The Writing University Podcast

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...

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 every...

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 w...

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 A...

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 wi...

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 beg...

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 dismantlin...

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 wh...

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 fro...

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 dee...

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 w...

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...

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, chapbo...

“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 w...

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 t...

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...

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—ma...

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...

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 reveal...

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 th...

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 fo...