable part—has to do with our own self-awareness. We understand our own flaws, contradictions, and virtues so well that we begin to understand people who are not ourselves. But another part comes down to technique. In this Eleventh Hour, John Dalton presents an array of helpful rules, suggestions, craft examples, and innovative ideas. Some of the ideas are John’s, but others have been harvested from a diverse range of writers: Gustave Flaubert, Emily St. John Mandel, Joyce Carol Oates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. One example of vivid characterization comes from the life of a Titanic survivor.

Writing is neither good nor bad; it’s only finished or unfinished. It’s in the finishing that it becomes fully realized. It may seem to take a different set of skills—even using a different part of the brain—to shape, prune, and polish the work we’ve opened our hearts to generate, but if we try to edit without keeping at least one toe in the stream of creativity inside us, we can end up dismantling powerful first drafts. In this Eleventh Hour, Mary Allen will share what’s she’s learned as a writer and a writing coach about maintaining peace, confidence, and inner balance during the editing process.

Good stories are often referred to as spellbinding. Of course they are not witchcraft, but the deft hand of the writer, who concocts a magical combination of the familiar and the unknown, of surprise and recognition, of enchanting prose. Drawing from the ideas of Kate Bernheimer and Bruno Bettelheim, among others, we’ll investigate the history of fairy tales, their story structures, the ways in which they’re rooted in a knowable world, and the elements that give them a sense of urgency, surprise, and wonder. We will connect fairytale techniques to those used in contemporary stories, and consider exercises that might bring enchantment and magic to your prose.

When story is not the main concern, what keeps us reading? How can voice, structure, or research provide a pressurizing frame—and a pleasing shape—for nonfiction material? We will explore these questions through readings that rely on elements other than narrative for forward momentum, in the tradition of the idea-driven essay. In the course of our discussion, we’ll look at a few quick examples from writers who have published nonfiction that depends on something other than narrative and unpack some of their “alternative” strategies of making.

In this Eleventh Hour, poet Michael Morse will explore how ideas and images work off of and with each other. We’ll consider some poems that use striking examples of imagery, and then we’ll play with some exercises where we allow our natural tendencies of associative thinking to generate vivid images that in turn can lead to surprise and delight in metaphor.

There’s often a crucial distinction between our whole life experience and the narrower story, or stories, that we create from it. In this Eleventh Hour, Sarah Saffian—a memoirist, teacher, and mental health therapist—will explore the concept of journal writing and its usefulness both creatively, as the raw material that we draw from to craft our stories, and personally, as a means of achieving deeper, clearer self-reflection, processing, and discovery. Please bring materials to participate in writing prompts during this lecture.

When we’re learning to write (the learning that takes a lifetime), it’s smart to focus on high-percentage moves, choices most likely to result in writing that will engage, convince, and move the reader. It’s worth remembering, however, that sometimes things normally worth avoiding perversely succeed. This Eleventh Hour will look at some examples of that phenomenon, in hopes of understanding both why the bad bet was bad, and what might account for its unexpectedly paying off.

Susan Taylor Chehak, an ardent and successful writer, blogger, and self-publisher, will discuss the who, what, why, where, when and how of doing it yourself. Susan is the driving force behind Foreverland Press, where ten of her own books have been made available to readers, both digitally and in print, along with twenty-five books from other authors. In this hour, Susan will review the rewards and risks of taking publishing into your own hands.

One of the best ways to participate in, and help define, contemporary literature is to start your own press or literary publication. This may sound intimidating, but you might be surprised to find that such projects need not be prohibitively expensive or overwhelmingly difficult. This talk will discuss a variety of media (print and electronic) and a variety of projects (magazine, blog-zine, chapbook press, and full-length book publications) and how to make your project sustainable, enjoyable, and meaningful.

“It sounds like a simple thing say what you see,” Mark Doty has written. “But try to find the words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning." In this hour, we’ll take refuge in the sensory experience found in some contemporary poets, as a way of thinking about a number of questions: How does description contain or convey meaning? What do we do when we describe something? Reproduce, account for, portray, trace, parcel out? How does one take the measure of the external world and what can it mean for our writing?

Many book editors say that they read the first paragraph of a manuscript, and if they like it, they skip ahead to read some dialogue. If the dialogue is strong, they go back to page one and keep reading. If the dialogue is weak, the editor sets down the manuscript, and the chances for publication (with that particular house, anyway) end there. Knowing how to write good dialogue, then, is crucial to publication—and readership. In this hour, we’ll explore what makes strong dialogue. Bring your laptops or pencils and notebooks with you, as Kelly will put you to work in responding to an exercise. (Sharing optional.)

A novelist has it easy—his characters, sprung from his imagination, don’t talk back when they’re not happy with the way they’re depicted on the page. But what if your character is your ex-husband, your twin brother, your mother? Are familial loyalty and literary integrity necessarily at odds? How can we most effectively navigate this touchy terrain, to maintain our real-life relationships without compromising the stories we need to tell? In this lecture/ discussion, we’ll grapple with such prickly issues as: the possibility of multiple “truths”; altering identifying characteristics; inviting loved ones into your writing process (or not); the pros and cons of allowing relatives to read your manuscript, and how much to revise per their comments, if at all; determining if what could hurt others truly advances the story. Whether you’re in the midst of a memoir project or are just contemplating one and scared off by this very conflict, let’s explore forms of expression that we can stand behind both as authors and as brothers/ daughters/friends.

In an age of technophilic positivism typified by the TED-talk, the smartphone, and the MOOC, why do we still need a shadowy, cobwebby, grave-y form like the Gothic? What darker truths about contemporary life—economic, environmental, political, bodily—can the Gothic mode bring up to the surface? This talk will look at the way authors from around the globe—Korea, Mexico, Chile, Sweden, and the US—make use of Gothic forms and tropes to make literary conventions split apart like the House of Usher and bring other bodies, truths and vistas rushing into view.

Over and over I hear my students, my peers, and my own interior voice talk about failure as writers. Often this is linked to an idea of ‘productivity’, and in particular to a perception of others as ‘more productive’. As publication online increases the speed at which writing can appear in public, the distance between writing as a process and writing as a product closes. Consequently, the concept of productivity is measured more and more in terms of visible, finished objects, muddling the relation of publication to the act/process of writing. I’ll question the usefulness of these ideas—failure and productivity—for writing, and suggest ways of reframing our writing processes to accommodate work that ‘fails’ or is not visibly ‘productive’. In addition to talking about how what seems like ‘failure’ is an integral part of making writing that’s worthwhile, I’ll offer strategies and concepts—the multiple, the telescope—that help me keep writing despite unhappiness with my work or the feeling that others are ‘better writers’ (meaning ‘more productive’) than I am.

When we write narrative, both sides of our brains ideally work together: the left brain controls linear thinking, logic, and language skills, and the right brain creates context and inserts emotion. This Eleventh Hour Lecture will emphasize the importance of using both sides of the brain when writing fiction and nonfiction, to push beyond an episodic recounting of events into territory that reveals your story's deeper truths. Nonfiction author Hope Edelman will give you with tips for identifying universal themes and archetypes in your stories, and methods for articulating them to readers.

Sometimes when we look at what we’ve written we realize we’ve created characters who are basically all some version of ourselves. It’s like multiple clones of the writer only with different haircuts. Or we find that we have a group of wonderful, quirky characters but that our protagonist is dry and uninteresting, exactly the kind of person you’d dread getting stuck next to at a dinner party. In this session we’ll talk about some of the problems inherent in constructing character and some of the strategies that are useful in crafting characters who are unique and real and three-dimensional.

From its beginning in the 1960s, literary journalism and its writers typically acknowledged their contextual debt to the traditional questions journalists ask about the five “W's”—the who, what, where, when and why that lie at the heart of any good reportage. The difference for creative nonfiction writers lies in their ability to create a narrative arc that describes how those 5 “W’s” come into focus, which means that virtually any memoir or nonfiction work becomes a type of quest story. This lecture will describe why and how nonfiction writers should always be on the lookout in the midst of their quest for the mysterious sixth “W”—what it is and why it matters.

What you know is the here and now and past of your own life, your own family, your own travels and some things about your friends. What you don’t know is everything else, which is a lot. What exactly are we to make of those oft-tossed words: “Write what you know.” They can feel like a stop sign, but let’s look behind them.

Sabrina Orah Mark, Michael Martone, Beau O'Reilly, Robin Hemley, Elizabeth McCracken

One of the biggest challenges, and imperatives, of writing is finding the time—making time—to sit down and do it. It’s something like that moment in the movie Field of Dreams, where a mysterious voice says to Kevin Costner, If you build it they will come. Except that in the case of writing, ‘building it’ means not creating a ballpark to attract ghostly baseball giants, but creating a little window of time in which to write. We can’t make the writing come to us, but if we make a space for it in our day, it will inevitably show up. And if we don’t make space for it, writing definitely won’t come. Mary Allen will share her experiences and struggles with finding time to write, and will pass along the workable solutions she’s arrived at over the years.

“Find your voice”—the most natural thing a writer should do, right? Somewhere inside me is my voice! Yet, the search tends to proceed like a grail quest, only trickier, because ‘voice’ pops up everywhere on the page, appearing now in the style, now in the sound, now in the stance, now in the details. So, is it the bedrock DNA of great writing, or a will-o-the-wisp? Should we follow the fiction writer Sylvia Watanabe’s advice, “Don’t try to find your voice; write a story”? In this Eleventh Hour session we’ll try to un-confuse an elusive all-inclusive concept, and we’ll start by looking at what ‘voice’ means to poets and what it does and doesn’t mean to fiction writers. Bring paper, we’ll be experimenting with a few exercises!

There are innumerable workshops you can take to help you write your first novel or book of stories, workshops in which you’ll focus on developing characters and plot and structure, establishing narrative pace and point of view, refining dialogue. But what about the character of you, the writer doing all that hard work? How will you plot and structure your life? What kind of dialogue will you carry on with yourself during the years you spend writing? What kind of pace will you set? What point of view should you adopt toward your fellow writers? Toward the world of publishing? In this Eleventh Hour lecture, novelist Stephen Lovely, who spent over ten years writing his first novel, Irreplaceable, will focus on a too-often neglected aspect of writing, which is the mental and physical health of The Writer: the brave, battered athlete of language.

In this Eleventh Hour presentation, poet Michael Morse will discuss the prose poem, a literary hybrid with evocative potential. We’ll look at a brief history of the form, some model examples of writing that blend the lyricism of the poem with the syntax of the sentence, and try our hand at exercises that will yield early drafts of work to take home and develop.

This lecture will explore recent moments and new possibilities in the age-old relationship between nonfiction and fiction. We’ll discuss contemporary works of fiction built around documentary material: photographs, testimony, reportage. Through an examination of how fiction frames, interacts with, and creates and resolves tension with its documentary sources, we’ll glimpse just what’s happening today at the border where fiction and nonfiction meet.

Creative nonfiction is an art of selection, omission, and juxtaposition. Decisions, decisions, decisions… Not only what to leave in and what to take out, but also how to artfully arrange the parts. When just the right elements are juxtaposed, a spark flies up from the space between. In this Eleventh Hour, Carol Spindel will lead a workshop on how to write a personal essay that derives narrative strength and power from juxtaposition. She will get you started with writing exercises and leave you with a template for an essay to be completed later.

One of the biggest challenges, and imperatives, of writing is finding time—making time—to sit down and do it. It’s something like that moment in the movie Field of Dreams, where a mysterious voice says to Kevin Costner, If you build it they will come. Except that in the case of writing, ‘building it’ means not creating a ballpark to attract ghostly baseball giants, but creating a little window of time in which to write. We can’t make the writing come to us, but if we make a space for it in our day, it will inevitably show up. And if we don’t make space for it, writing definitely won’t come. Mary Allen will share her own experiences and struggles with finding time to write, and will pass along the workable solutions she’s arrived at over the years.

In this Eleventh Hour, Susan Taylor Chehak will use Powerpoint to take a graphic look at comic book storytelling conventions and how they can be applied to your own written narratives. Through examples and discussion, she will explore the magic of words summoning pictures and pictures inspiring words.

One of the key elements in successful fiction is imagery—the word-pictures that directly transmit what the writer sees. But while writing students get a lot of help with things like plot and structure, imagery often goes unmentioned, in part because it is so hard to talk about how to make better images. Therein lies the value of haiku for prose writers. The short, imagistic form of poetry imported from Japan offers a clear (and very fun) way to practice making images. Over the course of the hour, Robert will lead a workshop in reading and writing haiku. This workshop aims to deepen your understanding of the role of imagery in your own writing, and to enrich your visual imaginations.

As part of the free, weeklong 2012 MusicIC Festival (featuring art music inspired by literature), poet Robert Fernandez and MusicIC chamber musicians will discuss the musical works that inspired Marcel Proust and the creative connections between music and literature. The series of discussions—with musical illustration—begins during Wednesday’s Eleventh Hour, setting the stage for the Friday night concert.

In addition to being omnipresent on the planet (every culture has a conception of lyric) poetry appears to have been written and composed in every ancient and historical cultural we’ve been able to investigate. And yet, many people (including writers) never read poetry. Why? Or perhaps more importantly: why not? In this two-panelist conversation fiction and creative non-fiction writer B.K. Loren and poet Juliet Patterson discuss poetry and the personal lyric, as both a source of inspiration and a tool of the writing craft. What’s special about poetry? And how does poetry enlist imagination in the art of story? What can poems teach us about metaphor and language? And beyond matters of craft, how does poetry specifically speak to the heart of the creator as well as find a solace in the reader who finds transcendence in the work?

In this Eleventh hour, Timothy Bascom will discuss the personal essay in order to demonstrate the ways in which this form, typically focused on autobiographical events, can be driven by research instead. Genre-shaping essayists such as Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace, and Eula Biss have demonstrated that what we call “personal” is not limited to what we remember internally. Timothy will show us how sometimes we have to go outside the self and explore our way toward unexpected discoveries, arriving at even-more-rich realities that would have eluded us if we turned inward. He will provide examples of the ways that research can be conducted and integrated into a personal essay, lifting it to a vivid and universally engaging level.

In the simplest of fairy tales or the grandest of myths—“Snow White,” say, or the Odyssey—both Snow White and Odysseus must spend time in the woods, or the underworld. Those of us writing fiction understand that our protagonists must grapple with darkness in order to rise to light; similarly, a descent into difficulty is a necessary element of memoir. Why is going “into the woods” so important to the weaving of a compelling tale? And what other lessons can be drawn from story elements found not only in a mythic “hero’s journey,” but in Snow White’s plunge into the forest, or Jack’s up the beanstalk? Sands Hall addresses these fascinating ideas, and offers ways to fold these strategies into your own, or your protagonist’s, journey.

Kathryn Rhett, author of Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis, and Jessica Handler, author of the forthcoming Writing Through Grief, talk about how writing the tough stuff well can be good for you, and for a community of like-minded readers. Everyone will experience difficulty at some point in their lives, and, being writers, we may want to write about the tough stuff, either because we need to, or with the notion that getting it down on paper will be cathartic. The strategies we use for strong literary writing dovetail neatly with the strategies for writing therapeutically. This talk introduces cross-disciplinary research and suggests a variety of compelling writing exercises.

This talk explores the beauty of limitation, whether it be something as simple as a deadline or a self-imposed structure for a scene, a poem, or an essay. Even the constraints of our lives (time! job! space! family!) can serve the muse. Many Writing Festival participants say, “I write more here in Iowa than I do all year—how can I do this at home?” or “In doing the assignments for this class, I actually found my real story. Why doesn’t this happen more often at my own desk?” Sometimes we forget that pragmatic practices lead to surprising creative leaps. Come discover how perceived obstacles can become tools to help our writing flourish.

In this panel discussion Dermont, Morningsnow, Twemlow, and Wilhelm will discuss poetry and fiction in conjunction with specific and intimate outside influences, inspirations, imitations, and inquiries. They will present examples of the ideas, authors, forms, and practices which have helped them generate their own most recent work, as well as discuss how writers might discover creative motivation in the world around them. Participants will leave with a list of recommended art, literature, music, film, and other imagination-sparking influences. Amber Dermont is the author of the novel The Starboard Sea, and teaches creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. Blueberry Morningsnow is the author of a book of poetry, Whale in the Woods, and has published poems in Thermos and notnostrums. Nick Twemlow is a poet and filmmaker; his first book of poems, Palm Trees, will be published in 2012 and he co-edits Canarium Books. Vinnie Wilhelm was a recent Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA and is the author of a collection of short stories, In the Absence of Predators.

Enrich poetry, fiction, nonfiction and blog posts by unleashing people’s innate desire to share what they know. Don’t be afraid to ask questions! This presentation will help you identify potential interviewees, pose questions that elicit intriguing responses, assess technological pros and cons, and evaluate the material your interview produces. We’ll also discuss how to recognize and weave the juiciest kernels of information into your writing project, whatever it is. Cheryl Fusco Johnson honed her interviewing skills in courts of law while serving as a public defender in Washington State. Currently, she interviews newsmakers for The Iowa Source and authors—including Natalie Goldberg, Larry Brooks, and Anne Lamott—for the radio show, Writers Voices.

Do you need to have a background in theatre to write plays? What’s the difference between a playwright and a screenwriter? How is it possible to develop characters and tell a story without passages of description and exposition? Is it up to the playwright to determine who does what and when they do it? How do you decide if the story you want to tell can best be told on stage? Once you write the play, how do you get it produced? Published? Kate Aspengren answers these questions (and more!) in this discussion of the craft of playwriting.

What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. –Augustine of Hippo, Confessions In this hour I’ll explore the possibilities and the limitations of storytelling in the context of time, moving from concept to craft, principle to process, the phenomenon of time in the real world to our own recreation of it on the written page. We begin with our heads in the clouds, exploring the physics and philosophy of chronos, before turning inward for a look at our own human experience of biological and psychological kairos, where we encounter our memories of the past and our dreams of the future, even as we struggle to keep up with the eternal ineffable now. From there we emerge onto the page to find Discourse Time, Story Time, Reading Time, and Real Time, using techniques of plotting and pacing and tense to create the narrative and historical chronologies that will take us from that promising tick of our tale’s first line to the satisfying tock of its last word.