The Writing University Podcast

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...

“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 wri...

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...

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.

In this podcast, recorded on 6/19/07 at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival Elevenses novelist and poet Jim Heynen discusses the relationship between content and form. Heynen advises writers to revisit thematic "obsessions" and to attempt "re-exploring the

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 to...

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 st...

In this Eleventh Hour lecture, novelist Stephen Lovely will focus on the mental and physical health of The Writer: the brave, battered athlete of language.

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...

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...

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...

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 a...

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. Timoth...

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...

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...

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 ac...

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...

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 jui...

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 pl...

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...

Most often we encounter work on the page, but haven’t we all had the experience of being transported by hearing the author give a reading of his or her own work? What happens when we have the opportunity, as listeners, to hear literature presented directly by the author? And what happens, as writer, when we have the opportunity to embody our work before an audience? This talk will give practical a...