The Writing University Podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Same Content / Different Form: Jim Heynen

Where Experience Starts: The Image: Juliet Patterson

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.

How to Write the Ten-Minute Play: Kelly Dwyer